Our Days are Numbered

I’d give my right arm to see the world open up to me. See myself surrounded by people I love, supported by a loving world. I used to run away when I laid my head on the pillow to sleep. I’d find a steady image of a world I’d create and I’d embed myself within it, prancing about in any way I saw fit. The things which bear heavy upon us during the day would melt away in my fantasies. I was loved and accepted. I created that for myself…

Those fantasies before bed used to be enough for me, but now I find it all the more harder to roll out of my dreams into this superficial world. I find it exhausting to just be. Here we feel transfixed to things that only seem to matter to the people making money off it. True, I might find myself shopping on the weekend, buying the most gorgeous bag to show off, the next time I have a day off. It seems dystopian, as we really begin to unravel it all. I start to wonder as I look at my newest purchase just how much I really wanted that thing to begin with. Was I told to want it? Where does this shit come from? It’s almost easier for those thoughts to just roll over in bed and forget this world exists, to fade off into fantastical dreams where anything can be.

Reality is dark. We’re told this is how things are supposed to be, but it’s hard to get a grip onto that idea when I can clearly see that nothing perceived to be normal in society is actually working. We’re so capable of everything. We’re so smart, efficient, admirable at times, kind when we want to be. Yet, we can never defeat the system that thoroughly defeats us. It takes its time, starting when we’re just learning to speak. Boxing us in. Creating proposed systems that indoctrinate us into the American way. We’re disciples when we’re young, flowering beautifully, often pushing past weeds with a strength unknown. School comes next, preparing us to be quiet simple brained children, unwise to the successful ways of the world. We learn instead to shut up, to not inquire, we learn history like a tall tale from story books, mostly fiction. We learn to suppress our instincts, stifle our emotions, suck up the worst of the worst and push forward. We learn the beloved deeply flawed motto of the American dream.

We grow tired at a young age, many students suffer immensely, leaving education behind and immediately joining the ranks of America’s army of slaves, sorry, I mean the American workforce. Many other students find they have no options, they never really did, so they stop speaking for themselves, they begin speaking for America. Our will is constructed in college, we make ties to people we feel bring importance to our lives, but somewhere along the higher educational road, we become admonished from all we’ve put in, without any guarantee of receiving income, a stable home, or a belly full in return.

Our society loves the American individual, the self made man. The one who rose above all odds to finally fit into their little American box, oh what a dream. Our lives are pulled from us, slowly, year by year, like a leech, keeping its host just alive enough so that it might feed forever. We’re individualized, allowed just enough freedom to make it look like we’re living for ourselves, but really think who put the idea of going to an amusement park this weekend in your head and who really benefits from you doing that? When we finally become financially secure enough to create our own home (or we never do) we give life to children who embody the same fantastic spirit that we did when we were born. We either feed and nurture that beautiful creativity and flow or we stifle it and shut it up because we lost our lives and our children deserve the same. When it’s time for our kids to go to school, our family is lost to us. Our individualism melts our unity, we become dysfunctional. Rather than remaining together, stronger, more stable, we send our children off to fend for themselves in this cruel world. They stagger, they fall, plummeting into a 9-5 they despise, homelessness, addiction, prison, or the military…

If the hope of keeping our families strong and unified escapes us then we have no hope when it comes to community. We fail to encourage our neighbors to blend. We fail to remember we’re stronger together. We separate, boxed into our picket fences, houses labeled in a row, lawns mowed or you might get fined by the HOA. We wonder why our children don’t play outside anymore and enjoy nature, but one glance out the window might provide you with answer enough to that thought. We look beyond the fences, asking to borrow sugar and we might be met with a kind smile or instead a wicked invitation into a home filled with conspiracies and honed in racism.

Our self actualizations always fall short. We’re stuck. We’re scared. We try to power down our phones, put away our watches, yet we’re always met with an electronic gaze, the awe inspiring bright white buzz of a screen. We try to mellow our criticisms, we try to meditate to alleviate the pains of the day to day. But we can’t escape. We live in an abysmal territory where fact is questioned as conspiracy and conspiracy is upheld as truth. We’re blind and bloodied. We’re caught in campaigns filled with pedophilic tendencies, wads of cash powdered with cocaine, and a very real threat of our own earth extinguishing this lame society we’ve built.

