Screwdriver

“Be proud!” the other tools said.

“It’s an honor to be chosen by the Carpenter. It means you’ve been given purpose!”

I wanted to have a purpose. I’ve never known a tool that didn’t. Ever since I was small and barely fit into my handle, I’d been asking myself the same question. The question we all ask.

What am I here for?

Thankfully for tools, the answer is given to us almost immediately. We are here to serve the Carpenter. The Carpenter will come, his great hand reaching down from the sky and drawing us from the tool bag. Once he does, we will be used and, in that use, find fulfillment.

But when I was first chosen by the Carpenter, I found more questions than answers.

The first question I had was, why did it hurt? Why did the carpenter plunge my head into the rivet of the screw, another tool, and twist me against him? My head screamed in pain, and I tried to run, coming free from the screw a few times, but the Carpenter simply moved me back to the work, and the terrible grating, bending, of my body continued.

I came back to the bag shaking, barely able to speak.

“It wasn’t what you said! It wasn’t what you said!” I screamed at the other tools.

There was this horrible sense of emptiness inside me. I’d never thought of emptiness as a thing that could be hungry, something that could devour, but this did. It ate through everything until I didn’t want to feel anymore.

“Nothing good in life comes for free,” Level said.

Their tone was infuriatingly neutral as if the answer was simple and it was silly that I had not found it as quick as they did. Hearing them nonchalantly give reason to my pain only made it worse, like what I was feeling wasn’t worth being upset about.

“Why didn’t anyone say it would hurt?” I asked, “You said it would be the best part of my life?”

“And it is,” Level said.

My mother came over to me before I could lunge at Level.

“Darling. I know it hurt, and I’m so sorry, but nothing we could have said would have prepared you for it. If we’d told you, you’d have been too afraid to go with the Carpenter. Honey, it hurts, but look at what you’ve done. You’ve helped build a chair for the Carpenter’s child to sit. The Carpenter’s child! You have given something to our creator. The one who gave us existence! Very few things can say that, and we are lucky enough to do it every day.”

I was crying so hard at this point; I was practically inconsolable. Mother stopped and bent her steel neck around mine, holding me. I cried because it had hurt, but that was only a fraction of the reason. Mostly, I cried because I realized they saw my pain and would do nothing about it. No, it was worse than that. To them, the pain was good, and if I had been honest with them, If I had told them how I violated I felt, like I was watching a part of myself drown in the darkest river?

They would have said something was wrong with me. I’d have been deemed broken.

I made a choice that day. I resolved to stop being so sensitive, to not estrange myself from my family, and to build a wall that would protect me from the pain. I would learn to take my purpose and the pain that came along with it. I would learn to love it.

Sacrificing for the good of the Carpenter made my family happy.

It would make me happy too.