In the top of one of the closets, up with the briefcase full of cassettes, I've got this red shoe box that used to hold high-top sneakers that were fashionable in 1986. This red box was appropriately glossy and sturdy, so I kept it long after the soles of the shoes wore away to holes, and it was empty, so I put little things inside it that I thought were important, and the box was less than empty.

It has these creases in the sides where other non-shoe-box things have pressed too hard against it as they rumbled around inside larger boxes designed for moving days, and the red gloss cringes under long brown cracks where the weight of too many days broke apart the chemical bonds that gave it luster.

Is it now less of a shoe box, or more than a shoe box?

There's a paper map inside, one large sheet creased in sixteen narrow rectangles that have opened and closed so many times that one more time might break it into sixteen small pages, each with a fraction of the whole. If I bound them along their long sides with thread, would it still be a map or would it be a book? Perhaps an atlas? Something more or less than its original purpose.

Not that it matters, it quit its job decades ago--the creases crossing out a black line here, a blue line there. The McCrory's where I stole fruit stripe gum and red ink pens once stood in that pin-sized hole. I kissed my prom date's mother in the parking lot of a strip mall on that street where all that's left of the name is an R.

These places are gone from the map, nearly gone from my memory. I've forgotten more than I remember.

I imagine the dents and creases in my mind have obliterated enough of my life to make me feel comfortable where I am, but there are moments when I remember a past version of myself doing something much worse than stealing candy from a department store that no longer exists.

Am I damned for these things that I don't even remember? Am I damned for the things that I create to cover the blank spots on the map of my memory? Perhaps I am simply damned.

It's easy for me to see myself as nothing more than a bag of meat, no better or worse than a cow or a crow, just another animal a certain number of breaths from dying. What makes me more or less culpable than a tornado, or winter, or time?

Yes, I know. I have a choice...sometimes. But sometimes choice is merely a trophy we give ourselves in retrospect.

We take the lid off the not quite empty red box, remove the crumbling map, and fill in the blank spaces with lines and letters as best we can remember.

Considering how few of us are trained cartographers, it's not surprising that we get it wrong, repeatedly.