Certain things hold memories of Ben. Flannel shirts wrapped around me like blankets on crisp summer nights at the cabin, the drumsticks he used to carry everywhere that haven’t moved from his drum set for over four years, the potholes we tried to dodge between laughs and bites of french fries, and an empty glass bottle filled with cold Maine sand from a waterfront with a “No Trespassing” sign.
Just beyond that sign was a garage bay left open, a basketball hoop barely too high to hit, a weathered dock floating 200 yards offshore, and 10 or so of my friends, gathered around without any expectations for the night. As the air chilled and the hours passed, the music and voices began to die down.
Ben started to fill an empty bottle with the cold sand we were seated on. I grabbed another from the bottle deposit pile and started filling. We made a game of it, racing to fill them up. At the end of the night, I grabbed mine from the shore and brought it home. A year or so later, as I prepared to leave for college, I packed it up, wrapped tightly in a T-shirt so it could withstand the move. Along with sand from home, it held memories of every late summer night I had spent with the same group of people for the last few years of my life.
During four years of moving from dorm to dorm, I realized I couldn’t find the bottle anywhere. When I lost the bottle, I came close to losing the memories that it held. I remember having this same feeling when Ben died. Along with losing him, I lost pieces of memories where he was a key player. Memories of soft flannel, drum sets, potholes and sandy waterfronts. Over the years I had packed those memories in boxes in the back of my mind, securing them with packing tape, only to be unpacked when the time was right.
A year ago, as I was unpacking boxes in the attic, I came across that sand-filled bottle. Suddenly, what had once been lost was now found. I was finally able to unpack all of the mental boxes and let the memories join me on the attic floor. And now, every time I look at that bottle, it brings me back to that night on the sand, followed by the feeling of losing something tangible, then the feeling of losing someone irreplaceable, and finally the feeling of finding both of those things all at once, even if only in my boxes of memories.