Packing is something that I try not to think about but just do, like a packing robot. But as I was rummaging through and recategorizing everything I owned yesterday, I was shocked out of my robotic state. I found a ziplock bag of pills. Thinking back I remembered I put this bag together as a prop for a play two years ago, but the sudden sight of it reminded me by of the play but of when I was younger and used to take all these pills. I had hung onto them, especially the psychotropic meds, in case I fell back into old habits, old insanities, and old illnesses. I don't like to think and remember all the past horrors. Selective amnesia is the best way to describe how I look at the past. I try to remember the good parts without accessing all the cruelties, craziness, and confusion that was my life for so many years. Packing strips away that selective amnesia. As I get out everything from corners of closets and behind books on shelves, I run into remnants that I have saved from my past. I chose to keep all these things because they meant something an remind me of times and places that meant things, but now they sometimes jar. In the bag of pills are antibiotics and some other medical drugs but also antidepressants and anti-psychotic drugs that were the only drugs that could make me sleep for a year. I would stay up all night because I couldn't sleep. The antidepressants were pills I took twice a day for many years and seem as familiar as my own skin. I could probably draw them in my sleep. But it has been many years since I needed these drugs and even felt afraid that maybe one day I would fall back into horror that I try to never remember. I don't read my journals from when I was sick and I thought these drugs were gone long ago. But as shocking as they were they are a past that will always be as much a part of me as all the good memories. My past is mine and is in my hair, my heartbeats, my walk, my voice, my mind. So, though I will never take those drugs again either for help or for fun, they are a part of me and put them in a box.