In this section, The Student Corner, we share a short story written by JRII student, Andrés Pacheco Dobrzelewski , for his Geography class.
AND home we arrived after the long day of school. He skipped the steps up the stone stairs to the entrance of his home, coming to a halt as he stood beside the large, oak wooden door hiding the insides of the quarters.
The kid had spent his entire day enjoying his life outside of home, running and learning, spinning and laughing. Yet, arriving home turned all to grey, as the kid’s usually joyful expression hardened to a grim dissatisfaction. His brown, curly hair blocked his sight as he tried to hide his anger from no one in particular.
“Hello?” spoke the kid, holding me through the trembling fingers of his tired left hand. He knocked; knock-knock, knock-knock. Time and time again did the small child tap on the wooden surface of the oak, his face churning and turning in disgust and anger as he finally gave up.
The child spun on his heels, taking heavy steps as grunts and puffs of childish anger upstaged the simple noise of his breath. He had held me for a while, ever since he left the school. Personally, those were the few best minutes in my woefully short existence so far.
Yet, those few minutes were over. As does every bag, bottle, package, and any plastic utensils, we usually get thrown away after one, in lucky cases a few, uses. Oh, but my journey was much dissimilar to the other plastic products, as a small packaging for an unnamed Chocolate product. Being thrown away was only a natural choice.
My usefulness had ended, and as the child angrily threw me into the dark abyss of the trash bin those were the last few seconds I’d ever seen a glimpse of those cold suburbs.
Days were long, dark and cold. Cozy. I spent about, from what I can recall, four days within that forsaken trash bin until the garbage truck finally arrived. A shaky, bothersome experience as the truck collected the trash bag and drove off.
And a few more hours. Long, dark, cold, now shaky hours that I spent within a collective of other plastic products being transported to an unknown location. I was surprisingly calm, as were most of my peers in the truck, unlike a small minority of scared plastic bags.
I began to doze off listening to the faraway conversations of the other plastics;
“Where are we going?” some asked, panicked.
“Nowhere bad, for what I’ve heard,” others answered reassuringly.
Then suddenly, as I thought complete peace was finally established, the truck stopped. And then blam, sploosh and woosh, us plastics were dropped directly into the ocean. Illegal dumping…?
Text by Andrés Pacheco Dobrzelewski