My Little Black Box..

The day I was born, my mother gave me a gift. It was a little black box. In it, she started storing pain. For its small size, it was able to contain a huge amount of pain. She buried it inside my soul. She hid it there, and did not tell me it was even there. Every chance she had, she put pain in it. Sometimes, she would call it love, other times, she didn’t try to disguise it. But, she never told me I even had it inside of me. This box was familiar to me, but I didn’t know it was always there. I felt the pain, of course I did. For, as she set it in the box, it dragged the surface, all The way to the box, and ripped my being open. These wounds were what I felt all along, and they distracted me from the awareness of my box she had bestowed upon me. All my life, I searched out the healing of the open wounds within me. In healing these wounds, the pain of course lessened, but, there was a haunting ache, which I liken to phantom pain left behind by an amputated limb. It’s echoes were always there, and I could ever hear them ringing out from within me. In shedding skin, and searching for the final wounds to focus on my healing, finally I got to the room in my soul where she had placed it. As if she left a map made of scars, there was a trail which guided me to my box.. it was not a straight line, no. Almost like a pirate hiding his loot on a cryptic map, she made her trail twisted and crooked, and at times, the climb was treacherous. But, years after my search began,  there it lay. With apprehension I approached the box. I thought I knew what it was,  but did not really know I wanted to finally pick it up. But, I stepped up to it, then tentatively grabbed it in my tiny, childlike hands. It was heavy, and the outside was petinaed perfectly. The engravings were carved in it by some tools handed to my mother by her mother. This was apparent to me, and the work put into engraving my box was clumsy and childish. Like chalk caricatures scrawled on the sidewalk, my box was imperfectly decorated, and done with pained efforts on my mother’s part. Upon picking up, I felt my soul release it to my inner child’s hands, and at once, the lock fell off. Full of fear, I stared at my box. I looked at my resentment I held over my mother, and held it in my left hand, my box in my right hand. To open the box, I had to let go of my resentment. This was a very hard choice.. like the moment one decides to let go of the opening of the airplane he has set out to jump out of, and begin the freefall toward earth. Afraid, I set my resentment toward my mother in the place where my box sat for 45 years. Oddly, the resentment fit the crater perfectly. Now.. it was time to open my box. With trembling hands, I lifted the hasp, then opened the lid.. it flew open, and the monsters of my nightmares came rushing out, flying by my little boy’s face. I saw them with clarity, and terror filled me. Beatings.. lashings.. rage.. envy… anger and violence came spewing out, and every memory attached to these images joined in this disastrous scene. I began to cry.. not the little boy inside of me, but the shell that is the man held in responsibility to protect that little boy. I wept.. but, in the midst of this release of saline cleansing, I knew I had to wrap my arms around the little boy, and let him hold that box in safety as All those monsters were released.. for 5 days I held my little boy, and I wept for him.. and for the man I am. I had finally found the source of the anguish I had endured, and in those 5 days, we were redeemed, and set free.