Today was no ordinary day, because today something beautiful was destroyed.

It’s funny; how when a person has their own destination in mind, they don’t even notice the havoc they’ve left in their wake.

This morning, when two identical staples, both with the same ambitions, attempted to acquire them at the same moment in time, their destinies were altered. They became jammed. Locked together for eternity, and the paper remained unstapled. The boy’s task that had seemed so close suddenly became so far, and he quickly created a remedy. Without thought he straightened a paper clip and worked to free the over-ambitious staples. Bending and twisting the clip until he saw it fit to complete its given task. With every bend it weakened, one portion becoming so weak that it could not, any longer hold onto the rest, separated and never again was one.

Suddenly the staples broke free, falling gently onto the desk they bounced away from one another as if in disgust. They were twisted and bent; broken and destroyed. Naturally he placed them into the garbage and returned to stapling his paper. The following staple’s destiny did not collided with any other, and his task was finally complete. The boy turned his paper into the pile of others with identical staples, all with fulfilled ambitions. Returning to his desk he found the broken paper clip. Naturally, he thought of throwing it into the garbage with the rest of the broken objects, but that clip lying alone on his desk, gazed up at him with an image of desperation. He looked at what he had done and was appalled by his actions. He fervently attempted to bend it back into shape, trying to undo what had been done. Those two staples had leapt towards their ambitions at the same moment, and as a consequence, were broken and destroyed, but he had stolen the ambitions from the paper clip. He had destroyed it through the lust of his own greed. He looks at the clip, bent into a small loop. Never again will it be the same. It has been forever altered. Although it may still do its task as well as the others, it still has the scars, the gentle bends and pathetic loops. He looked at it in his palm and wanted to cry. It was a casualty of the choices of others. Still alive, but bent and broken. He had killed something. He had destroyed something beautiful.