The Box

Kelley Kwok, United States

At a young age, we’re told how we’re supposed to be. They hold us up to the sky, and cradle our tiny bodies in their strong arms and whisper to us a thousand wishes. I hope you’re brilliant. I hope you’re beautiful. And I hope you live a good life. Then they set us down into the rectangular bed frame, and let us sleep and dream. Sometimes we cry. Maybe because we don’t like the dreams we see, or because we don’t like the way the dark looks when our eyelids droop over our vision, blocking us from the world. 

Or maybe it’s because we lie there, in the rectangular bed, with its perfect corners and smooth sides, and we despise it. We despise the soft corners of the blanket, and that itchy tag on the side, with its thin pointy corners, pricking our backs and our arms and pricking our sleep and our dreams. 

And as we grow up, our eyes trained on the rectangular televisions, showing perfect people, we know in our heads, that’s what we’re supposed to be. That’s what I want to be. And we go to sleep in our rectangle beds, clutching our rectangle books in our arms, savoring the stories, and dreaming of the day we can be a rectangle, like they showed us all our lives. 

My favorite holiday was Christmas. Not because of the minty scent of peppermint that filled the air, or the spirit of song when a familiar tune played, or even because of the familiar people that surrounded me. It was the gifts. Those presents wrapped in bright colors, that meant you deserve the world and I’ll prove it, stuck in cubed shapes and boxes. But my favorite part wasn’t receiving the gift. It was opening the box. To tear those bright colors, hearing the pleasant rip of paper, revealing a smooth cardboard box underneath. Then opening the box, crushing the box, taking those perfect corners and flat sides and making it into something new and unrecognizable.

And then we grow older. We begin to worry about our futures, staring out at the rectangle windows in front of us, placing a hand under our chins and wondering if we’ll look out the same window all our lives. We begin to worry about expectations, staring at the faces in front of us, and wondering if we are the same person in their eyes, or if we are different. We begin to climb into our rectangle beds, dreaming of the plans we’ll make to shatter the sky. We begin to fit ourselves in little boxes, little places where we can find ourselves, little spaces we can call home. 

We begin to realize that we don’t fit in these boxes, with their sharp corners and smooth walls. But we try anyway. We do it over and over and over again, because that’s what everyone does and we have to do it too. 

But then we realize it hurts. Squeezing ourselves into a thousand different shapes, trying to fit into the box we call me, before we realize that our arms are bleeding, crimson oozing out of our pain, our nails torn down to the sight of unrecognition, and scars on our legs from too many boxes, too many corners, and too much life. 

And we do it over and over again, because that’s just the way the world works and we bleed and bleed, and we keep bleeding. Because we know that the only way people will accept us is if we’re a cube, a rectangle, with elegant corners and straight sides. 

And we can shout, we can shout it all we want, We’re human, we’re not meant for boxes, but the world is set and everyone will just lay on their rectangle beds, and go to work on their rectangle desks, and walk on the rectangle pavement, and open their rectangle doors, and read their rectangle books, and smile at their rectangle world. 

And when they bury us, only then will we finally realize that the box was a casket.

Kelley is a freshman in high school from New York. In her free time, she likes to read, write, watch TV. She enjoys writing poetry, and fantasy fiction stories.