Tara Dewalton, Human!

There comes a day when your life ceases to hold meaning.

The cursor blinks impatiently at Tara as if taunting her. Do better, it seems to chide. Tara groans, running her hands through her disastrously tangled curls. She usually managed to type a good two thousand words before she began personifying the cursor—an occurrence of her delusion this early on was most definitely a bad sign.

She tries again.

There comes a day when our lives cease to hold meaning.

She watches the cursor, seeking its approval, coveting some sign from the universe that she will probably never receive. Something, perhaps someone to tell her that what she hopes to make her deepest, most profound piece isn’t simply the epitome of every broken-to-healed, cowardly-to-courageous, absolute-mess-of-a-person-to-self-actualized-main-character-girlboss™ bullshit. The more she stares at her words, the more they seem to blur and haze together as one depressing mess of a sentence.

Tara Dewalton!

She shouts into her empty apartment, attempting to latch on to as much nonexistent motivation as she can.

Bestselling author! Top of The New York Times charts!

It is the foolproof method she exploited in high school, yet currently, the only part of "foolproof" it was proving to be was making her look like an utter fool. It is often in these moments that Tara wonders if she is someone who peaked in her teenage years. Someone who family friends and relatives who might as well have been strangers would take one look at and decide that she had "potential" once they found out how pathetically short her list of accomplishments stretched.

Her anxiety spiral inches its way back up slightly as she is reminded that she, in fact, would likely be considered someone who had lived up to that so-called "potential" she'd possessed so much of. She had transformed the miserable scribbles teenage Tara had furiously scrawled in her diary-that-she-refused-to-call-a-diary and made a career out of melancholic poems and even more depressing novels that far too many people related to. Now she simply had to write another one.

Tara aggressively grabs onto her desk before pushing her chair in the opposite direction, letting the momentum spin her around and around until she feels the room tilt in time to the pulsing migraine she feels coming on.

There comes a day when my (?) life ceases to hold meaning.

She writes this cautiously as if afraid someone is watching her in her lone apartment. As if they would sneak out from under her bed and wave a finger too close to her face.

Ha! They would cry. Your life?! Why would your life be meaningless?!

They would dramatically prance around her cluttered one-bedroom studio space and thrust their arms up to the sky.

Look, Tara! They would grab onto her shoulders and throttle her in a miserable attempt to shake some sense into her.

This is what you wanted! This is the life you dreamed about! This is what you wrote in your hideous, neon green diary, (yes, it was a diary) right under your biggest dream of all: Date. Daniella. Peng.

And they would be right about everything. And her head would ache a bit harder when she recalled the words Daniella had written to her—written because Daniella was the type of girl to reject your romantic pursuits with a handwritten letter tucked neatly into a beige envelope—and that was precisely why Tara had liked her so much in the first place. She’d been exhilarated when she first spotted her name on the envelope, written in solid black ink without a smudge. Soon, however, her excitement quickly dissipated into bitter disappointment as her eyes devoured the contents of the letter.

I genuinely appreciate your inquiry as to my romantic status and enthusiasm regarding possible romantic endeavors between us. However, it is with regret that I inform you that I am currently not in pursuit of a relationship of the romantic type as I am instead focused on the success of my future career. Thank you for understanding, and I will let you know accordingly if my decisions were to change.

Best,

Dani

Later, Tara would find that her employment rejection letters could hardly rival the level of detail and compassion tenth-grade Daniella had wielded to reject her. Perhaps it was for the best, Tara desperately tried to convince herself. After all, Tara had wild hopes for her future too! Thus, she grabbed the letter, crumpling up all the meticulously folded edges she knew Daniella had taken great pride in perfecting and hurled it into the garbage can.

An hour later, she took it back out.

Throwing away the letter unsettled her. There was an aggravating, bothersome feeling inside her that had only grown in size after she had tossed Daniella’s letter, and she couldn’t seem to shake it. Fortunately, the letter only smelled mildly like moldy bread and the trademark scent of trash. Burning the letter didn’t feel right either. Tara wasn’t superstitious, but she couldn't help but feel that burning something Daniella had given to her felt a lot like cursing Daniella, and Tara surely didn’t despise her, even if she was a little (a lot) heartbroken.

