kleenex things
when i was a little girl i would stay up all hours of the night. i'd
make little things out of kleenex. i don't remember what it was that i
made. little things. it would have been really hard to make big things
out of kleenex. i remember laying underneath my comforter. i know that
it was some shade of pink. i remember pulling out my secret flashlight
from some secret place and hiding that light underneath the comforter
and making little kleenex things in secret. i don't know how long i
would make these little things for. until i got tired i suppose. i
sometimes gave the things to friends. no one fully appreciated the time
i had taken to make these little things. i think that some of the things
were animals. i'd wet the tissues with my saliva in order to shape them
sometimes. i remember one time waking up and feeling that the kleenex
things were missing so i hung upside down on my bed to peek underneath,
where i hid them. untouched, they were all there. my little army of
little kleenex tissue things. from an upside down view of course. one
time i came home from school and i looked underneath my bed and all my
tissue kleenex things were gone. i started crying and i asked my mother
if she knew what had happened to them. she said that she threw them
away; that she didn't know what they were. she thought they were used
tissues, bunched up and tossed aside, breeding germs. she didn't know
the time i'd taken to shape them and give them more meaning than they
had ever known as mere tissues. i didn't tell her then. to me, they were
special, but i realised that they weren't special to anyone else. i
never made another thing out of tissues again and i don't expect that i
ever will.