Being Inside the Box

This is a guest post by Eliz­a­beth Howard. Read more about her at the end.

Every­one always says: “think out­side the box.”

Yet...

When small hands slowly pull the card­board lid over them­selves, inside the box is where I’d like to be.

Inside the box, arms and legs tan­gle– and what belongs to whom doesn’t mat­ter anymore.

Inside the box, a tor­rent of laugh­ter twists with beg­ging for turns. This is where Nego­ti­a­tion and Joy make love.

Inside the box, we draw shades of dark­ness will­ingly, for­get­ting our unhappy freck­les, our crooked teeth, our tor­tured skin tones. Dark­ness makes us same.

Inside the box, we push against bound­aries together, explor­ing the lim­its of strain near­est break­ing point.

Inside the box, phys­i­cal close­ness becomes inti­macy: famil­iar­ity unmen­tioned but worn like skin.

Inside the box, the roar­ing dragon flees across an unchained mind.

So that...

Even when seams break, sides col­lapse, and bod­ies explode out, the inside prevails.

The spirit of the box keeps itself on call, for the next bot­tom­less adventure.

At Let­ters from a Small State and The Least Weird Per­son I Know, writer Eliz­a­beth Howard exam­ines how we sur­vive and occa­sion­ally thrive in Amer­ica, through the lens of our small­est details. A writer and poet liv­ing in Con­necti­cut with her new fam­ily, she works daily in her own sliv­ers of cre­ative space and time.