BOX OF SOUL
Copyright© by Rick Yost
It was a cold Monday in
Massachusetts, overcast and windy. My morning had been
typical, running late, feeling tired and hung-over. I was starting my ninth
month at ACME Office Products, working as a telemarketer. It was certainly
not one of my favorite jobs, but it paid the rent.
Everything went weird after lunch. My girlfriend and I had an argument over
the phone. This wasn’t our usual spat. She was really pissed at me.
I apparently wasn’t investing enough time or money in our relationship.
I groveled and whined until she agreed to let me take her to an expensive
restaurant for dinner and discuss the matter.
As soon as I hung up with her, I was summoned to the boss’ office. He
told me if I wasn’t able to push twenty percent more product this week
than I had last week, then next week I could look for other employment. I
groveled and whined until he agreed to give me ample time to raise my sales
figures to acceptable levels.
Later, while looking at my reflection in the men’s room mirror, I thought
to myself how disgusting it was that I had resorted to groveling and whining
to keep things in my life from falling apart. The more I thought of this,
the more I realized there were many parts of my life that had become distorted
by fear and uncertainty. There were people with whom I dealt everyday that
I allowed to dominate me in conversation and action as if I were worthless.
There were situations that came up all the time where I would immediately
back down instead of standing up for what I felt was right, just to avoid
conflict. This seemed to go against my real character and personality.
I remembered how, as a younger man, I would never have groveled or whined
for any reason. I wouldn’t have thought twice about telling both my
girlfriend and boss to “Fuck off!” But now that I have gotten
older, it seems I don’t feel I have the options I used to. I was no
longer living my life for myself. I was living my life the way everyone else
wanted it to be. I was too agreeable, too controllable; like a slave who’d
do anything to avoid the sting of his master’s whip. This was all a
sickening realization for me. I thought of an old song lyric, “Trading
the maybe for the sure!”*
This train of thought roared through my head all the rest of the day. I went
home and sat in my chair and tried to avoid letting the cycle of depression
take hold of me as it had so many times before. Luckily this time I became
angry. I felt anger was better than depression. I won’t go into the
sordid details of my life; we all have stories of depression, pain, loss and
suffering. There are many of you who understand; those of you that don’t
understand are fortunate.
I thought of my neighbor who’s eighty years old and lived alone in that
big old house across the street. He was a ‘hoarder’; he had a
psychological aversion to throwing anything away. Oh, he’d throw out
most of his garbage, but kept every newspaper, magazine, and piece of mail
he’d received. He had papers that dated back forty years. He couldn’t
tell you why he did this. There were so many stacks of stuff piled up all
over his house you could barely walk through it; he traversed through narrow
pathways. This huge mass of trash didn’t just show up overnight; it
took years to accumulate.
Similarly, it had taken years of being beaten and battered by life to get
where I would grovel and whine at every situation. I didn’t like thinking
of myself as a coward. I did not intend to die a hoarder of petty fears and
negative, hurtful experiences. This was a mess I must deal with now, but how?
I spent the next three weeks reading Mental Health Journals, calling “psychic-help”
hot lines, listening to Talk Shows on radio and watching TV shows like “Dr.
Phil”. I knew these were all sources for “Pop-Psyche” information
but they still probably knew more than I did. After careful consideration,
I finally put a plan together that I felt would help me regain control of
my life.
I set the cardboard box, measuring one foot
square, on the kitchen table. It was time to put it in the box. It wasn’t
easy to wrap, it didn’t really fit the box. It didn’t like to
be confined. It didn’t know how to be still that long.
I did my best to get my hands around it. It was like picking up a plastic,
trash bag, half-full of water. As I lifted it from the table, it would fall
and droop in globs between my fingers.
It seemed to be indifferent to my handling it like picking up a big, sleepy,
lap-cat; hanging limp and refusing to wake up. But naturally, it had no fear
of me doing anything harmful to it. After all, it was the most precious part
of myself. It was the core of my self. It was all I had been, all I had done,
experienced and loved. It was my life. It was, for lack of a better term,
my soul.
I know how bizarre this must sound, putting one’s soul in a box. It
was my imagination that created the description above of physically handling
my soul. I’m sure you must think me insane. This was merely a mental
undertaking and yet it is an effort nothing less than monumental.
