Life Outside Of The Box

As 19 year old Rolly sat staring blankly at the brown paper box, scenes from her life were flashing before her like giant waves lashing out from the ocean. Before now, her memories had seemed to be such a blur. Nothing was clear enough to be put into any type of sequential order in her mind. Events just seemed to happen, days seemed to just come and go. Every moment was just like the last, no hours passed, time just stood still while life kept happening. Now, random memories kept popping up into blank spaces inside of her head, like Jack-In-the-box of sorts. She had become so accustomed to tuning out, taking her mind to some faraway place outside of her body. The mental disconnect that Rolly experienced for almost 16 years of her life was so deep that reality was no longer real.

Even though Rolly was free from life inside the box, she was learning that freedom was not free. There was still a price to pay after the price had been paid. The haunting, blurry memories of stolen years that could never be replaced would follow her for the rest of her life. Every time that she saw a box, she would be reminded of the one that she lived in. Even as she laid on the beach facing the sky while digging her toes into the sand, the sun kissing her skin and the water rushing almost right up to her then suddenly, almost instantly returning back out to what looked like a thin line between the sky and the ocean. In a weird way, the brown cardboard box was a place of comfort and protection from the outside world. “Life isn’t fair,” she thought to herself. Sometimes a box is all you have to shield you from the dangers of your own mind. For 16 years this box represented everything that was missing and stolen from Rolly. The box had become her friend, her hope, her protection and now her motivation.

At the age of 1, Rolinda Joseph had been taken from her drug addicted parents and put into foster care. By the age of two she was officially adopted by her foster parents, who made every effort to present themselves to social service and adoption agencies as kind, loving people who longed for a baby girl. Only time would reveal that their efforts were financially motivated, and their kindness was non-existent. From as far back as Rolinda (Rolly) could remember, starting around the age of 3, she was forced to live inside of a cardboard box. No friends, no toys, no light, no attention, no love, no comfort, no connection to the outside world and no one to care for her. Rolly spent days and nights inside of an empty old washing machine box that her parents had put in the basement after they bought a new washing machine shortly after her 3rd birthday. She remembers being fascinated with the huge box that was so much larger than her. Each time she followed her adopted mom into the basement to wash clothes, she wandered over to the box to look inside of it and scoot it across the floor. This annoyed her adopted mom and she threatened to put Rolly in the box and leave her there. It was around this same time that her parents began to holler at her more and more on a daily basis and ignore her when they weren’t fussing at her.

One day while she was climbing up on to the box to sit down (while holding a bottle of juice), the box tumbled over and Rolly tumbled behind it spilling her juice all over the floor. Apparently, this was the last straw. Before she knew it, she was being snatched off of the floor and thrown inside of the box. Though startled, she was amazed that her little body could fit so comfortably inside. Not knowing that this would be the beginning of a lifetime of memories inside of the box. For the first week, each day her adopted mom or dad would come down and tell her that from now on that she would be staying in the box in the basement because she was a bad girl. One day, her dad came down and gave her a brown box, wrapped in brown paper. It had a doll and several books in it. She was told that she could only leave the box to use the bathroom in the basement and to never come up the stairs. They gave her a bottle of water each day, a snack and one meal per day. As days became weeks, and weeks became months and months turned into years, life in the box in the basement became a way of life. Until the age of 18, when Rolly became brave enough to bust out a window in that old basement and climb through the broken glass to experience a life outside of the brown box. The one thing that she could not leave behind was the brown paper box that her books were kept in. It became an image of herself and her imagination. That brown paper box was a castle, a mansion, a doll house, and the hope of someday experiencing a world beyond the brown box. It was now her time to shine, to see a world outside of the box. She was now that diamond that had emerged from the pressure, a stolen life to be recaptured.