And so Tara went into the forbidden land, the dangerous deep where monsters perched and demons dwelled (the basement, obviously), and grabbed the first Brown Paper Box she spied. She sprinted back upstairs at double the speed she had for her physical fitness test in school (Mrs. Kelp would’ve been proud!) before examining her findings. It was the box her mother’s monthly vitamins came in, about the size of 10 Monopoly board games stacked, and Tara carefully ripped off the faded shipping label, claiming the old Brown Paper Box as hers from then on. She then plopped Daniella’s rumpled letter in before double, then triple sealing the box with the most durable shipping tape she could find. She slipped the box into a small crook underneath her bed, confident that she would not revisit it for a long, long time. Maybe someday she could even laugh about it.

She couldn’t have been more wrong. The first time she tore open the Brown Paper Box was only two months after she first sealed it. This time, though, it had been like a sharp blow to her stomach: unexpected, uninvited, and excruciatingly painful.

This time, it was a funeral invitation.

She’d only known Larry for perhaps three-quarters of a year, yet they had undeniably grown closer than she had with friendships that stretched the span of five years, some even longer. Their friendship had always felt different than her other friendships; Lary was a year older in school, and she regularly sought him out for advice, for guidance when she couldn’t admit to anyone else exactly how lost she was. He had a way of coaxing the truth out of her when it was second nature to brush off anyone's concerns about her with a simple, “I’m fine.” Thinking back on it, she’d never been there the way he was for her. She was ashamed of it, yet she couldn’t help the bitter anger she felt after his death—at herself, at the world, and perhaps even at Lary. She felt deceived. Fooled by the eternal smile Lary seemed to carry, the stories he would tell with such vibrant energy she could practically feel it buzzing, humming in the air. Perhaps his laughs had stifled his sobs in solitude, his smile so bright it overshadowed the misery he had truly felt.

When she tore off the still-new tape of the Brown Paper Box, it was with a heaviness and sorrow she had never known before. She’d gently laid the new letter to rest next to Daniella’s, and she’d felt a sense of longing for the person she had been merely two months ago when the worst feeling she had ever known was Daniella's rejection. This time, she’d merely bound the tape once around the box.

The Brown Paper Box grew heavier over the years as the letters piled up. Some left her devastated and heartbroken while others merely drew out a long sigh and an immediate need for chocolate-cake therapy. Some she nearly burned, or shredded, or even tried to feed to her dog before she decided alas to surrender it to the Brown Paper Box. The first "D" she ever received on a test. The time she didn’t get accepted to her dream university. The love note her boyfriend had left a week before she caught him with another girl. It wasn’t easy for her to watch her box of disappointments grow at such an alarming rate, and she had been more than terrified that she would eventually need one, then two, than many, many more boxes to carry the weight of her failures. Yet as the box grew, she’d like to think that she did too. She’d spent her lunches in the library after that "D," her head hunched and back aching from too many hours trying to cram facts about Europe’s conquests of the early centuries and exactly how many Grammys Taylor Swift had won before turning 30 (okay, that one was more for personal research purposes). She didn’t despair, and after a year and a half of attending a local university, she had transferred to her dream school and graduated with a degree and a much more loyal girlfriend.

There were many days in which she had desperately wanted to be rid of the Brown Paper Box. To her, it was a reminder of what she had lost, rather than the new life she had built for herself. She often tried to take baby steps—jamming the box into the topmost shelf in her dusty closet or throwing her least favorite blanket over it and calling it a day—all to no avail. No matter what she did, it seemed to be perpetually present, thrumming and pounding to the rhythm of her heart until she finally relented and let it sit beside her desk, out in the open. It sat there through what she considered the worst years of her life, growing heavier with each one of her defeats. It witnessed the years she held sacred, the months that she did not need to open the Brown Paper Box.

There came a day when my life ceased to hold meaning. There came another day when my life rediscovered meaning. I could tell you that story, but my memories have tapered around the edges, my thoughts clouded and obscured. I could tell you all the happy moments of my life, but that would only be half the story. The other half? I keep it in a Brown Paper Box, filled to the brim with no tape enclosing it. Not because it's too full, but because I like it just the way it is.

Because it's earned its place.