3.

sometime around the present

Her (what do you call a former bedroom?) ex-room smelt sterile before we had even gotten to it. Two weeks ago, two weeks before moving, sister had turned up at our home (her home!) and said “You can shut the door and drop a match in there once I’m done.” Her assuming smirk was swiftly replaced by a scowl and eye-roll when I pointed out you’d need to drop the match in before closing the door. A rare success. She waved her arm unhurriedly in the direction of her room so as to regain the momentum “I don’t need any reminders of how I used to accumulate landfill.”

One week before moving, she stood in the doorway in her black vegan-suede boots, with a duffel bag over her right shoulder and some book about determinism in her left hand. “Do you even live here anymore?” I asked. She said nothing. She has money now, she doesn’t need a room at her parent’s place.

Today, the day after she “officially” moved, as the last remaining resident under the age of 30 in the home, I have the privilege of dropping the match in. I sit on the floor of sister’s former room looking at boxes with labels such as ‘recycling 1’ and ‘particularly useless landfill’, estimating how many boxes will fit in the bins, the car, etc. I put my headphones on and hit play on an ambient album which oscillates between rise and fall without ever reaching any of the destinations it can only allude to. I slowly move to my feet.

Half an hour later, brother waltzes through the door with a bagel, looks at the box I am lugging into the hallway (‘e-waste 1’), rips off the tape whilst it’s still in my arms, scrunches his face, says “hey that’s my non-bluetooth speaker”, puts the gigantic thing under his arm, chews into his blueberry bagel (I can smell the cream cheese), slaps the speaker, says “this bad boy pumps so many dBs”, holds the bagel in his mouth, pats my head roughly, walks down the hallway saying “gotta go back to the office” and “it’s one of those weekends” and “let me know if she stole any more of my stuff”, and slams the door. Dad announces himself at this point “have you been checking those boxes for your brother’s stuff?” I drop the e-waste box, start a ‘brother’ box, and set up boxes for displaced landfill and recycling. I open a box (‘recycling 2’) full of shredded paper. I sigh. I swirl my arms around the box, finding nothing more than torn, indecipherable history.

At the bottom of the next box (‘landfill 3’) I find - between a mouldy YA novel about some kind of intergalactic love triangle encased in a zip lock bag and a plush snow leopard - a heart-shaped box. My father, still hovering in the doorway, raises his eyebrow at me. Inside the pink cardboard walls are a modest stack of papers, barely reaching a quarter height of the box. The top one, dated 2010, reads “things I love about my family”. Descending down the page on the left are the names of mother, father, brother, me, and some of sister's friends, but the second column appears to have been cut out. I pause the music. If this piece of paper is a fragment of time, a dot… say dot number 137 in the canvas of sister’s life, what number dot was sister standing on in the doorway a week ago? How big is the space between those two dots? How straight are the brushstrokes between the person who wrote this and the person she is now?

The rest of the box, disappointingly, reveals letters from friends and family - including a coffee stained apology note from brother after he cut part of her hair whilst she was sleeping, and a note from the co-dux at her school with a newspaper clipping from their graduation ceremony indicating the, and I quote, “sky is the limit for the two of them”. It is true that I laughed whilst reading some of these letters of inconsequence. But amongst them was nothing explaining why she is the kind of person she is, or was, or will be next.

I pick up the lid. Scrunched up within it is a paper dated 2018. I shake the lid and the paper falls to the floor. The creases seem permanent. The bottom is torn and taped back together. I flip it over.

At the top are the words ‘the cry list’. I take my headphones out.

“What’s that son?”

“Ummm.” I throw the pink box with my right hand - it narrowly passes father and makes a sound as it hits the inside of the back wall of the recycling box before landing - and stuff the cry list in the kangaroo pocket of my hoodie with my left hand. I smile and stand up. “Nothing interesting sadly. I need to go send an email. Don’t you have that thing you need to do?” He nods.

I jog to the back of the house. I scramble through the mess of cardboard under my bed for an old shoe box labelled ‘2018’. Opening it, I see a letter from J. I only remember crying once that year.