G to the C

Prologue-

Every time I move out of a place, a barrage of boxes comes with me, some of them that were never even opened but mysteriously manage to cling on… like there is a ‘boxed’ conspiracy going on… but I was wrong… not just a conspiracy, it’s a revolution. Here is the autobiography of a box that I had a chance to converse to in my living room during ‘after-move-slumped-down-resting-period’.

 The Autobiography-

I still remember the day like it happened yesterday. Or perhaps it did. I am still dazed. I was young, freshly off the assembly line from the recycling facility, full of new ideas within me.  My name is Brownine and I am a box. My friends called me Mr. Idea box – I always thought inside the box, and I was looking ahead to my future. I was built strong – double layered recycled cardboard hemmed across all of my edges. I was the state of the art box, ready to tackle the most difficult tasks of the world. I even had two little openings on my sides for humans to stick their hands right by my neck to pick me up. I liked humans. I looked at them cheerfully and aspired to hold true to their beliefs that I can hold great things. It started as the happiest day of my life when this human picked me up. I don’t know his name or don’t understand the language. All the humans look exactly the same to me. Nonetheless, I was very happy. 

They called him the ‘Leader-Box’, the heaviest of us all, sitting in the dead center of the ‘The Box World’, filled with magazines and old text books, thus carrying the wisdom of the old and the new and revered equally among all the boxes of the free world, including the spare kitchen-dishes box and the extra-cleaning-supplies-bought-from-Costco-and-long-forgotten box. He must be able to sense that our box world is about to collapse. I think he got his clue from the sudden change in our environment, with suitcases (always alien to us) beginning to disappear mysteriously one by one and the new boxes like me started coming in their places. I could never find out how he did it. I was in awe of him, despite his age evident by his outer shell, he was sitting tall carrying the entire load and with the voice that would shake the world. I immediately knew what I would want to become in my life, if I lived as long as he did. How many great things he has seen, how many great box-worlds he has been to, I wondered!

The great leader box called upon a meeting of all the boxes of the free-box world; old and new, big and small, native and foreign (with their flat smooth surfaces), even those fancy little boxes who brought the greatest gizmos known to mankind, Ipods and Laptops, with their countless silky-smooth flaps, never belonged with us brown ones, but show up anyway in the spirit of ‘Boxity’ (just like humanity for you, O my human friend).

He said – ‘How can we solve this ages-old problem of the complete destruction of our environment by these vicious humans? They love us when they bring us in but then leave us in this dark, damp god-forsaken place to rot with all these moths and silver fish crawling in us… and when we finally accept out fate, they move us out of here! How cruel can they be?’

“Not anymore!” said the leader box, “we shall retaliate; we shall get together and make them suffer! I say let’s make them remember each time they put their hands on any one of us, for the years and years to come…. You can take a Box out of storage space… but you can never take storage space out of a box! We’ll store so much that they’ll have tears when picking us up. I say let’s get heavy….fill yourselves up to the top … and then some!! I say lets get sharp… you, Flatpan, my dear kitchen box friend, put those knives out, so that you get at least one of them…. I say LET’S GIVE THEM HELL! Now, I understand that some of us may not survive this ordeal, but it’s the sacrifice I am willing to make. And to prove that, I am going to weigh so much that if any human comes near me, they’ll bleed through their fingers!!! O the sweet victory, I can taste it now!!

So excited was the world that the boxes started ripping apart the tapes that held them together, some of them made holes in them and let more bugs come in and eat away the precious old clothes (to be donated to salvation army) and little newspaper clippings they were holding… the kitchen boxes pushed the knives right through them to support the cause….. Even the boxes with carrying the linens got right next to the wall to collect dirt and the rain water that seeped through.

It was beautiful.

I, in all this excitement, got my flaps on some old chemical engineering and Forbes magazines that were lying around in one corner. I put all of them inside me, but still had some more room left, so I started picking up the small boxes and tossed them right inside me. I was bulging from all the places. I was the biggest of them all… and the heaviest! And that was the moment when I felt it. I knew how the leader box got all his wisdom. I was dreaming. I was dreaming finance. I was dreaming chemistry. I suddenly started understanding the world around me, the human world.. It was amazing. I started forgetting where I was, I just wanted to do some experiments and make a lot of money! I wanted to be the Einstein of the Wallstreet!

A gentle yet firm flap on my back from the Leader-box brought me back to the box-world, and he said to me, “It’s a boon to know all these things, yet it’s a curse to carry them. Knowledge is power and with power comes responsibility, whether you want it or not”.

Nevertheless, the day dreaded by all of us finally came … I never saw such pain, such misery, and such sacrifice in my life. It was a massacre. Never saw so many boxes dying, their flaps just flapping away like the wood chips back in the factory. I wouldn’t know where to begin and where to end the events that took place that day. So I’ll just leave them for now as a memory within me. I still cry for that day, so much that I started growing mold. Our Leader sacrificed himself. For us. We shall never forget him. Never.

Now, I am the leader of whatever world is left of us… and I feel him in me, literally, since you put his flaps inside me, to make me even stronger..  Even after his death he lives on! O my great leader box. I salute you!

Epilogue-

Every now and then I visit the storage room to dump more stuff in it to help rebuild his new box-world. The new leader is still strong, waiting patiently for the time when he would start a revolution. If it had eyes they’d have been RED. One of these visits, I asked him if he was something else, anything, what would he want to be? He said, “A Collapsible Plastic bin”.