Three Boxes

Inside the square space is a plain rug and a rack with promotional materials. Mini-bats. Mini-globes. All business propaganda is dutifully emblazoned with the company’s proud logo. Odds are, that multi-million dollar deal with a pharmaceutical company (Organized Evil)  is unimaginable without the desperately needed assistance of a squishy globe.

I look out the window and see a church. Behind the church is a wall of hot glass. It stretches up to scary heights and mingles with the powdery clouds. Ant people scurry down the streets in their business costumes, some with their heads down but more swiping away at their soul consuming/inspiring iphones.

I sit in my uncomfortable costume in an uncomfortable chair next to an uncomfortable young professional who graduated from a private college in Maine. Is further description of my colleague and cellmate really required?

As time grotesquely boils up into the ether, I pry my eyeballs from my private spreadsheet nightmare and stare intently at the three boxes of life that makes up the far wall. Unlike the gray carpet and gray desk and gray telephone and gray computer screens, there are three boxes that burst with color and writhe like a pure newborn. There is movement amidst my static and stifling Skinner box.

Was man given an allotted amount of time and expected to spend most of it living with only one wall, one dimension, of color and motion? Was pure evil sick joyous sweet sad heartbreaking painfully loving life only meant to be viewed out of the corner of our eyes? Life resumed beyond the rack of cold-call pamphlets and envelopes  that will soon be bunkmates with empty Greek yogurt containers and banana peels.

No. Man was given a set time.  It’s a thin paper card with a stripe on one end, this side up for decisions. With quaking  fingers, insert your card the right way, allow the flimsy and totally unnecessary plastic barricade to part and prepare for the bumpy and cramped and stifled ride. These will be rides where you feel like cattle going to the slaughter. But the cattle would have it better, you decide, because at least they are destined to be unadulterated diabetic happiness, to be purchased with the salty type of grease and sadness-soaked fries.

So one day I dove into one of the three boxes. I dove past the dead cup of coffee and the robot that lectures me on the evils of corporations and the yammering phones and e-mail accounts with inboxes that breed like unusually hypersexual rabbits.

I fall into grass, long and sweetly sharp. Each striation on the blades is a mini-waterslide, with dew nervously and shamefully shaking at the summit. My feet sink an inch into the cool dirt. I run and inhale the silver curtain of mist that hovers just overhead. The sun is raw and I feel each individual ray scrape my skin. I run down a valley with huge cliffs on either side, with a circulatory system of waterfalls that lazily gush a crystal liquid too clear and sharp to be water. I follow a stream that cuts through the center of the valley, watching the rushing liquid bend and fracture the smooth stones underneath.

I caught sight of a woman creature. Her brown hair flirts with the wind and her skin is bronzed and oozing love. She was cleansing her almond skin with the busy water. I rush to her and she receives me as though I had rescued her from some knight-frying dragon. My hand felt familiar on her firm waist. 

My lips met hers, soft and moist like the air, and then they met the pavement, dotted with gum stains and last night’s filth.