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Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Many people rethink their choice once they get to know me. I tell myself each time that it doesn’t matter, but a little part of me dies, never to be justified with a burial or tears of goodbye. Oh well, a little less to recycle down the line.

Many people reduce the contact they have with me, emotionally, physically. Boredom is contagious, and so is my joyless experience of the world. When it comes to two sponges meeting, I always fill the other with my void, instead of absorbing a little taste of life.

People reuse me for a few specific purposes. No matter how miserable their lives get, mine is always worse. When they’re feeling down they’ll offer a drink at one in the morning on Saturday. Of course I’m home alone. Of course I don’t have anything better to do. Of course I’ll come and keep them company. I can’t judge the drunken mess that grows before me, my life is so much worse.

When you see me again you won’t recognize me. Life will yet again have thrown me into a new mold. If I was a carton, I would bear the stamp of ‘recycled plastic’ with pride on my forehead, but instead I shrink from the world. When I was in high school I was molded into the class dork, I was the guaranteed daily entertainment, books and tray sent flying every lunch time. When I was at uni I was molded into a waitress to get by, thrown from one rough pair of hands to another, the tips far and few between. At my first graduate job I was molded into a secretary, countless paygrades below what I studied for. I guess that’s what a pair of breasts and no voice gets you. I fooled myself for a second, that I was finally taking charge of my life, and I quit to become a librarian. I slipped into my familiar high school mold, the environment only fractionally kinder. Well wishing family members bullied me into joining a knitting club, and I found myself in a new mold yet again. Every time I get remolded, there’s another set of fingerprints in me that I can’t shake. Some are but whispers, others are deep as stab wounds. Every time I get remolded, I get a bit less flexible. One day I’m afraid I’ll get stuck between molds, and the world will finally reject me once and for all. Every time I get remolded, I lose a bit more of myself. There’s only so many more times it can happen before there’ll be nothing left to recycle.