Abby Palmer- My Most Recent Kleenex Box

My Most Recent Kleenex Box

You seemed so nice when I first saw you.  Your eyes were wide and watering like you wanted to confide your secrets in me.  Your hand shook as you gently touched me, and I gave in without a fight.  I wanted to help you.  I loved you in your weakness.

            But then you held me to your face and filled me with a disgusting substance I did not yet know the name of, and I realized something:

You’re just using me like everybody else.  You’re no different from all the others that have stumbled into this room. 

You know why I was put here?  For your use.  Just to be taken apart piece by piece, soiled, crumpled, and then thrown away.  Nobody has ever thanked me.  Hell, they’ve done the opposite. 

I was branded just days after I was born.  From the machine, I was a strapping thing.  My mother made all my corners and openings just right.  Brown, plain, sure, but I was well built; broad and sturdy and square.  I did what I was built to do.  I could hold hundreds of tissues inside of me.  If you burnt me in a fire, I would have smoldered to make the most fantastic ash.  If there was a word to describe me, it would be useful.  I was a tool to help you humans.

But that’s never good enough for you aesthetic beings, is it?  My creator decided to tattoo my flesh with a drawing he happened to like.  And you know what it was?  Pink flowers.  And trees.  And birds.  All cartoony and half-assed and the same as every other Kleenex box.  There was hardly any thought put into me.  These birds and trees and nature that are actually melted onto my flesh only remind me that I am meant to be outside, a part of my original tree, not sitting on the ledge of a stale office room waiting for another bacteria infected human to rip me up until there is none of me left to destroy.

Oh, and look, here you come again.  Your gaze is blank when you look at me, and even the presence of your cruel eyes doesn’t come often.  Your smile is directed toward a girl on the other side of the room.  Your hand knocks against my side—once, twice, thrice!—before you manage to reach inside of me, grope and fumble until you get an essential part of my being within your fingertips.  You don’t even have the decency to look at me before you demolish me from inside out.  So, go ahead, take another part of me.  Reach inside of me and take my pride and joy until I am empty, and useless, and hardly even recyclable because of the shell I bear.

And when you’ve taken all that, shove me in a black bag with all the others you deem “now useless”.  I’ve heard rumours of what lies there: stinking piles of rot and more of that mucus you humans insist of blowing inside me.  The paper towel roll has whispered horror stories to me of being tied into this disgusting space, thrown onto a pile of even more human filth, and crushed until I am an indistinguishable pile of crap.  If I’m lucky, I can be soaked in a bath of water and chemicals until I am pulp.  What a pleasant word that is.  Pulp.  I’ll be molded into something else, like maybe an adventure book or a poster or a home for somebody in a city that never sleeps.  Anything would be better than a disgusting human sickness holder.

But, as it is, I am stuck here on this ledge.  I gaze through the windows at the rolling trucks that will someday hold my carcass, and watch as people give me half hearted, inconsiderate glances before deciding to rip me apart.

Well, you know what?  I never asked to be used.  Especially not by you and your runny nose.