Brie Nicole Inked

Boxes. Each and every part of my life carefully packed away. Each memory folded along its sharpest creases, each feeling wrapped in paper thin as breath. I stack them neatly in the dim corridors of myself, label them later, and seal them with trembling hands, as if tape could hold back time. I tell myself this is order, this is control. But cardboard is only pressed pulp and pretense. The glue dries, the corners soften, and the weight inside begins to shift. Years pass and the seams begin to sweat, edges bowing outward as what I buried, grief with its rusted nails, rage coiled like barbed wire, love I was too afraid to cradle, presses insistently against the walls.

They do not collapse all at once. First there is a split along the spine, a sag, a muffled spill. Then the contents bleed into one another. Ink into water, smoke into lung, until the room I constructed within myself grows thick and airless. The atmosphere changes; it grows heavy, damp with all I refused to feel. It settles on my chest at night, a suffocating presence that smells of dust and old paper and something rotting sweet beneath it. Everything I worked for, the careful architecture of composure, the clean lines of productivity, the bright façade of ‘I’m fine’, begins to tremble under the pressure of what I would not open.

And still, I keep packing. I fold new disappointments into sharp rectangles, press fresh sorrow flat with my palms, tape the flaps shut with desperate precision. I stack them higher and tell myself I will sort through them someday, when I am stronger, when I have time, when it hurts less. But I know cardboard was never meant to hold a lifetime of storms. Sooner than I want, sooner than I am ready, I will have to kneel in the wreckage, slice through the tape, and let the contents breathe. Before the walls give way entirely, before the weight of everything I’ve hidden buries me beneath it.