I am a musician and a poet.

As such there are certain things that I need for my sanity i.e. my mandolin, my books, a good pen, etc. However, in the event of a house fire or other such catastrophe, these items wouldn’t get a second glance on my way out of the house. There was a time when I would have said that my instruments or my books were my most valuable possessions but they are no longer. I could make quite an extensive list of my most important objects and they would all have two things in common: they are simple (pine cones, rocks, sticks, pieces of paper, scraps of cloth) and they are symbolic. When I say that these things are symbolic, I mean symbolic in the most highly poetic and shamanic form of the word. They don’t simply signify something else in my mind, they exist as a manifestation of that something else and as such, are fluid in their meaning. The meanings change as I change and expand as I grow. These are the objects that I’ve found or created during my most intense upheavals of the soul and because of this, they are imprinted and have become physical and symbolic extensions of myself. They are just as much a part of me as my fingers and toes because they represent the dynamic thoughts and experiences in my life that motivate my very being in the world. I have dozens of these little objects.

My most valuable of these objects, that which I would save from disaster above any other possession I have ever owned, is a piece of cardboard. It is one of those thin, square pieces that manufacturers place inside calendars to keep them rigid in the store.

About two weeks before my sister died, she came into my bedroom one day with an arm-full of paper. It was mostly old calendars and scrap cardboard that she had been keeping. She asked me if I wanted any of it to use in my collage art. I said sure and set the scrap material in a pile on the floor. After my sister died, I had the terrifying and colossal realization that I was now the only person on Earth who had memory of our inside jokes. I would not have been so terrified by the gravity of this realization if she and I didn’t have so many of them. There is no possible way that I can describe how silly she and I were so I won’t try here (I’m working on poems for this) but realizing that I was charged with remembering this massive chunk of our life together seemed indescribably daunting amidst my grief-delirium. It became even more so when I realized that I couldn’t remember any of our inside jokes. Not a single one came to me for days. Slowly, they started coming back to me and I needed to write them down. When the first one slammed into me about a week after her passing, I grabbed the closest thing to me to write on: the piece of calendar cardboard. Since then I have devoted countless hours of my days simply trying to remember our silliness. Since then I have utterly filled both sides of the cardboard with our inside jokes.

As of 11:02 pm on June 10th, 2013 this piece of cardboard contains 274 individual inside jokes and I’m continuing to remember more. Roughly 200 of these were only started in the past 5 years. I’m just now beginning to truly remember inside jokes from our childhoods and early adolescence which means I will need another piece of cardboard.

It may seem obvious now why this piece of cardboard is my most valuable possession, but there’s more to it than it being a method of record keeping. It’s symbolic. When I’m awake late at night, I will pull out the cardboard and recite each inside joke exactly the way we used to say them. The exact same tone, inflection, facial expressions, everything. I say them as if my sister were right there with me like she used to be. One of the things people feel the need to tell me is that my sister now “lives on” within me. This is so trite because in all seriousness, we’ve been living through each other for the past 18 years. That’s why grief is so fucking awful. Even so, I believe the sentiment. My sister does live on in me because I am the remaining half of our relationship. This is realized through the act of memory. But even beyond memory, I now understand the necessity of preserving her voice as well. It’s not going to be enough to simply remember her, to pay tribute to her. That’s why this ruffled up piece of cardboard is so important to me. It exists not only as a way for me to remember her, but also as the symbolic object for the part of her voice that still exists and resides inside me. Not just the way she sounded when she talked, but the quality of her words that made them hers. She was not a writer. She didn’t write these things down but her voice is a very real part of my being and because of that, I must do everything in my power to resist forgetting and resist letting that voice fall silent. There is a space in this world that we created with our words and our jokes that still exists, but is smaller and quieter. That space will exist as long as I exist because a portion of both our voices still resides here. That is only one of the countless ways that sister lives on in me.

Far beyond the books and the musical instruments, the little pine cones and scraps of cloth, I need this piece of cardboard for my sanity. I need it because it makes me laugh and get silly like she and I used to. Then she doesn’t feel so far away anymore.

-B