My skin used to crawl at all this. When I was much younger, I used to shout, my hair inflamed, trying to get people’s attention. I always thought I would be able to do something, to change something, to be better. I wanted to be a cop, to remedy all their wrong intentions and halt disgusting men wrought with rabies for power. Then I wanted to be a politician, stifling old men with opinions from medieval times and speaking out against the wrongs of humanity. I wanted the world to see its negative toll on its citizens, to see its most vulnerable communities and feel impassioned to do something to better their lives. We’re only as strong as our weakest members, I’d say, let’s bolster them then!

Year after year, time would age me and I’d chant the same things, sometimes louder, sometimes my voice would lose itself and I’d be chanting till I was hoarse. Often not even a murmur would escape my lips, I would just stand back and stare at the horror show playing before me, shocked at the human rights violations, shocked at what humanity allows time and time again. Now I write, maybe speaking wasn’t my thing. Maybe I can change something using a piece of paper, written language lives on, it prospers…

Still fantasies, I suppose. I never grew up, I never learned. The people who need to hear my words never will, I’m sure they couldn’t comprehend if they tried. And whose fault is that. Who must be blamed for this enraging world?...For this unenlightened racist, sexist, misogynistic ableist, white supremacist, pedophilic, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic bullshit Christian establishment. The people at fault remain hidden, hoarding the world's wealth in the biggest banks on Earth and allowing puppet people with pockets lined to speak for them and do their bidding, till the world is as it is, corrupt, irrefutably evil, mismanaged, exhausting.

I get tired of fighting, of writing the same excerpts over and over again. I’m still young, when I’m 50 will I find myself writing this same excerpt in a new way, in a different book? There's no breaks, there's no time outs. It's all of us against all of them…and I must add, it’s way more of us. If you’re tired, me too, but what can we do? We’ve berated our minds to find the best conclusion, we’ve tried and failed at emancipating ourselves from this corrupt system and yet some people never turn away, they become hypnotized by the system's eager demands. They encapsulate themselves in capitalism, “earning” their way up the ladder to a bigger car, to a bigger vacation. I think they still find themselves, empty and alone, they just don’t know what to call it and by then it’s much easier to get a prescription to make it go away.

I wish there was a clock on the wall that said how much time we had left and when it ran out we’d all be wiped out, maybe this would remain. Maybe civilization would restart and they’d begin to build a working system of society and they’d find all the old posters held up at protests and they’d find writings exhibiting conditions of servitude and they’d regret the past that came before them but use all those tools to create something new and distinguished, something that benefited everyone that lived within it.

Alas, I’ve caught myself in another fantasy, and so have I entrenched you, my reader, within it as well. I’d say it's one of my most charming faults, but it breeds disorder and heightens my expectations till I’m inconceivably depressed. I suppose that’s what this is all about. How can we continue on and not be depressed when our world has manifested in this way around us. I like to tell myself sometimes that the struggle is something I chose beyond my birth, something I needed to experience, but it provides little comfort to this shameful world and I take my steps wisely because in my experience if we meander too far from the truth, we cannot simply postulate our feelings to match that of our prose. Hidden in the depths of our tortured minds we find solace, but its permanence is fleeting and unordained under the massive law of the world. With structure undeniable, we cannot even begin to threaten what exists until our thoughts translate to actions and our words heavy like our hands cannot be denied on the face of man as it lands harshly upon his cheek and grips him out of his hypnotic state.

It is with great incompetence from all the times tried before and susceptibility to failure that leads me into leaving you with these final words. As morose the journey has been, as hard pressed the tumor has laid upon our brains, we must regroup, revitalize, and atone. Our wrongs have not been righted and our day has not yet dawned. It will come and our strength will only unveil itself if we’ve numbered ourselves beyond that which the leaders can count. We are the pressure applied to the heavy steel door barring our entry from deciding for ourselves. We are the final degree in the pot that boils the water and scalds the hands of those who attempt to feed us scraps. We are in unity as we are in death, everybody will die, what makes it worth it--Did you stand before we fell?