The idea was to box up my soul and mail it to myself. This would officially
affirm me as the rightful owner of the contents of the box. Then I could truly
regain total possession of it, maybe for the very first time. This idea was
totally symbolic and reminiscent of something out of a faux-psychology, self-help
book. None-the-less, I was desperate and this seemed to me, however unorthodox,
a necessary action.
I closed the box, taped it up, and addressed it to myself. I then put it in
the car and drove to the local post office. The woman working the counter
would have no doubt thought it strange that the customer she waited on was
sending his soul to himself; or maybe not. This gave me cause to smile. For
the first time in too long a time I felt good about the positive action I
was taking.
Like a parent sending a child off on their first day of school, I watched
intently as the postal worker carried my box to the back of the office and
pitched it into a buggy full of other people’s boxes. As I drove home
I felt I was doing a good thing. I was resolved to do all that was left for
me to do, wait.
Time passed, slowly, torturously. It had been eight days and still I had not
received the box. In those eight days I had become a nervous wreck. I didn’t
understand; it took no longer than three days to send a letter cross-country,
yet the box that symbolically contained my soul had yet to arrive. All the
junk mail, advertisements, Christmas fruit cakes, pre-approved-credit card
offers that made it through the postal system everyday, why was it I couldn’t
send my soul to myself without mishap? My bills arrived like clockwork but
my soul on the other hand couldn’t be so prompt.
Since I had built up in my mind the positive result of its arrival, I had
to follow through with the consequence of the plan going awry. If the post
office lost the box, then my soul was lost. This was an eventuality I had
not considered.
I had made several calls and visits to the post office to try and retrieve
my box to no avail. They simply said I must wait a few days more. They thought
it might have been put on the wrong truck and sent to a postal hub in Maine.
If this were the case they said it might take a few more days to get back.
“It is after all,” they said, “the Holidays”.
I’d tried hard not to let this diminish this positive first step toward
regaining control of my life. However, I’ll admit those days of waiting
for my soul to arrive had me feeling cold, lost and depressed. How ironic,
I had created a brand new fear, the loss of my soul.
I spent the next few days hanging around the post office. I’m sure the
word had spread to everyone working there about the strange guy hovering about,
waiting for his lost box. They saw me bundled up in my coat and hat, loitering
around the building and walking around the parking lot. No, I did not tell
them the box contained my soul. They did ask the nature of its contents and
I just said “important papers”.
It was now the week between Christmas and New Years. After a week of snowing,
the streets and parking lots were a maze of snow mounds and slushy, dirty
ice.
At the rear of the Post Office building I watched the cold wind whip trash
around under the rear wheels of the many huge trailers backed up to the loading
dock. It was an enormous building surrounded by a vast concrete lot busy with
trucks.
As I walked around the building I heard workers inside the closed doors loading
the mail into the trailers. I wondered if my box was perhaps in there somewhere,
hidden behind other packages that were deemed more important.
I saw a small, empty, cardboard carton, once containing packing tape, being
swiftly blown across the lot by the wind. Then my stomach twisted as I imagined
my own empty box being blown across the loading dock and out one of the huge
doors un-noticed.
As I wrestled with this uncomfortable thought, I saw an old woman across the
lot by the dumpsters. She was wrapped in many layers of old clothing and a
toboggan cap. She pushed a grocery basket loaded with cardboard and rubbish.
Hung from the sides were several bulging, plastic trash bags. I saw these
unfortunates from time to time but paid them little attention. What made me
look twice was the stack of folded and crushed cardboard inside her basket.
Was it possible this old woman might have found my box?
I walked toward her briskly, telling myself I shouldn’t get my hopes
up. Besides, my box was probably on its way back from somewhere in Maine.
This was after all, the U.S. Postal Service. They wouldn’t mindlessly
let a package just blow off the dock by a winter wind. Would they?
What if there were drugs in that carton that could make the recipient well?
What if there were important papers in that box that could effect positive
changes in someone’s life? What if someone’s soul was in that
box?
I’d walked halfway to her when she turned and saw me approaching. She
was startled and immediately grabbed her buggy and began to leave.
I called to her, “Hello, can I talk with you for a moment?” There
was no response; she quickened her steps. I had to run to catch up with her.
