A Nickel For My Thoughts

I like the corner market down the road from my home. The owner lets me take some of her spare cardboard boxes left over from stocking shelves. Today she let me take four such extras home.

Pushing the latch down with my elbow, I drop the boxes just inside my threshold. After hanging up my coat, I grab the roll of packing tape I leave on the kitchen table. It seems to work better than masking tape since it doesn’t tear as easily, and I’ve found durability to be pretty important when I use the tape to seal down the cardboard flaps and close up any gaps. That way I make sure no nickels fall out. Pausing for a moment, I reach in my pocket.

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The problem with paper bags is the weight of the nickels tears the handles off when I try to pick a bag even half full, and plastic bags tear right away. The boxes, though, slip nicely on a dolly when I’m organizing them in my backroom.

One nickel weighs about five grams. The light weight makes it hard to feel when one appears in my pocket. Oftentimes, I reach into my left pocket and find I’ve already accumulated three or four just below my pocket journal. Frequently one might slip between its pages, a sort of intrusive bookmark flagging one of my empty pages. The nickels really ought to stay out of these places I press my unwritten thoughts. I’ll admit, perhaps taping the boxes is more an ode to wishing those nickels would stay out my little book. Keeping the coins precisely where I want helps me maintain what's left of my sense of control.

A year after your passing, I tried to start journaling and bought from the corner market a small notebook to use as my diary. But I could find no words to put down. Yet so often I think of you. Despite never writing in it, I’ve taken to carrying in my front left pocket a collection of pages bound in a charcoal jacket. This began my other ritual of always wearing pocketed pants. That’s when the nickels started appearing.

Weeks passed before I pieced together the connection. Whether a time together, your face, or even just remembering the feel of your general presence, a nickel appears. At first I kept them in jars, bottles, cups, or whatever containers I could spare. I’ve avoided taking any to the bank since I can’t explain how I got them. Besides, they’re tokens of my memories of you. Memories before I found you on the floor. When those images start of your arms sprawled next to empty pill bottles, I struggle to break away. My pocket fills up, the nickels pressing against my thigh until the discomfort jars me out of the flashback. So I keep the nickels stowed away.

After a year of my ritual - two years since the anniversary of you passing - the floor is starting to bow under the weight of my boxes of nickels. Last Memorial Day, I tried weighing a on my bathroom scale. Coming to 95 pounds, I figure each box holds about 8,600 nickels. Today I’m filling my 47th box. That means we would finally have enough for that car we talked about the week before I found you, making me want to laugh and cry at the same time. Instead the floor sags beneath the weight of all these coins; the silhouette of stacked boxes pressing me equally. The kaleidoscope behind both my sockets drooping, dragging my mood and bottom eyelids with it, twisting my view into a gray haze.

I should apologize. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to take so long to finally write to you. And I’m sorry I didn’t know you were being eaten up inside. Maybe the reason I finally could write to you like this, is that I just came back from my first therapy appointment. For the first time, I think maybe there is hope for me in a life after you. Hope for finding color again. Hope to unpack these boxes. Hope to recall your memory with thankfulness over despair. Hope to find my life again. The therapist says it's a long road, and I don't know how it will all look but I know the road is there. During this walk, I promise to write to you often.

Thank you for being patient with me as always.

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I slip my black notebook back into my pocket, and as my fingers instinctively search, I realize for the first time in a year there’s no nickel. I look to my latest boxes, perhaps ready to bring them out to the recycling bin.