Boxes

Fiction by Carly Stone

I live in a city of boxes.

I lay on a soft mattress box while I sleep inside of a bigger box where I have all of my things. I don’t want to remove myself from the soft box until the last moment. My eyes are shut, and I am safe for a moment. My sleeping box is inside a bigger, apartment box that holds two flatmates in their respective boxes. When I finally get out of my soft box, I rotate through all the boxes that belong to me: clothes box, bathroom box, food box. My lungs feel like lead, and my arms swim through the heavy morning atmosphere. It is quiet and dark when I start out in the morning, and it is essential that I do not miss the transportation box that leaves every twenty minutes from the station. Then, I leave my apartment box, that feels more like a shoe box, to face the looming ice chill outside; I walk through the hall between different family boxes and pretend to hear their slowly fading early morning dreams. Then, I am outside. The city is still quiet.

As I wait for the transportation box that is more rectangular than square, I look at all the boxes towering over the station. Some are lit up with warm yellow light, and some are still midnight blue, waiting to wake up. If I’m lucky, I see a family stirring awake, someone frying their eggs, or a couple embracing before work. The vignettes are like wishing stars that twinkle in the dawn. They are squished close together, six inches of bricks between them, but they never touch. In the cold morning air, I long for my own warm apartment box.

When the transportation box comes, I hurry in, sit on the box meant to hold my weight and look out at another glass square. Soon, I am at a vantage point where I can see numerous boxes. Some in Manhattan are already glowing as if they had never been dark. They stand tall and symmetrical in the distance. All the glistening squares are perfect. The Brooklyn boxes are more crooked. They have character and lean into each other as if they were cakes removed from the oven too soon. They are shards with different angles that lead into half circles or sometimes points. Smoke boxes poke out of the living boxes and always have an angular lean, never even, always tipped. The city starts to wake up and get louder and brighter. I seem to move past the boxes at breakneck speed as I feel the vibration of the morning pickup.

I get to the large learning box as the sun comes up. Here, students are put in mental boxes. These types of boxes turn into caskets, and each of their owners turns into a slave. I can’t see these vestibules as easily as the skyline, but they are as tangible as concrete. Every day I come to the learning box and pry open the invisible coffins for eight hours. I try to lift the lids over my head, but the weight is too heavy. Every day there is a new box, container, or lid designed to suffocate the owner, so I go home. I pretend that I helped one student remove their mental box. I pretend that I don’t have a mental box of my own that seems to be weighing more and more every day. I pretend that tomorrow there will be fewer boxes, fewer caskets, and fewer barriers.

I live in a city of boxes. We all do.