I stopped a few feet from her. She turned with a nasty look on her face and
said, “I’m leavin’; I’m leavin’! Don’t
call the cops!”
As she spoke I looked past her and saw it. There under some dirty newspapers
was the box that contained my soul. My heart leapt to my throat. I couldn’t
believe my good fortune of being there just in time to find it. If I had stayed
home that day, I would never have seen this old woman or my box and it would’ve
been lost forever.
It was crushed flat and torn but it was my box. I was sure of it. I recognized
the taping job I had done. I remembered thinking as I closed it up; it would
carry my soul, I didn’t want it to come open.
“Please”, I said, “I need that box you’ve found there!”
I pointed to it.
She swiftly slapped my hand away and exclaimed, “This is my basket,
and these are my things!” Her eyes glared at me from under the edge
of her cap and through strands of her dirty, gray hair. “You go get
your own basket, get your own damned things!”
I judged her to be in her late sixties, yet her short, stooped frame stood
firm with a stance that spoke of being accustomed to the violence of the street.
I feared this could get ugly.
I tried again, “Listen, I really must have that box. It’s very
important to me.” I tried to sound as respectful and reasonable as I
could.
“I found it, it’s mine. Go get another fuckin’ box!”
she blurted out as she started away again, pushing her buggy across the parking
lot at a fast pace.
“You don’t understand” I pleaded after her, “another
box won’t help me, I have to have that box! It must have fallen off
the dock back there and been crushed by a truck. It has my name on it. Please,
you must let me have it back!”
I must have sounded desperate. She stopped and turned around. “It ain’t
got nothin’ in it, you crazy bastard! What good is it to you?”
At that moment I thought if I could only think of a convincing reason, maybe
I could persuade her to give it to me. She stood a few feet from me waiting
for me to explain my need for the box. I slowly stepped closer; her tired,
wary eyes peered out at me from her wrinkled face.
At that moment I felt myself start to slip into the groveling, whining mode
I was trying to rid myself of. I steadied my resolve and spoke the truth as
the old me would’ve done.
“You see,” I said very calmly, “you think the box is empty
but it is not. That box contains my soul.” I said simply. Her angry
look disappeared leaving behind a puzzled expression. After a moment of looking
into each other’s eyes her expression softened. She calmly turned and
pulled the ragged box from her basket and offered it to me. With a maternal
voice she said, “Here Son, I’m not the Devils’ mistress.
I can’t bargain with your soul, it’s of no use to me!”
I drew a deep breath, politely accepted it from her and held it for a long
moment. I felt the sting of the cold from the tears forming in my eyes. In
the following few seconds as I stood there holding the box, I mentally stepped
back and looked at this bizarre situation from a distance.
I thought of how much of life was made up of imaginary things.
Man spends so much time counting, worshiping, stealing, and killing for the
imaginary concept of money. I thought of Mans’ imaginary connection
to ancient myths and religions; how some men use these connections to imagine
they have the right to slaughter innocent men, women and children. I thought
of the imagined, self-righteous, self-important, glass-towered, chrome-plated,
high-performance, flat-screened lifestyles that we in the fortunate nations
create, crave, strive for, and die for.
While the majority of us live like Kings and Queens, we imagine we have countless
better things to do than feed the starving, help those dying of curable diseases
and assist those who suffer in-humane treatment at the hands of their governments.
All of a sudden I didn’t feel quite so strange about my imagined box
of soul. I was simply being human. I had only imagined I had a real problem
to begin with. So of course, as we are conditioned to do, I had to either
imagine a distraction to take my mind off of the problem, or imagine a way
to correct it. I had taken a step towards returning to the real me.
This whole thing would not have had the same effect had the box not been lost
for this woman to find. Losing my soul was the thing I needed. That simple
twist gave me an almost “It’s A Wonderful Life” experience
and perspective.
She stood with a slight smile on her face
and watched as I did my best to re-shape the box back into a square. I read
my own name on the address label. I pulled open the top and peered at the
emptiness inside. I felt a smile race across my face as I began to realize
how much I’d learned from this. I also began to realize I no longer
needed the box.
I looked at her and said with a sincere smile, “Thank you so much, I
feel better already.”
“I imagine you do. You should keep something as important as that, deep
down in your buggy mister.”