Written By: Audrey Pomeroy Graphic By: Audrey Pomeroy
My head spins as I pull everything out of the box, dump it on the floor, and restart. No matter what order I put everything in, it doesn’t quite fit; the box doesn’t quite shut. I turn around, flustered, pulling my hair back into a ponytail in the vain hope that the few strands of hair that are blocking my vision are the culprit that, once taken care of, will reveal the answer to the problem I’ve been obsessing over for the greater part of the past hour. I’m wrong.
Trying to be otherwise productive, I shift my focus to a box a few feet away, this one containing all of the clothes that I’m taking with me. Fitting four seasons into a box is daunting, and I run into the same problem that had bested me with the box before. It’s Tetris, and I’m losing. It isn’t as if I haven’t been preparing for tomorrow morning for the past 13 years of my life, so why is packing all of my belongings for school the problem that catches me off guard? I overcame years of academia, clawing my way to a 4.0, worked for months to achieve the right test scores, and ran for president of every organization I could think of. I kept my head down and I worked. And now, at the end of it all, I am defeated by four cardboard boxes: the only things that will accompany me across the country, the only ties to the life I’ve known.
It’s slowly becoming clearer that I’m not going to fit everything that I wanted to bring with me, and I’m faced with the impossible decision of what to leave behind. After two hours of painful choices, I’ve narrowed it down and have 18 years packed neatly into four boxes stacked in the corner of my bedroom. I retreat to my bathroom and examine my frizzy and tangled hair, sallow skin, and now heavily-bagged eyes, my face reflecting with no sugar-coating the exhaustion I feel in my bones.
Something about my reflection looks duller than usual; a sparkle that should be there is missing. Just as I brush off the unease, my heart drops into my stomach. My necklace is gone.
I feel every hair on my body stand straight up as pins poke every inch of my skin. I frantically check the inside of my shirt, the bathroom counter, and drop to my knees to scan the floor. My necklace is the one thing I need. I could leave the four stacked boxes if I had it with me, something from my home to carry across the country, the one thing I have left from my grandma, a birthday gift for my sweet sixteen that had been given to her at the same age that she wore from then until it was passed on to me. The boxes. It must be in one of the boxes. I stand outside of my body as my hours of hard work and puzzling are ripped apart in seconds. My bedroom is returned to its previous state of disarray that I’d so meticulously organized, and then worse. The sun is starting to light up my room again, and beyond my return to square one in terms of packing, I’m in a state of panic and exhaustion, a combination less than ideal for the 14-hour road trip I’m about to embark on with my parents.
The basement! That’s where I got the boxes that now lie sideways on my bedroom floor. My necklace got caught on something and is probably sitting on the stairs, waiting for me to retrieve and return it to its rightful place, on my throat against my pulse. I half-tiptoe, half-run down the hall and down the stairs, clumsily opening the door and flipping on the dim light switch before doing a double-take. This isn’t the basement that had been here for the 11 years that I’d lived in the house. The walls that held my mom’s nicer dishes, and the hooks where my dad hung his golf clubs, were nowhere to be found, replaced by oak shelves that lined as far as I could see.
I’m exhausted, obviously, and check my watch to check the time, and explain why I’m seeing what I am, but there are no hands. I spin on my heel to go back up to bed. My necklace must just be somewhere I haven’t combed yet, maybe under my bed in the back corner, or in the kitchen, but the door that I don’t remember closing behind me now refuses to budge, insisting that I walk further into what looks like a library with endless shelves. I walk for a second, trying to see what’s on the far wall, and realize that there isn’t one within sight. Starting to panic, I turn once more to the door and start to step more quickly, scanning what
appears to be endless shelves, when something familiar catches my
eye on the shelf closest to the door.
A small shiny plaque, boasting a name that matches my own, adorns the top of the rich wooden shelf, inviting me to look closer. I run my eyes down the four shelves, my heart dropping when I look closer at the contents. Everything on the shelf is my own, things that I thought I’d never see again, lost to time. On the middle shelf, there’s a small piece of parchment, a stark white against the dark backdrop of the shelf, addressed to me. My watch, which had previously been bare of hands, began to tick down from the top of the face. One hour.
I began to frantically scan the top shelf, immediately recognizing some things that I had spent hours searching for, and some that I never even realized went missing. Mismatched earrings whose twins were still in my jewelry box, old swim ribbons, and endless pens and pencils. My heart pangs as I recognize my first taste of grief: my childhood blanket. I feel a soft smile spreading across my face as I read the tag attached to the blanket: Chloe, age 7, left on an airplane while moving. I bring it to my face, smelling the familiar scent of my childhood bedroom, and feeling my eyes prick with tears when I remember how upset I’d been, demanding that my mother call the airline and ask the staff to find the blanket that was now somewhere over the continental US. Glancing back down at my watch, I gently fold the blanket back up and place it back where it belongs, taking one last deep inhale as I put my childhood back on the shelf.
