Proud to pulp to paper

I was born hundreds of years ago, before the cities rose up around me. Back then, I was surrounded by trees like me, huge sentinels by the hundreds. Then they all fell around me, when the men came with axes and tools, hacking away at us one by one. At my best, I was a giant. But then I came apart in the blink of an eye by mechanical woodsaws, and suddenly I was just a section. A long board, stripped of bark, exposed to the elements.

Even when they pulled me and the others free, even when they brought us to the enormous factory, I still had faith. I still believed that I had suffered my worst. But then I began to hear the noise. The incessant whirring and buzzing. As they moved me closer the noise began to grow. Suddenly it became the clear sound of shredding. Each plank was being shredded apart. I had lived for hundreds of years, and now I only had moments to accept my fate. I had survived being cut apart, but this would surely kill me.

But it didn’t. It was excruciating. It tore me apart. But it didn’t kill me. At this moment I entered a crisis. I didn’t know what I was anymore, but I knew my conscious was thriving. I was a pulp. A mind within water and shredded wood. How would I find value in a such a powerless state? What was my reason for existing after I had been so reduced? But it wasn’t over.

The great machines were ever moving. I had gotten used to a world of speed and efficiency. What had once been pleasant moments of sunshine and peace were replaced by metal and energy. I had relinquished myself to a machine world. I fell through a series of these worlds: some bright, some dark and cold. Each a new existence. A way of living and dying again and again. The final one pressed me thin, thinner than the bark I had once worn.

And now here I sit, pressed again into other pieces just like me, laden with ink; the stories of other lives. These lives used to be spread out over miles, and were now squeezed into inches. My story is only a piece of a larger one, and each of us tells a part. I often wonder if the other thousands of pieces of me have their own minds, and what stories they live to tell.