the gold trimmed box

just there rests a broken mason jar of stones

the sort of stones you collect as they’ve washed up on the shore of a beloved beach in the pacific northwest.

the sort of stones you’ve kept in a jar on your bedside dresser since childhood (as if in some attempt to hold onto your innocence- a time capsule of rock and tide)

until one day a rush of force and the unwanted tilt of life sends them flying to the floor

you watch as glass becomes fragments around you.

and just there is a ukulele which hasn’t seen the light outside its case for nearly two months, though in your mind you play him daily

though others may not pay admission, the concerts are nightly,
the music incandescent

around the corner sits an old black and white photo of the people you miss; whose smiles sing the virulent melody of inevitability

yet they are beautiful.

juxtaposed against a house made of gingerbread nestled amongst a forest of portraits.
snapshots of a life she would never want to discount.

but just there under the desk where she wrote as a little girl, a simple brown box fixes itself.
Plain and ordinary on the surface, this box perhaps contains every decent memory she’s retained

of the man with chestnut eyes and architect hands.
a boyish charm and a grownup’s discipline.

The gruff of a Mr. Darcy.

any physical piece of his retrospect lies there, in the four walls of paper vessel, taking respite on the robin’s egg floor of an attic protecting her most animate heart.

while she, perched on the mattress, fills that gold trimmed box with letters.

(a time capsule of rock and tide)