“Don’t touch the demon box. You might not like what you find.”

My process as a writer often ends, and sometimes even begins, with an object, rectangular in shape, except for the top, the lid, which is rounded.  It has hinges on the back and a metal fastener on the front.   Both are black, as is the fair trade paper which covers it.  The paper is covered in silver flowers and scrolls, and has a thick, rough texture. 

I always place it somewhere in my room where it can see me, but someplace where I can’t always see it, because, you see, the not so secret truth is that it contains things that scare me.  It is full of scraps of paper littered with words about all sorts of things –the boy that I just can’t get out of my mind, how angry my mother made me that time, what any given moment might have felt like, and deeper, darker things I don’t care to discuss online. 

I stow pieces here when I don’t know what to do with them.  It holds the random spurts of my mind and soul that can’t be filed away into neater divisions.  Sometimes, there is a need to open this box full of demons.  Just the other day I was frantically, searching for an old poem that I wrote, and I had to take it down from the shelf.  My roommate watched me with peaked interest.  “This,” I told her “Is my demon box,” jokingly.  “Don’t touch the demon box. You might not like what you find.” 

Today, one of my professors presented my class with a quote from Robert Frost: “All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material –the condition of body and mind now and then to summon aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through.”  Now I found myself faced with a question, laced with a challenge; can I spread those terrifying pieces of paper out in front of me, and face them with the courageous stillness of an artist’s heart, and use them to create? Can any of us?