From the day you are born, you are given a box. No one knows where you get it from, but everyone has one. Your box isn’t openable, until the last day of your life. Your box is 7.6 inches by 6.3, you know because you measured it trying to figure it out. Like a Christmas gift or birthday present you shake it. No sound comes of it. You go to school and show your box to your friends for show and tell, they have boxes as well. Some are prettier than yours others have spikes and look stronger. You go home and read online about the mysterious boxes only to find that odd trinkets are contained within, none of which make any sense. You carry your box with you many years later in your backpack, well into college. Your box is there with you when you find your first girlfriend or boyfriend. You put it by your bedside, right under the lamp, your significant other does not. Your box is with you when you wed them, taken with you on the h0neymoon, just in case. Your children will look at it wondering about you pondering over it. This box will be there to see your children graduate while you continue to observe it. Your box is old now, it sits on the counter next to your black coffee, pills, and raisin bran cereal. It collects dust over the years and the wood has begun to rot, while it may not be openable to human creation, nothing is safe from time. You now sit in hospice, perhaps cancer has finally won, your body is withered and torn. You know your final days are near but you’re only focused on what’s inside the box now. Family concerns don’t bother you anymore. Then, now, you feel it, it’s time. Your box clicks at 12:00, Today is your big day, you reach for the box and place it on your lap. Prying open the lid with the last of your strength you peer inside. Your children are grown now, with families of their own. Your grandchildren are all outside, they don’t want to be here, it is late and they are tiered. Your children sit next to you with sad smiles on their face, tears beginning to swell. With unease in the voice they ask you “what’s inside?” With your last breath and forsaken strength you lift a small figurine out of your box. Eyeing it up and down till you mutter out, “It’s me.”