Memoir of Carl Carbon
12/4/12
In the brief time I have been part of life about 13,000
years I have seen many things as I started out in the mountains of India as
part of a tea leaf a glucose molecule. I
lived this luxurious life for 100 years until I was plucked and put into a
stew. This led me to a new life where I was digested by a human and was split
away from my companions. I was then thrown around in a small structure called a
mitochondrion. After this ordeal I made sure that I would be removed from such
a terrible place. To get out of the body I was thrown out allowing me to
breathe of relief. I spent the next 10,000 years roaming the planet looking to
be a glucose in a tea leaf. It was not until 1,000 years to this day that I had
this privilege. The process was not as kind to the protons as I had remembered. Getting thrown around the chloroplast was not
exciting. I moved from the stroma to the Calvin cycle where I was bonded with a
new group of companions that I would spend the next 500 years with becoming the
most valued tea leaf of all time. Where I
sat in a vacuole waiting to be used for energy I was never called. One day a
man walked up our mountain in Nepal and plucked the leaf I was contained in. He
then must have noticed how valuable our leaf was and then dried us out. We have
now sat on shelves for 500 years waiting to be used so we may continue our life
as carbon molecules, yet this has not happened so I wait staring at the
membrane of my dried out vacuole.