The Box

I live in a box.

It is easy to tell that it is a box because it has a cuboid shape, six faces, and lines perpendicular to each other.

It is a box.

A box with doors, windows, a floor, four walls, and a ceiling, all various colours and patterns to suit what doors, windows, floors, walls and ceilings ought to look like. You may call it a room, but I call it a glorified box. It is a box, all the same.

It is easy to feel closed in in such a box. Even with the windows and doors. You feel like you are literally boxed in, like each six faces of the cuboid are suspended in the middle of nowhere, and closed tight so there is no way out. The doors and windows are only paint, everyone can fake anything with paint nowadays. And even if you could find a way out of the box you would fall into the black nothing that surrounds it.

It is better to feel closed in everyday than to fall into black nothing. In that way, I begin to like my box. It is a solid geometrical shape of security and seclusion.

I know I am alone in my box.

Because after all, a box is still hollow inside.

And no matter what you do to it, fill it with objects, add artificial light to make it look like day, play the sounds of the outdoors, the smell of existence...it is still a box. And I am still alone.
People talk of living in bubbles. I talk of living in boxes. After all, bubbles burst eventually, or if you're underwater they rise to the surface and the little sphere of air inside is free. But in a box, you are trapped. Bubbles are aerodynamic and light, they are for the ones who still dream about a better world. But a box is not aerodynamic. It is nowhere near aerodynamic. According to one of Newton's Laws and those funny physic's diagrams, there is always friction between the box and the ground, and there is always the force keeping the box on the ground, and another that keeps the box from moving. If it moves at all, it will stop eventually.

At most, my box can rock from side to side.

It doesn't get very far.

That is because, in case you haven't realised, it is a box. And boxes cannot move by themselves. Even me, stuck here inside, cannot get this box moving.

Everyone lives in boxes, unless you're lucky enough to live in a bubble. The bubble people are not entirely happy, and that's why they dream of something better. The box people are completely content with living in an immobile box. And so they are happy. Or so they think.

Happy people are hiding something.

But not everyone knows that.

When the bubbles pop and you fall, at worst you end up with a few broken bones, and at best you get a couple of bruises. But when the box burns,

I die.