There’s a shoebox on the top shelf of my closet that has held the same jumble of loose photographs for at least six years, maybe longer, and I have started sorting it no fewer than four times that I can remember, and finished exactly zero of those attempts.
I pulled it down again last weekend, determined this time would be different, and sat on the floor of my bedroom with the box between my knees, pictures spread out around me in a rough semicircle within about ten minutes.
What’s Actually In There
It’s not organized by any system, not by date, not by person, just decades of photographs someone, probably me at some point, dumped into a shoebox instead of an album. There are pictures from vacations I can place instantly and pictures I genuinely cannot identify at all, faces I don’t recognize in settings I don’t remember, that must belong to some corner of my life I’ve simply lost track of.
There are a good number of photographs of this house, empty rooms before we’d moved anything in, taken the week we bought it, back when the walls were a color I chose and have since painted over twice. There’s a photograph of my husband standing in what would become the kitchen, holding a tape measure, looking pleased with himself about something I can no longer remember the context of.
Why the Sorting Always Stalls
Every time I’ve tried this before, I get about twenty minutes in before I stop actually sorting and just start looking, picking up one photo, then another, following some thread of memory instead of making the small, mechanical decisions the task actually requires, like which pile does this belong in, which stack am I even building.
This time was no different. I told myself I was going to make three piles, keep, maybe, and toss, a system that sounds simple enough on paper. I made it through maybe fifteen photographs with any real discipline before I found one of my husband at a barbecue, laughing at something out of frame, and I just sat there holding it for a while instead of deciding anything about it at all.
What I Managed to Actually Sort
By the end of the afternoon I had, if I’m honest, made almost no measurable progress. A small stack of duplicates I felt confident throwing away. A slightly larger stack of photos so blurry or poorly framed that even sentiment couldn’t save them. Everything else went back into the box in roughly the same jumble it came out in, no real order imposed on any of it.
Why I’m Not Sure I Actually Want to Finish
I’ve started wondering if the reason I never finish this task isn’t really about time or discipline, but about something closer to not wanting the box to become a finished, organized thing. Right now it’s a mess, but it’s a mess I can dip into whenever I want, pull out a random handful and be surprised by whatever comes up. If I sorted it properly, by year, by person, it would become something more like a reference, and I think some part of me prefers the surprise of not knowing exactly what I’ll find each time.
What Wanda Said About Her Own Photos
I mentioned this to Wanda, expecting her to have some brisk, practical advice about finally getting it done. Instead she told me she has three boxes like this in her own closet and has stopped pretending she’s ever going to sort them, that at some point she decided the boxes could just be boxes, and whoever deals with them eventually, herself or someone else, could deal with them in whatever order made sense to them at the time. That gave me a strange kind of permission I hadn’t expected to need.
Back on the Shelf
The box is back on the closet shelf now, marginally thinner than it was, missing its duplicates and its blurriest failures, but otherwise exactly as unsorted as it’s always been. I don’t think I’m going to try again anytime soon. I think I’ve finally admitted to myself that the box isn’t a task waiting to be finished. It’s just where these particular pictures live, and maybe that’s allowed to be enough.
The One Photo I Did Frame
I pulled exactly one photograph out to keep somewhere more visible, a picture of this house taken the week we moved in, before any of the rooms had furniture, just bare walls and afternoon light coming through windows with no curtains yet. I put it in a small frame on the bookshelf in the front room, where I actually see it most days, unlike the rest of the box which I might not open again for another year or more.
It felt important, choosing just one, forcing myself to decide which single image out of hundreds deserved to live outside the box permanently. I went back and forth for a while between the empty house and one other option, a picture from a barbecue years later, full of people, most of whom don’t come around anymore for one reason or another. I chose the empty house in the end, mostly because it felt like the truest starting point, the one photo that everything else in that box eventually grew out of.
Wanda noticed the frame the next time she was over and asked why I’d picked an empty room instead of one with people in it, which is a fair question and one I didn’t have a fully formed answer for on the spot. I told her it felt like the beginning of something rather than the middle or the end of it, and she considered that for a moment before saying she’d have picked differently, something with faces in it, since that’s what she actually misses when she looks back. I think we were both right, in our own way, about what a photograph is supposed to hold onto.