And yet you just dismiss me as nothing, because I'm only knee high, despite what the environmentalists say, despite that I'm a nice perky shade of cerulean.


My hollows echo with pleading wails and the aching cries of despair from homework left behind, bewildered stories from the failing grades [despite those agonizingly long cram sessions spent at absurd hours] and the affable slips of discarded assessments, not big or important enough to matter.


Discriminating jeers and snippy, giggling little remarks from the note passing gossips emanate from torn notebook paper with neon shades of pink and purple and moaning tales of perfectionists with barely perceivable flaws ail me with throbbing headaches, and immature jokes spatter me like a kaleidoscope.


Trailing thoughts-- vacant, genius thoughts-- with their heads in the clouds interest me, if only to decipher the illegible handwriting and to ponder these ideas unbeknown to me.


Degrading whispers resound in my depths and silly, superficial shouts of encouragement are awfully obnoxious, making me dizzy. Sighing slips of unsatisfied dreams, appearing out of the Doldrums, mix with the indignant, peeved, concise and elegant plans, humiliated and shoved aside for something far more grand. Exasperated papers with histories of late hours-- only to discover that they were never really assigned at all-- abound.


I am like everyone else-- just not in a human body. I don't get to run and eat and play and sleep and complain. I sit, in my little corner, collect the dramatics of middle school life, curious about these wonders. Controversies are my favorite; I myself debate them with my painfully limited knowledge. I'm a compilation of personification, and I'm just like you. For I also experience your experiences-- in written form. They come to me in badly formed lyrics and poetry, and prose that's abundant with all sorts of errors. Occasionally I even get a visual, marred by a scrawl-- perhaps from that big earthquake everyone was talking about, sometime around the end of your Spring Break.


I experience your drama-- but I'm a wallflower. Perhaps, someday, I-- the monstrous recycling bin-- will take part in the action. But now, I experience through old paper, and suffer from Acute Langeweile.