The Blue Box
Alex and I had finished all our work at the opera house and now my evenings were free. We didn’t have another project lined up because we hardly ever stacked them up back to back, preferring to work intermittently, here and there, when something really caught our interest. Alex, of course, was the boss, technically, and he liked long breaks in between hard work and I couldn’t blame him. The opera house was a project that would have taken a lifetime on Earth but here in Hel, where we had no schedule and no deadline it had stretched beyond what was reasonable.
With so much time on my hands I was back to reading books, drinking coffee or tea at my dining room table, wandering around my part of Hel, and occasionally popping into the opera house to check up on the tech rehearsals that were going on for the opening night performance. And for some reason, I began to write furiously.
I wasn’t stupid enough to count the hours and write those down. I knew from Dotta and Loki’s eyes that I knew more than I should about the way Hel was constructed, but I picked up a blank book I had stashed in my room at one point or another and I started to write everything I knew about anything. Anything safe. Anything real. Anything about me and my life.
I wrote tomes and missives on the equations of sound traveling through the universe. I wrote stories. I described the things I saw as they rose and fell through the days, explaining how I felt about the things and people I interacted with and saw. I described, as vividly as I could with the words I had everything I wanted to remember. I described the facades of buildings as the shadows of the day move across them. I described the way the shattered glass looked on the pavement the morning after Loki had jetted out of Hel. I recorded what I wore each day and why I wore it. I jotted down the weather. They were small records, nothing with any worth, and nothing substantial. But, because I wrote them there was proof I existed, and to me that was what I needed and that was enough.
And one day, while I was at my dinner table, with my perfect cup of tea and the rattling, whistling tea kettle that would forever remind me of Loki and the way the stars fell, there was a knock at my door.
I closed my notebook out of habit, sticking the pen in the page to mark where I had left off, and got up, somewhat annoyed.
I opened my door, but saw nothing.
“Typical,” I muttered as I scanned the hallway and turned to close the door. I noticed a small brown package sitting right on my doorstep, tied with navy blue string, carefully and meticulously wrapped, completely inconspicuous. I smiled as I picked it up, happy that someone would have taken the time to send me something other than a bill. I wondered who it was from, and held it with one hand as I closed the door.
I walked it over to the dining room table, moved the journal aside and set it down. I carefully untied the string and undid the brown packing paper. Inside was a sturdy navy blue box wrapped with delicate and perfectly folded white tissue paper. I thought it odd that someone would take the time to wrap a box in tissue paper, as if to hide the color of the box, but as soon as I had unwrapped the second layer of paper I saw that a delicate, spidery hand had written “destroy me” on the lid of the box.
Instinctively I knew what it was and my breath caught in my throat as my hands moved to lift the lid off of it. I pulled it away and set it down next to the box, lining it up neatly. Inside was more tissue paper wrapped objects, carefully and meticulously wrapped up, and a creamy white envelope of thick, expensive paper. The same silvery ink had been used to write the word “first” on the envelope, so I pulled it open and slid the letter out.
The ink flashed in the sunlight from the huge windows, and I turned myself away from the glare of the light to read the brief letter better.
“Autumn,” it read, “This is you.”
That was it. This was my ransom, my payment. My whole life. Loki had followed through. I hadn’t expected that. I thought, perhaps, it would be too difficult or too dangerous or even both.
But even as I handled the box, I knew that Loki could never know the extent of my life, no matter how much time he spent on Earth because I had been gone long enough, and because Earth did not stagnate. When you leave it you are suspended but those you leave are not. They walk forward into their linear time, growing, building, and then finally ending and joining us here. The evidence of my time on earth was already eroding, my lifetime here becoming stronger as my lifetime there shrunk into a blue box full of objects.
I paused for a minute, preparing myself for what I was about to see, and, hastily dropped the letter onto my table, grabbing at the small white parcels in the gorgeous blue box, indelicately tearing them open. There was a necklace, a small heart with a blue stone in the center, something cheap, but just like something I would wear. There was a book of poems, dog earned and marked up with purple and green pens - my favorite colors. There was a delicate coffee mug with spidery blue flowers on the china. A wedding band, thin and delicate, a pair of pearl earrings, a key to a bike lock. A black wallet with nothing in it. Everything was completely mine, in my taste and style, even though I had no memory of them. The wedding bad was something that I would have picked out for myself, the mug similar to ones I already had in my cupboard, the poems marked up in my own handwriting. It was fascinating, uncanny, terrifying, but beyond all that I was comforted.
“I am as I was,” I gasped, turning the objects over in my hand, slipping the wedding band onto my left hand ring finger. The loss of my life, of my memories did not mean that I had been erased completely. I continued to be who I was on Earth. I was just lonelier, without the support network that we got on Earth. I still read, still scribbled all over my books, still drank tea.
As I was about to place everything else back in the box I noticed two envelopes in the bottom of it. Unlike the other one they were cheap and somewhat dusty, like they hadn’t been pulled out in a while.
My hands shook as I opened the first and slid the contents out. They were photographs, not too many, just a few. I stared at the first one, tracing the sharp outline of the rectangle with my finger. My own face stared back at me, which startled me. In the background a yellow light peeked through the leaves of green trees. I smiled widely and I looked happier than I had ever looked here in Hel. I touched my own face in the photograph, and then quickly flipped to the next.
In this photograph I looked tired, a bit placid maybe, but no less happy. I was standing, surrounded by a lot of people who looked just like me and I was dressed in a stunning black dress, black heals, with long lithe legs. We were all dressed to the nines, for some reason. Instinctively, I flipped the photograph over and looked for an inscription.
“New Years Eve, Family Party, 2004”
I looked at the eyes of the people in the photograph. They were my eyes. This was my family. This was love, unremembered. But the photograph was at the very same time love, proven.
I felt tears well up in my chest and choked back sobs. All these people, in their grey and blue and black suits, cocktail dresses, white hair, grey hair, blond hair, auburn hair, this was the love that had carried me through my first life. This was what I had lost in falling forward into Hel. The love that this photograph represented was what we could never, ever have in Hel. My chest tightened, scanning the familiar faces, and for the first time I knew the devastation of those who brought forward the memories of their families.
I flipped through the rest of the photographs quickly, glancing at them just long enough to know but not long enough to analyze. In each picture I saw myself, and I saw fragments of my other life. I knew I needed to know what they would tell me but I didn’t want the searing pain of analysis, trying to guess which one was my mother, my husband, my sister. I didn’t want to guess what places I had lived in, or visited.That could come later, perhaps, when I had the emotional capacity.
After a quick glance I carefully put the photographs back in their envelope and grabbed the last envelope. There was a feeling of finality as I opened it, pulling out the paper from inside of it.