I run my fingers along the shelf as I recognize countless objects begging for further exploration, but I’m running out of time. I gently run my fingers over my middle school diary, which I had hidden out of embarrassment, and eventually lost to time, tempted to thumb the pages but aware of my ticking watch. I click on a shattered phone that I had shattered during my first breakup out of hurt and anger, my heart panging at the lock screen of someone who’d once held my trust and broken it, then deigning to continue. I pick up a sheet of paper that reads my list of accolades and my deepest, most innermost struggles that beg a college to choose me for acceptance. I skim it again, no wonder I deleted this one out of frustration, I was correct in knowing that it would bear no success against the essays of those I was competing with. None of this is worth what little time I have left.
I can feel my eyes beginning to sting with exhaustion as I scan the shelf, dragging my eyes over countless items that have been lost to couch cushions, car seats, and the recesses of backpacks. I stop this time on a small, plastic necklace, a half of a heart adorned with a butterfly and the word friends. I pause, picking it up and looking at the item, searching in my memory for its place. It hits me: Bella, my first heartbreak. We had been inseparable in fifth grade, attached at the hip from age 10 to 13, one never without the other. We had gotten these necklaces together at the Claire’s at our mall, the first time that our moms had let us do something alone, and our first taste of the freedom that accompanied young adolescence. I remember fighting over this half of the necklace; it was far prettier. We did rock, paper, scissors, and I won, proudly adorning myself with the friends of best friends, even though I could sense Bella’s disappointment and jealousy.
Two weeks later, during lunch, when I went to touch my necklace, I realized it was gone, and when I saw Bella’s feigned sympathy, I immediately turned on her, accusing her of stealing the necklace because it was the one that she had wanted. She got upset with me for unfairly accusing her, but we both stood our ground, me thinking her a thief and her thinking me a liar. Even though it was such a small thing, I refused to be friends with her anymore, my stolen necklace a reflection of the state of our friendship, incomplete.
My first heartbreak at the hand of my best friend, one I still think of today, partly compassionately, and partly resentfully. Even as I place the necklace back on the shelf, I ask myself why she had to break our friendship and keep lying when the small tag attached to the chain fluttered to the ground. I pick it up and read the chicken scratch and feel my stomach sink with shame: Chloe, age 13, fell off at soccer practice. Bella was telling the truth all along, and I’d wasted five years of potential friendship because I didn’t want to believe her.
Feeling heavier than I did 45 minutes ago, I move along, keenly aware of the 15 minutes left on my watch, observing myself grow up via lost items, feeling the pang of each item that I missed dearly, and hoping that there is one thing I won't encounter, the one thing that I had come down here for. I break down when I see it. My grandmother's necklace, a perfect, shining gold locket, save for the one scratch that I had put there when I fell during a soccer game, one that I had lamented over endlessly.
My hand feels like lead as I reach up for the pendant, reading the tag: Chloe, age 18, ____. Of course, the library couldn’t even tell me where it was, leaving me with no hope of finding the piece of my heart that I could now never get back. My grandmother had been there when nobody else was.
When my mom and dad were working late, she was there cooking us dinner. When I was sick, she was there comforting me. When I was overshadowed by my big sister, the shining star who never had to work for anything and effortlessly glided through life, my grandma was there to hug me and tell me that I was special. She was why I worked so hard, why I allowed myself to forgo so many opportunities to get the perfect grades, get the perfect scores, get into the perfect school, drilling myself into the ground. When she got sick, she promised me her most cherished possession over my sister: her golden locket from her mother, and gave it to me when I turned sixteen, two months before she passed away.
I feel my cheeks warm and become slippery as I finally let the tears I’d been holding back slip down my face, bemoaning and grieving the loss not only of my necklace, but of my grandmother, the only one who ever chose me, hugging it close to my chest, itching to clasp it around my neck and feel its comforting weight against my speeding pulse. My watch begins to heat on my wrist, signalling to me that I’ve run out of time and must return everything that I’d taken from the shelf. With a heavy heart, I put my golden necklace back on the shelf, next to the plastic one from Bella, the childish and elegant heart necklaces side-by-side, uncanny symbols of the two people that I’d loved and lost next to each other.
I retreat from the library, grieving the loss of my loved ones and my items stolen by life. I could never get any of these back, and will never see any of them again. I shut the door behind me, putting my back to the wooden door and sliding down, leaning back against it, comforting myself by wrapping my arms around my body, letting myself cry for everything that I was leaving behind, not just in the library, but at home. The weight and the fear of leaving had become too much to bear, and trying to shove all of my pain into four boxes had only made it worse. I don’t know how long I sit here before stalking up the stairs back into my bedroom. I gently pack my boxes back up that had been forgotten on my bedroom floor during my time in the library. The sun warms my face as the day begins. I pack my boxes into the car and start the drive with my parents.
Half asleep, I feel my phone buzz with an Instagram follow request:
The Liberator Magazine 
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