Moving was a pain in the ass. It was why he hadn't done it since leaving college and there were still boxes that he'd never unpacked or sifted through in the eight years since finishing his undergrad. Rule of thumb, or so he was told, was that those were the kind of boxes that needed to be thrown out rather than kept, but Jack was curious. After he finished organizing his new room in the house he now shared with Gemma and Robin, he pulled one of the worn, beaten boxes onto his bed and opened the flaps. Shoved inside were dozens of pictures, some newer than others that he had thrown in there as a place to put them during the recent move. His first generation iphone and an old ipod were at the bottom of the box and to his surprise unbroken. He pulled the chargers out and plugged them in, while he sifted through all the photos. Some loose ends of paper fell out from between the photos and at the bottom of the box he found more, crumpled up. He plugged the ipod into the old dock of his alarm clock and put it on shuffle as he started to go through the old letters. Now he knew why they were all in that box, left forgotten. They were memories he hadn't wanted to keep but had been too sentimental to toss out. The letters were poorly written emotion dumps, used as a cathartic way to move on. The iphone contained messages transferred over from his old phone, his all but forgotten affairs staring blankly back at him. After he finished them, he tossed them and the photos all back in the box and knocked it off the bed. He'd put it in the far end of his closet in the morning, back where they all belonged. The harbored regret that he felt, sinking in once again as he tried to go to sleep to the music that played from the time capsule mp3 player. |