Boxes
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
We do it carefully.
Almost lovingly.
We sort people the way we sort meaning—
not to diminish,
but to orient ourselves.
This one is family.
This one is work.
This one belongs at the edge,
where things are pleasant
but contained.
Boxes are not born of cruelty.
They are born of management.
Of bandwidth.
Of the quiet fear that if everything stays open,
nothing will feel stable.
So we define.
We clarify.
We decide—often without saying so—
how much of someone
we are willing to let matter.
I lived inside one once.
It was clean.
Well-labelled.
Perfectly reasonable.
It came with expectations
but no invitation.
With proximity
but no curiosity.
I wanted something unassigned—
a relationship not governed by title
or architecture.
Something that could move,
that could misbehave,
that could become more than it was meant to be.
But the shape had already been chosen.
And boxes, once agreed upon,
are rarely questioned.
They spare us awkward negotiations.
They spare us the vulnerability of asking,
What else could this be?
They allow us to remain kind
without being brave.
This is what we don’t say often enough:
boxes are not prisons—
they are ceilings.
They don’t harm by exclusion,
but by restraint.
They decide in advance
the depth a connection is allowed to reach,
the weight it is permitted to carry.
And so entire possibilities go untouched—
friendships that never cross the threshold
from polite to essential,
alliances that might have sharpened us
if we had let them.
Not because anyone refused.
But because no one reimagined.
People are not fixed roles.
They are evolving systems—
capable of intimacy, divergence, surprise.
When we refuse to let someone step outside
the context in which we first understood them,
we preserve order—
but at the cost of discovery.
And what is lost is not dramatic.
It leaves no wound.
No argument.
No clean ending.
Only the faint, enduring sense
that something spacious
never happened.
Not because it couldn’t.
But because we never made room
for it to try.
Keep My Words Alive
If this poem has stayed with you, you can help keep my words alive or explore more of my work. Every bit of support helps carry the stories forward.
WHERE WORDS MEET MORNING LIGHT
BEGIN EACH DAY WITH SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL
Every morning at 11:11AM, I send a poem — sometimes soft, sometimes devastating, always true.
💚 Subscribe now to read and breathe and feel along with me 💚
Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe:
