The Archive of Girlhood

How much of a person truly survives? In October of last year, I found myself transcribing graveyard records for a small cemetery in southern Maryland, the middle of nowhere, really. I was bored out of my mind and stumbled upon what I thought to be the perfect autumn weekend activity. Unusual, a bit spooky, and picturesque in a morbid and delightful way. Quickly, it became painstaking, trying to make out names of people long dead that had been scribbled haphazardly on yellow paper, in faded pencil. The journey was frustrating to say the least. It struck me how horrible it was that this was all that remained of these dead people, a name one could barely make out with any level of certainty. Everything they had been, lost irrevocably, to time and other greater things. I'm not much different from them at all though, most of me lives in a little Christian Dior shoebox.

Christmas morning when I was fourteen, gifts were piled under the tree and the smell of pine needles and something (sickeningly) sweet and vaguely chocolatey filled the air. I opened my last gift, a little Dior rollerball perfume in a pristine white box. I still have the box, but gifted the perfume to a friend of mine. It had always smelled strange on me, too floral and almost uncanny, and it wasn't my favorite fragrance at all, just the cheapest one they sold. The box itself, however, was a symbol of luxury that excited me to no end. The gold logo, DIOR, written in that iconic clean font, the slightly textured rigid box was nicer than any other gift box I had ever had. The box, to my mind, has since become a magical vessel of sorts, containing scribbled "I love you!" notes, my first paper crane I ever folded, earrings from my first Nutcracker performance, pretty wax seals, numerous cards and polaroid pictures that I am too sentimental to ever let go of.

The box is small and filling up quickly. Perhaps I am somewhat ruthless in deciding what items make the cut, but I have never struggled to make that decision when the time came. Intuitively, I know what is important to me, what items hold memories that I don't ever want to forget. Some feelings are too poignant to not hold on to. What these objects are able to say is definitively the most valuable thing about them. They are completely honest and absolutely vulnerable in a way that nothing else in my life is. I have hidden behind a great many things to try to evoke a different personality. I change the way I laugh or the way I speak depending on who I am surrounded by, and I allow myself to be molded and influenced by people I don't even respect because I am too malleable. Even in my own journals, I embellish details and exaggerate, in hopes that my future self will see me as someone more admirable than I am. With these little trinkets and mementos though, they know exactly who they are and they possess the ability to transport me back in time to the most vivid memories I could ever belong to.

So, I am the curator of my little museum of everything I love. These things are somehow the most intimate part of me, but anyone else could open that shoebox and see only a bunch of random objects, even garbage. My first boarding pass when I flew alone overseas and was terrified. The bracelet someone special made for me last summer. The birthday card my best friend wrote for me when I turned sixteen. These things don't objectively hold any meaning at all, but to me they mean everything and more.

Now I am taken back to that graveyard. I frequent cemeteries often, when I need a place to sit or to wander. Maybe, these people do exist in more ways than I had thought. They are more than names that are nearly illegible and fading, but they lived lives and had stories to tell. They had their loves, their impact, and their own shoeboxes.