Suspend your disbelief for a moment and imagine, if you will, that you are a person. You are walking down the median of Acadian Thruway on your person legs, breathing air with your person lungs, just being person-like in general.
While the bulk of your attention is placed upon the road ahead of you, you also make sure to keep an amount of awareness of what lies before you on the ground. The “noodle incident,” though now years behind you, taught you this lesson and you don’t intend to forget it.
You spy on the asphalt a few yards in front of you a nebulous white object with a short streak of pale blue extending from one end. Curiosity piqued, your eyes stay glued to the object as you approach.
Nothing you’ve ever experienced, not even middle school, has prepared you for what you find when you reach the object, because no person should ever be made to see such a horror.
Imagine, though all reason tells you not to do so, that at your feet is a tampon with what appears to be a bite taken out of it.
You are no expert in bite signature analysis, but from your personal experience as the proud owner of a set of person teeth, it appears that a person - a human person - took a bite out of this tampon.
Unrest in the middle east, the denial of civil rights, poverty, hunger, are all very real problems that plague the world you live in. They make you sad, but you have come to terms with the fact that these issues and many others will not be solved in your lifetime. While not content, you are prepared to live in a world with these problems.
You are not prepared to live in a world where somebody takes a bite out of a tampon, then discards it on the street like an apple core.
Imagine that when you see the tampon you say out loud “What the actual living fuck?” This should not be too much of a stretch. You have witnessed the end-result of an action, undertaken by what you assume is still a living, thinking human being that at some point said “I’m going to take a bite out of a woman’s hygiene product, possibly used. After this first bite, I will decide that the rest of the tampon will not be consumed. Like the tip is the only good part of the tampon, everybody knows that.”
This person lives among you, in the same city in which you currently reside. This person possibly has access to the same public bathrooms you do. This person may have children, and is allowed to teach them how to live in our society. This person is capable of travelling outside of their home, which must be a terrifying den of profound sadness. This person is breathing your fucking air.
Imagine, if you will, that your soul just died.