Purchase Now!
“Hopefully, one day, I suppose it depends on the adventure you choose…”
Minnie walked through life collecting moments and insignia and affirmations and energy from the universe, an understanding - unknowingly. Minnie walked through life without knowing that’s what she was collecting. She was collecting the future, past, present, the maiden, mother, crone.
Accept all, reject none, right? Hopefully, one day, I suppose it depends on the adventure you choose...
Minnie’s most recent online purchase was sold to her as “The Mystery Box” and was suggested to her from a YouTube ad. Her interest peaked, so she followed the link. She looked at the testimonials of virtual strangers about how the contents of the package changed their lives forever. It all seemed on board-ish, especially for the low price of $29.99 (plus shipping and handling). She clicked the Purchase Now! button - encouraged by the pangs in her sacral chakra growling “do it,” but she couldn’t hear or feel them yet because she didn’t yet know what that feeling was. She took YouTube up on its ad and offer to deliver “The Mystery Box” that would revolutionize her reality. Yes, she was reeled in, bought in to the game, and rolled the dice in the great capitalist gamble.
Before you get too judgy about her purchase she did so - and so do you - because that’s what you do when you’re part of a culture that looks like this. When we live in a culture always encouraging us to look at things. When we live in a culture encouraging us to want the ats - the things we think make us feel better, but are intended to make us feel othered, lesser. The ats ensure we’ll buy the imitation feeling they convey because we hope they will fill the hole inside ourselves. The hole inside, begging us to look within…
Minnie, like many of us, liked looking at things. Minnie liked looking at things like: the tracking numbers of her packages and the rating of the drivers assigned to deliver her ordered boxes of ats. She found pleasure in tracking, in knowing when the package would arrive before it was left, confirmed via the driver, on her doorstep. It gave her a needed sense of control, content, content.
Minnie loves to look out and at. Minnie loves tracking her ats out the window. Minnie loves knowing every box that has been and will be delivered. This was part of the thrill she found in life, and it brought her a sense of purpose. She relished in peering through the blinds as the delivery drivers hustled out of their open doors to the backs of their trucks, to hustle her ats to her doorstep - not knowing she was surveying their every move…
Maybe she enjoyed it so much because there’s an element of it that connects back to being in high school when she first heard of Walt Whitman. She read a line about an old woman watching young men play on the beach from behind her curtains. It was part of one of his most famous poems - the name escapes her. She remembers his poem was in a book that was banned for a while, in various groups (in various states of consciousness), because it was considered too obscene by the framework of the culture. The same culture that eventually birthed Minnie, and you, and me. The same culture that eventually changed its framework to such an opposite side of the spectrum it now teaches said poem in eleventh grade English as a classic...
On this day, the casual onlooker of Minnie’s life, watching as she pulled into her driveway and seeing her reaction to the package on her doorstep might think, “Well that seems out of character.”
They would be correct.
That’s because on this day, Minnie finds herself unable to handle the delivery of a package. That’s because on this day, the delivery is unexpected. That’s because on this day, the sheer existence of this package is too much for her to find, on the stoop of her door, after returning from her weekly grocery run. But, she brings it in anyway.
She sits. She stares at it. She can’t handle the idea of the fact that 1: it wasn’t expected, 2: it wasn’t addressed to her, and 3: it was addressed to her significant other. Her curiosity surrounding this inanimate object was eating up her soul.
“What is in this fucking package?!?”
It took all of half an hour before she found herself sitting on the floor, legs splayed and hair tousled from rubbing her head so much - entranced by and cursing out the why of this box in the brown paper wrapping.
She sits. She debates. She walks away from. She walks back to. The package. She asks herself, “Should I open it? I mean… I was expecting an order. Maybe I messed up the tracking and it’s my YouTube treat?” She knows that isn’t right because she has been tracking “The Mystery Box” since she ordered it thirty-two hours and seven minutes ago.
She tells herself, “Leave it be. Your name isn’t on it. Maybe it’s meant to be a surprise for you.” She can’t leave it be. The idea of that brown parchment wrapping and burlap string sealing what the perfectly shaped cube conceals is too much to bear.
She begins to unwrap the package in her mind.
She imagines what the contents could be. She does this because it’s Wednesday and she’s already been to the grocery. She does this because she’s over-educated and under-stimulated. She paints images in her mind’s eye of the various potential gifts for her that the box might obtain, contain. She lists them out one by one, imagining the weight of the object in her hands, the various textures, the excitement of knowing what it is.
As she rattles through her imaginary catalogue of the potential contents of the box, she comes across her ego. She comes across all of the elements of identity, all of the ats, and all of the things she’s learned.
Then she comes across a choice: “What’re you gonna do Minnie? Come on Minnie, you want to take the blindfold off and choose your own adventure? You want an either/or situation? You want to be forced to choose a path, well here it is. Choose your adventure.”
Minnie hears the contents of the package whispering to her with calls that get incrementally louder as they continue to speak: “You take the blindfold off, you get this path. You leave the blindfold on, you get this path. It’s a polarity. A binary opposition. A framework. We’ve all been put in it. Now, choose your adventure.”
Minnie feels the pressure to decide. The anxiety stew begins to boil the chunks of her insides. Her mouth dries up and her armpits become pools of past indecisions that forced decisions upon her. She feels ice in her limbs and water in her brain. Frozen, yet moving unconsciously - subconsciously.
She realizes the choice: binary and opposition and either/or is all just a bunch of bullshit. She comes out of her mind’s eye and realizes she’s been screaming at the box for who knows how long, “BOTH. I want BOTH. I don’t want to be forced into a binary opposition. I don’t want to be forced into an either/or decision. I want to take off my blindfold and choose both my body and mind. I want to choose both my head and heart. THEY ARE BOTH MINE! I don’t want to HAVE to choose between the things that are me, that are one. I want to wholly integrate.”
She wipes the tears from her eyes and the fog her sobs created from her glasses, puts them back on and realizes - the box is open.
She has opened Pandora’s box...
All the towers fall. All the things not said are said. All the things not felt are felt. She knows. She has content. She knows. She is content. She relishes in no longer having to peer through the blinds to find a sense of fulfillment.
She gets the point: Within the polarity there is oneness because there cannot be a polarity without a singularity. There has to be a starting point that two things diverge from in order to create a binary, an opposition, a need for either/or. The starting point is the oneness; without knowing it, nothing else can knowingly exist...
We can pretend all of the ats in life: identity, nationality, religion, ethnicity, habits, relationships, politics, desires are separate, but we’d be incorrect. It’s all the same fucking thing and it all comes from the same fucking place, from the singularity, from oneness. It might be a hard pill to swallow. It might make you uncomfortable as it washes down, but the box opened for you.
Pandora’s gifts are now yours. Find the hope in the chaos of your choice for oneness.
About the Creator
Erin Lucas
she/her
Multimedia Creator, Writer, Educator, Nonprofit Organizer
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