gold-tinted glasses

lil shrimp

the shopping mall has a supermarket and because we have nothing better to do and don't want to go home, we take a walk inside

there's a section selling seafood, with little shrimps inside water tanks. i bend down to look at one as it turns to face me. i wonder if it can see me when it hits the glass of the box, an invisible barrier keeping it within its small cage.

i feel a little sorry for it. the poor thing was born to be sold, killed and eaten. i look at the other shrimps as they writhe in the water, legs flailing aimlessly. they're confused and lost, not made for this thirty-centremeter environment. i wonder how life has come to this, bathing in fishnets and cooking pot water.

this whole city makes me feel a little sad. the young security officer outside my grandparents' neighbourhood who sits in his little glass cubicle all day, on his phone or tapping the button to lift the bar on the road. the uni-aged workers mindlessly staring at the baggage scan at every metro station, paid to put on a performance of security on their seat all day. the shop hires that stand outside in the heat with their little plastic signs, calling out to blank faces whatever line they've been shouting for the past hour. the old lady at the shopping mall restaurant, the shop ran by only three of them. she quietly takes trays to and from tables, wordlessly carrying orders and clearing plates. and the wages here are awful. this is their life, working for two pound fifty an hour, all day, every day. i can feel my feet being raised by a wave of underpaid population, service smiles all on their faces. the most i can do is say thank you and return a smile.

i don't want to pretend to play as an all-loving humanitarian, though. i leave the shrimps behind and head for lunch, and maybe for dinner i'll be served a platter of seafood that have hardly ever seen the sea. and i'll eat it without any regrets. i've bought mountains of online shopping packages, picking the cheaper dupes at unfairly low prices, adding things to the shopping cart as if it's to no cost at all. and soon i'll fly away to england, leaving pollution in my wake and away from this transparent capitalist clownfest that makes me feel a little more guilty than back home where the exact same problems are ever present. the world is kind of fucked.