My job is mildly depressing. It isn't that I dislike the work; on the contrary, I enjoy what I do very much. I do not, however, enjoy going through boxes containing someone's most prized treasures, especially when I know that someone is now deceased.

Love letters written during the war, the fanciful script of a bygone age, tintypes of children with their pets, frozen in time.

I feel like I am an intruder, gazing into someone's life secretly while they lie, unsuspecting. They never imagined I would be rifling through a box of their belongings. They never accounted for me at all. Yet here I am, creating my own past.

It makes me feel a little crazy. All these people are just forgotten, like they never happened at all, reduced down to this box, collecting dust on a shelf, being worn away by bugs and air and time. Always, always time. Their possessions outlive them, then those, too, slowly disintegrate. Everything ends.

Our lives really are so minuscule, so insignificant. We are really so temporary and fragile, and then, so easily forgotten.

I don't know if this is just my own fear surfacing. If somehow, I am the one afraid of being cast aside. If I am the one who is scared to die.

I miss my mammaw. I miss Courtney. I miss Uncle Sammie. I miss Dangerous. I miss people who aren't dead, who are just off living their own lives somewhere, no longer in my life.

I don't want everything I know to die.

This is my curse.