Boxes

Hello there, white blank space! Haven't seen you in three months.

I just learned something recently. So there is this group of people who live in boxes. Each of them has their own personal box, with their head, hands and feet popping out of it. They eat, sleep, do every single thing while being inside the box. But there is one point that you need to keep in mind, though. They didn't choose to be inside the box, there were put inside the box.

Sadly I'm not really sure who put those poor people inside the box. But it is probably me, or maybe you, as I said before, I can't be sure about it. But to make it easier, let's just say it was I who had put them inside the boxes. 

Some time ago, when they were sleeping, I picked each of them up and shoved them inside these boxes that I just happened to have in excess. I was really busy with moving to a new home, I bought a bunch of boxes, a whole bunch of them, because I thought that I'd need a lot of them. When I finished packing up all my belongings, it turned out that the corridor leading out of my house was still stuffed with empty boxes. What a pity, I thought. Instead of just throwing them away, might as well fill it with something. And that's how those people ended up inside a box.

The story didn't end there, actually. To help me discern one box from another, I put post-its on the inside part of the box. At first, I started with red, because I had a lot of red post-its, but midway through, I realized that I didn't have enough red post-its. Since I had no other way out, I took my old post-its, some were blue, white and some were even rainbow colored, then I taped them in randomly.

It won't be a problem, right? It's just paper with different color.

Even if it becomes a problem, those post-its were taped inside, so each of those people can keep it to themselves. Although whoever put them inside those boxes may be extremely disappointed after hearing that people make such a fuss about difference in color, when they don't even mind being put inside a box.

p.s. there is no known people living literally the way I mentioned above.

Sidewalks or Pavements or Whatever You Like To Call It

I was sitting on a bench (I wasn't sitting on a bench, but for the sake of this post, just suppose so) along one of those sidewalks constructed by the government. In case you failed to define government-made sidewalks, I shall help by providing several additional descriptions about these sidewalks.

These sidewalks are, most of the time, unproportional in size, with its width much narrower than the requirement. Every two or three meters, a tree sticks out of the floor, with the root cracking the sidewalk, while its trunk, at the same time, becoming a separator that forces every walking couple to let go of their locked hands if they wanted to pass through. But, if the tree was absent, you would absolutely find a streetlight or an electric pole full of advertisements - electrical appliances repair service's, toilet repair service's, and recent election's participants's pictures - as substitute. 

In other cases, sidewalks are built on gutters, just acting as some sort of mask to cover the filthy water beneath it that sometimes is blacker than the coffee you last drank (unless you drank it with milk, which I'm pretty much convinced you did). The odd part is, it's not rare to find the gutter cover/sidewalk, which is simply line of blocks made from cement, laying not on the gutter, but on top of another block, or occasionally by the side of the road. Well, maybe they just cleaned the gutter, although it's still as filthy as before, then found it too much trouble to return it back to its proper place. Of course it's dangerous, but at least you'll have this jumping game to keep your lower half from turning into something you'll have a hard time recognizing.

But, my bench was on a different type of sidewalk. It was neither the tree infested sidewalks nor the gutter cover, it's of a slightly fancier type of sidewalk. It had benches. I didn't smell any sewage. In place of trees, potted plants flanked my bench. Those were fancy. Rare as it is, I'm glad such sidewalks exist.

I forgot to mention that I'm back home in Medan. And I also put milk in my coffee.