There are boxes upon boxes upon boxes in my mother’s garage, creased and slumped and practically groaning, their flaps ajar like idiot mouths, sighing dusty sighs. The boxes are labeled: KITCHEN, BEDROOM, BOOKS, PHOTOS, MUSIC, TOYS. But the words are scratched out again and again, overlaid, amended, updated into meaninglessness. I suppose that when the boxes were first used, they were true to their categories. Now their labels are like the lies of that person you know you always lies, the way I lied when I was younger, layering lie over truth over half truth over lie, until I was papier-mâchéd into a semblance of what I wanted to be. These boxes that we’re lugging, shoving, squeezing into my car now, there’s no way to know what they contain until I lift up the corners and peer inside, rifle through the upper layer that rests like topsoil over the compressed accretion of my past. See here, on top, my third-grade math book, smooth and purple and inked with unsteady loops of fountain pen; now bury your arms elbow-deep and unearth this soft, lumpy pillow intended for the head of an infant, stitched with my initials, the lace border disintegrating like frothed milk.

 

My mother calls these things treasures, urges me to comb through them for gems, glows in anticipation of the memories these objects will summon like a séance. She says she kept all these things for my benefit, for my children’s benefit, but I wonder, as I open the first box and lock eyes with a stuffed animal I only vaguely remember, how much that’s true, how easy it might be to confuse what is essential with a fear of throwing anything away, because you might accidentally throw yourself away too, how things are precious only as long as there’s space in a garage, only until you’re readying your belongings to move house, until the weight of those boxes is no longer the weight of treasure, but the weight of burden, how we pass along that weight to our children and call it gold.

 

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful; please don’t think me ungrateful. Look at these: I took my first step in these little shoes, these sweet little blue lace-ups, three inches long. I’m grateful she kept these. These have significance. These I will keep.

 

But what of this stack of papers? How did these end up here, amid my childhood relics? These are my mother’s accumulations, the tatters of her stacks of Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, and Tatler magazines. I recall the way she would leaf through them, using a licked forefinger to turn the pages, sniffing the scented strips of perfume ads, the decisive tear of paper when she found a page of interest. She amassed mountains of these pages, mountains she couldn’t bring herself to discard, because surely she would use them one day, these interior design inspirations, those opulent five-star Italian villas for future dream vacations, this striking evening gown modeled with the forward hunch of shoulders that only works on models.

 

And what of these photos? No, I don’t mean the hundreds of photos of holidays, family gatherings, old houses, me in a tree, me in a princess dress with a mosquito bite on my cheek. I mean these photos, the ones where my mother cut herself out because she didn’t like how she looked. She, like me, like the labels on the boxes, editing a story, but still reluctant to erase the context of those photos. Perhaps she thought, even with her face cut out, they might contain some essential truth about her, about us, and what a shame it would be to lose it. In a way she was right—they are evidence of her need for evidence, even after she’s tampered with it. Like how, as we decorate our tree every Christmas, a stray foot will find a fallen ornament and crush it with a devastating little crunch.  Those ornaments, so beautiful, that we collected over the years, contain the memories of our holidays, a little warped, just like the fish-eye reflections of our faces as we hang baubles from branches. Unless the ornament is broken beyond recognition, into a pile of razor-sharp fish scales, she keeps it. They have their own box, these broken ornaments. Every year we open the box, hoping to find a use for them, and every year we close the box, finding none. And yet, still, she can’t bring herself to relinquish them.

 

And now they’ve been passed to me, and now I can throw them away. I can bear the burden of this particular erasure that my mother couldn’t.

 

But let’s take a look at the “keep” pile I’m building, at the intact photos, at this old edition of a beloved children’s book. I’ve also added my English book from when I was ten. There was some promising work in there, and the stories I wrote fit my preferred narrative (“See? I always loved to write!”) I added my milk teeth too, rattling in a little plastic case. What metric saved these objects from the donation pile, the “someone else’s problem now” pile? Why the little shoes, these little blue lace-ups, three inches long, that I took my first steps in? They summon no memories—my first steps are nothing to me but a story my mother tells. But they’re pretty damn cute, so in the “keep” pile they’ll stay, their original function scrawled over with a new one. These shoes are no longer to be kept where they can quickly be slipped onto little feet, but tucked away in a box, for me to rediscover and bear witness to once every few years as I ready my belongings to move house. Selecting them for the “keep” pile is an act of self-preservation. See, here, how I wore these shoes and walked—crawled then walked then ran then crawled upon this earth.

 

Yet as I weigh the little shoes in my hand, they stay in my hand. Their testament to my personhood is a comfort, yes, but little more than a document. This isn’t the same for other objects I unearth, which contain something vital of my mother, her mother, my father’s mother. The weight of those things I feel in my whole body. I leaf through the pages of my mother’s old artwork, smelling the paper for the scent of her imagination, her talent, for her before me; I carefully shuffle, like tarot cards that read only the past, the postcards that my grandmother sent me every month when I was a child, her handwriting an elegant, old-timey scrawl; I run my hand, as though reading with my palm, over the illustrations my other grandmother drew to accompany the stories she wrote for me. These are the real treasures. These I keep not out of fear of self-erasure, but to feel, to welcome, the weight of my forebears, a distillation of all of the objects that they touched in their lifetimes. By comparison, the rattle of my milk teeth rings hollow. I throw them away.

 

After all, who would I keep those teeth for? My hope sometimes is that hands like mine will someday hold with tenderness these affirmations of my existence the way I hold those of my forebears. But if not in the hands of the children I’ll likely never have, where will they end up? In a trash heap, probably, or in the bucket of a bric-a-brac store among thousands of jettisoned heirlooms and strangers’ photos, nudged up against kids I’ve never met on tricycles that have long since rusted in jungled backyards, other people’s grandmothers sat behind big frosty cakes topped with candles in the shape of an “80.”

 

Perhaps I’ll root through the trash later and dig those teeth out, transfer them to canopic jars, let them be arranged around me with the other objects of my self that I’ve selected from these boxes, to be entombed with my body, for someone else to discover. Someone, a future archaeologist, might raise their lantern above their head to survey my remains and my curated personhood. They might behold my narrative and preserve it, inventory my relics in labeled boxes, and tell the world that, yes, she was a person, who crawled then walked then ran then crawled upon this earth, and here is the evidence, treasure after all.