The Bottom Drawer

Twenty-four hours remained before everything needed to be out of the house, and only the dresser’s bottom drawer had anything left in it. Still, as she knelt and gripped the drawer’s handle, she hesitated. She understood why her parents had chosen to downsize, but that didn’t stop her from wishing that they had chosen to stay in the house she had always called home. 

The drawer creaked as it slid open, a smell reminiscent of old books emanating from it like smoke from a fireplace. Filled with all the junk she had forgotten about, it was a miracle it had ever closed.

Dust puffed up as she reached in and pulled out an old notebook. It was purple, thin, and cheap, with spiral binding that was coming undone at the ends. It was wide-ruled, too. She couldn’t remember the last time she had used a wide-ruled notebook. Maybe middle school, but over fifteen years had passed since then.

On the first page, there was a sketch, a bunch of tiny stars amongst the moon and a compilation of planets. There were words too, written in smeared pencil that was no longer legible. Sometimes, when she drew, her head would float off somewhere else, and she would scribble little poems on her doodles. She was sure whatever she had written then would make her giggle now, but it was still a shame that it was gone.

Setting the notebook aside, she reached back into the drawer and fished a handful of beaded necklaces out from the bottom. They were green and purple, the kind of cheap plastic necklaces handed out for Mardi Gras. One was broken, snapped in half so clean it was as if the string had been cut on purpose. 

She’d gotten them during her first year of college, on a night when she’d had a lot to drink, although not so much that she couldn’t remember cutting the necklace in half and trying to turn it into a headband. It was too short, unfortunately, and she was too out of it to somehow tie it into her hair and make it work. So she had left it behind as she and her friends went out for the night, the other beads rustling around her neck as she danced.

She’d had a very different view of her life—and herself—then. The world had felt a little brighter, and the future, somehow, a little clearer. As she’d gotten older, things had become more jumbled, and her dreams no longer guided her every action.

When she reached back into the drawer, she fished out a delicate old flower. It was long dead, the corsage she had worn to her senior prom. The flower was a dull shade somewhere between magenta and purple now, but it had once been a sharp, vibrant red. With its black and silver ribbons, it had stood out in contrast to the deep blue of her dress.

She had felt like a princess that night. The sequins on her dress had shimmered under the dance floor lights, and she’d gotten her hair done up like Cinderella. Never had she felt as good about herself as she had then, and sometimes she wondered if she ever would again. 

Part of it was that she wasn’t sure it was possible to feel so light anymore. Coming up on her high school graduation, she had felt like the whole world was in the palm of her hand. Anything was possible. She supposed it still was, but possible did not equal probable. No matter how hard she worked, there were some things that would simply never happen.

When she reached into the drawer again, her hand closed around a loose, folded piece of paper. At first, she didn’t recognize it, but as she unfolded it, the memory crept back in. 

In fifth grade, she had started to think about her life beyond elementary school. What would she be like as a teenager? As an adult? What would she do? It was imperative, she had decided, that she come up with goals. So, she had made a bucket list. 

There were many items she had completed. She had gone camping in an actual tent one night, rather than staying in a camper like her family always did. She had adopted her own cat and dog. She had crossed both United States borders, traveling into Canada and Mexico. She had visited the Four Corners Monument, laughing as she placed one foot in Arizona and one in New Mexico and one hand in Colorado and the other in Utah. In high school, she’d had her first kiss.

She was proud of her younger self for coming up with so many big things, but she was also disappointed. Not in the little girl whose handwriting monopolized the page in her hand, but in herself. Because for as much as she had done, the vast majority of the list was not yet complete. She hadn’t gone skydiving or swum with dolphins. She hadn’t gotten to see the northern lights. She had never set foot on a single continent other than North America. She hadn’t seen the cherry blossoms bloom in D.C., and she hadn’t visited every US state. There was still so much missing.

She always told herself that she was waiting for the right time. Someday, when she was at a very specific point in her life, she would do the things she had always dreamed of. But there wasn’t any way to know how much time she actually had. It could have been decades, but it could just as easily have been minutes. How disappointed would her younger self be if she never made it to the end of the list because she had wasted time waiting for everything to be perfect? There had to come a point when she realized perfect was never going to happen. It was now or never.

She wished she had known then the toll that the transition from childhood to adulthood would take on her. Maybe she wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to grow up.

She folded the paper back up but held onto it with one hand as she reached back into the drawer with the other. Her fingers closed around a pen, purple with a giant purple puff ball on top. Perhaps she should buy more pens like this one. It wouldn’t hurt to add a little bit of childish whimsy to the boring work she did now.

From downstairs, her mother called her name. She needed to wrap it up so they could keep moving things.

“Okay,” she shouted back down, and she began to shove the rest of the drawer’s contents quickly into a box. She would go through it later. For now, she took the purple pen and wrote on the folded bucket list: Finish it. 

Tossing the pen in the box and taping it up, she got to her feet and looked at the room. It was still full of boxes and bare furniture, but it was empty of everything that had made it hers. There was no telling who would live in it next. Maybe it would be another little girl with big dreams. She smiled to herself and turned away one last time.