If the cardboard box is the novel of the household, the paper bag is the short story. It is lighter, more rumpled and over almost as soon as it begins. One enters. One hears oneself. The walls of the bag respond with a crackle that confirms the self in a way that no therapist has ever managed, and then one attempts to leave while wearing it.
I surveyed fourteen bags this month. The finest was a brown grocery sack, unprinted, with a single handle torn off, discovered under a stairwell at 8 Whitlow Row. It had been used, I am told, to carry a cabbage. The cabbage had left something behind: a note of earth, a question. I wore the bag for an hour and felt, for the first time since 2019, understood.
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