Please be very gentle when you open the box; the day inside of it happened 9,123 days ago and it was a Wednesday, if that matters. Jimmy Stewart also died on this day, which I think adds to the general sense of fragility.

The edges of 2 July, 1997 are a little crispy and tissue thin, like I imagine old parchment must be, crumbly if you touch it, so don’t touch it. The trick is like with anything else, open it up and let it expand to fill the available space, give it room to breathe, like a wine.

I had a friend, still a friend ca. 2 July 1997 (though not for much longer after if I’m being honest) who said that when you fly into a new country, the smell in the airport would tell you everything you needed to know about the place and the people in it. How could this be, I still wonder, when airports by their nature are full of everyone else besides the people of that country, doing everything besides what they normally did. But he swore it was true. 2 July, 1997 is not an airport or a country but being the past it is also both, and it smells simultaneously like Fahrenheit (another friend used to wear this, I slept in his bed sometimes and would go home smelling of it and feeling utterly intoxicated) and also CK One, both great unisex perfumes, or scents as they said then. Did they say scents then? They did say unisex which now feels inadequate as an adjective, and weirdly naive somehow.

2 July, 1997 eases itself out of the box while I am telling you this, flexes its shimmering and iridescent wings to get the circulation flowing again, and then it’s out the window, goodbye.