Broken Boxes | Teen Ink

Broken Boxes

June 18, 2009
By Isabelle Edwards BRONZE, Seattle, Washington
Isabelle Edwards BRONZE, Seattle, Washington
2 articles 0 photos 0 comments

I wish life were simple and easy and linear and describable. I wish everything could be dreamt up and boxed up inside these neat, manageable letters, words and sentences. I wish that I could sit here and type out my life, or your life, or anyone's life. It doesn't matter. What matters is that I wish, with these fingers, I could create an entire person, complete and whole or empty and broken, a person that exists with only words for a body and feelings for a heart and thoughts for a mind. I wish that life could be like that. But it can't.

Ideas cannot be contained, thoughts conveyed or feelings encompassed. Life cannot exist within the clean, perfect world of fiction any more than your imagination can take corporeal form. Life is messy and noisy and cruel and complicated. It is everything and nothing: everything any of us will ever know, and nothing compared to what could be known. The possibilities of reality are endless, but I would still choose fantasy over physicality any day, because life isn't simple or easy or neat or linear. But I wish it were.


I wish it were, because then I could bottle you up with all these words at my disposal. I could catch your heart and hold it on the tips of my fingers. And I could pour your soul all over my keyboard until it was all gone and then I could keep you sitting on my lap until the end of time.

And if I could describe the love that we share then maybe it would last forever like hieroglyphs carved in the walls of long forgotten caves. And if this pain that is ours as well could be written down then we could burn the paper and the pain would be just ashes, blowing in the wind. Perhaps happiness would not be so fleeting if the word happiness actually meant what it said instead of just being a random compilation of meaningless scratches. If sorrow could be captured then surely it could be tamed and eventually it would be like the tabby cat curled up next to the fire that was once a proud lion.

But I cannot capture our emotions, just as I cannot catch our fleeting lives because every feeling we experience is as unique and undefinable as we ourselves are, and therefore just as impossible to simplify into human speech: I could learn every dialect on earth but it would still not be enough to describe the sound of your voice when we whisper to each-other on starless nights. Still, the impossibility of the task is what makes it so compelling.


No, compelling isn't the right word. I am not compelled to write, because I am not even given the choice to refuse. I must write. The necessity of it pounds in my blood and takes root in my heart. Because the universe is infinite. Think about that for a moment: the universe literally has no ending. We are not even a pinprick compared to that vast space that stretches on forever. We are nothing. But maybe, just maybe, if we write it all down: every single unexplainable idea and fragmented thought, then maybe we wouldn't be nothing anymore, because in some way, shape, or form we existed outside of ourselves. And the file can be deleted, the hard drive destroyed but for a spilt second you, me, us, we existed in tiny little broken boxes called words that couldn't quite hold our souls in and so they leaked and dripped and spilled out into that infinite unknowable universe. And in that single second, we were part of that infinity. And that tiny moment is more than enough reason for me.


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