— Hey, Jino, throw that box away! But keep this one, we’ll need it.
The voices mingled together, one instruction after another, short and ordinary sentences.
The usual noise of a workday.
I looked around.
There were boxes stacked on top of one another—big, small, old, new, crumpled, but still sturdy.
Two guys were emptying the boxes. One picked up a box, opened it, looked inside, then tore it apart and threw it into the garbage bin. The other picked up the next one, paused for a moment, as if weighing something in his mind, then carefully folded it and set it aside.
One was garbage, the other was worth keeping. One was opened, the other remained closed. One was useful, the other no longer was.
I looked at another box that Jino was holding in his hands, trying to decide its fate—should he throw it away, or might he still need it?
I looked at him, then at the box. Jino was trying to decide whether there was still something inside it worth keeping, or whether the time had come to throw it away.
Perhaps life is like that too—over the years, so much accumulates that one day we are forced to stand before it all and ask ourselves what to keep with us and what to let go. For a moment, I thought about how strange it is that the fate of an ordinary box can become so serious when you don’t know whether to throw it away or keep it. And perhaps that is how we live too—constantly
deciding what to keep in our lives, what to let go of, what to make room for, and what to finally say goodbye to.
A human life is a box too. One is full—so full that sometimes it won’t even close. Inside are people, memories, loves, losses, unspoken words, promises kept, fears, dreams, happiness and sadness: an entire life, piled one on top of another.
Another is half-empty. Perhaps there have been few people in it, few loves, few losses, or perhaps they had everything but wanted to keep nothing.
There is also a box with only one thing inside—a person, a memory, a word, a day. But sometimes that one thing is what makes the entire box heavy.
There are boxes in which everything is mixed together—love beside hurt, happiness beside sadness, laughter beside tears. You cannot take one thing out without touching another.
There are also boxes that seem empty. But perhaps they are not truly empty; perhaps everything that mattered was given away long ago, and there is nothing left inside the person anymore.
And we, like Jino standing before that box, spend our lives constantly deciding what to keep and what to throw away.
We keep a memory for years, even though it may hurt every time we open it. We keep a person inside us, even when they have long since left our lives. We cannot throw away a word because once, it was very important. And sometimes we try to forget an entire life, thinking that it will make us lighter.
And there are boxes that are arranged very neatly. Everything is in its place.
The owners of such boxes seem to know what to keep, what to forget, what to speak about and what to remain silent about.
And perhaps the strangest thing is that we all look at those boxes only from the outside.
We do not know what is inside. We do not know which one is heavy, which one is empty, which one has been closed for years, and which one is opened every day. We do not know which box holds the greatest pain, and which one holds the most precious happiness.
When a person opens the box of their own life, even they do not know what will come out first.
And most importantly, we do not know which box is already ready to be thrown away, and which one is still the most precious thing in someone’s entire life.
Perhaps that is why Jino’s hesitation felt so familiar to me.
He was deciding whether to keep that box or throw it away. And I thought: if a person can look at a box and decide, this one should be kept, and this one should be thrown away, why can’t they decide the fate of the things they carry inside themselves just as easily?
Why is it so easy to tear cardboard, fold a box and throw it into a garbage bin, yet so difficult to let go of a memory, or even a word, a “what if…”?
I looked at Jino. He finally decided to keep the box and set it aside.
Perhaps that is the greatest difficulty of being human—to understand what truly needs to be thrown away, and what does not.
Because inside us, something always remains unthrown: something that, no matter what, we have not been able to throw away.
I looked at the boxes and thought: perhaps, in the end, a person is just that—a small box left from the entirety of their life, a box in which the most important things always remain… unthrown.
Armine Mukoyan
Montreal, 2026
