We rush, rush, rush, like Alice's rabbit indeed, tending to our very important affairs, always late for something, always too busy to call, always too tired.

And have you ever noticed? We move around in boxes. Big boxes, small boxes, black boxes and white boxes, and every shade in between.

They are one of the most important symbols of our important city life. Little pieces or replicas of our abodes, decorated to our taste. Some of us have nicer ones, or bigger ones, or flashier ones. Most of us have one. Others have two, three, or four, according to our station in life. We measure ourselves and each other against them. Some of us have none, so we borrow from others. When we tire of them, we change them for better, newer ones.

They are our bubbles of isolation, the visible manifestation of the sadness that we carry. A terrible, banal, constant presence that never kills us, and never leaves.

Our boxes are also the containers of our loneliness, that peculiar loneliness that is unique to us urbanites, to living in such physically close proximity to each other and yet light-year emotional distances. They also record the imprints of our human condition: our tears, our love and hate, our laughter, our beauty, our ugliness, our growing pains, our betrayals.

Some of us find respite in taking care of our boxes and grooming them to excellence, to fill other voids and vacuums, holes in our heads. It does make some of us happy. Yet others collect them, like toys.

We harbour a funny illusion that they confer on us a sense of importance, or identity.

And yet, the difference, really, is just the size, or who has a nicer one or an uglier one, a shabbier one or a more polished one. They are still boxes, with all the sense of safety and security, illusory or real, and all the awfulness, that that implies. Our boxes, images and reflections of ourselves. To make us think otherwise, to perpetuate the illusion, we give them another name, and call them cars.