Jenga!

The box is dusty
It's been sitting in the little room
The little room beneath the stairs
You know
Like the one Harry Potter lived in

In our house
Harry Potter doesn't live there however
What does live there
Are all the things that we just can't throw out
Or at least all the things we can't let go of yet

Under the single glaring bulb hanging from the ceiling
The dusty box wants me to take it
So I do
I grab ahold of it and drag it out
Out onto the clean wood floor of the hallway
Leaving a track in the dust on the floor of the little room
A track that bulldozes some of the dirt from there
Out to here
Where it clearly doesn't belong

I sit on the floor next to the dirty old box
Releasing the latches on the front
Lifting the lid against the protests of the rusty hinges
My eyes take in what is inside
A forgotten childhood's worth of stuff

The game of Life sits on top
Daring me to spin it's wheel
And end up with twins in the little plastic car
Drawing cards randomly to determine my future

A Viewmaster with a little envelope of disks
Begs me to take it out
Put in a disk
And hold it up to the sunlight streaming in through the window
To look through it and be amazed
At animals and scenes
That all pop out at me in all their 3D glory

A game of Jenga
It's what I really was thinking of
When I went after this box today
So that's what I grab
I take the game to the kitchen table
Leaving the dirty old box in the hallway
Open in the sunlight from the front window
It's gaping maw waiting to gobble up some other thing
That I can't let go of yet

I sit down at the table and read the outside of the box
The rules seem simple enough
But I'm going to do mostly as I like
Playing by myself as I am today

Carefully I take the old lid off and dump out the wooden pieces
I start to build my tower
A green one here
A red one there
Brown one on top of that
I keep going until it's about a foot and a half tall

I look at it like that for a bit
How all the blocks interlock
Forming a structural tower
The inherent stability of it

The average person is formed much the same way
Mentally, anyways
All your experiences and memories
Your values and beliefs
They all interlock
They all build you up
To that foot and a half tall tower
Of who you are

Sometimes I wish it were more like Jenga in a way
Where I could remove certain blocks
In certain ways
In a certain order
And the tower would still stand

But even in Jenga
The more blocks you remove
The more unstable the tower
You remove enough of them
And the tower falls

And you lose the game

Still
I wish there was such a concept
As in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Where one could take out certain blocks
Certain memories
Surely certain things you'd be better off with
Surely?

Or would it surely make you a little more unstable
A little less firm
In that foot and a half tall tower
That makes you who you are?

I pop out a piece on the tower
I don't like the looks of that one
Then another
Strategically removing
Trying not to breathe

JENGA!