A Bite-Sized Story: Pavement

I was angry when I wrote this.

I guess I'm still angry now.


Pavement

                The heat. The heat is unbearable. Air thick and heavy with apathy, a tangible mood that saps at the will. We shuffle through the day with smiles as plastic as our clients’, living a series of scripts. We are the NPCs of their video game, with nothing but a conversation tree. We display their options, they just point and click. Somehow, we are still not the main character.

                Every one of them is a deviation of the same theme, some permutation of ‘coffee and cake’. No ‘please’, never a ‘please’. We take the burden of society, we uphold the Truman Show that is all of their lives. We are the crew and technical team. We are the scaffolding.

                Someone always has to be the scaffolding.

                There used to be pride here. Pride in being scaffolding, pride in being necessary. They used to look at the buildings they supported and say that they were a part of it, even if their names weren’t on the door. Now we, their successors, their descendants, we can’t believe in the buildings. What pride is left here?

                Then they got to become the buildings, and they tell us we will do the same someday. We won’t. We are the ones who allow their plastic lies, and they expect us to believe them? Do they forget these things so easily? How selfish, how lazy to place the burden of reality on us, we who are already so burdened. We who are pinned by loans and laws and failing systems because they felt striving for idealism should be our job. They decided that for us, back before we even existed. We sat patiently in the future, helpless.

                We see ourselves nowhere in 5 years. There is no dream of the future, there is not even the small improvement in each day. There is this day, and there it is again, and there it is again. A good writer would call it disillusionment. I call it misery. This is not a magnum opus. This is not made for a stone tablet. This is just the truth. From the bottom of the barrel, from 6 feet underwater, this is what we see. Only us on the pavement can look up and see the whole skyscraper.

                I am not a cog in a machine, I am not reduced to a replaceable part. I am a person, like every other person here on the pavement, and I wish I could be just a cog. I circle blocks, step by step, wading through that thick, thick air. I know that one day, I will take my last step and I will have never left the pavement.

                I am a sad man, and I cannot find nobility in emotion.

                Fix our world, you scum.