Tie Me In Ribbons [Oneshot]

AN: This story is entirely fictional, and is not written from my perspective. The ad that is mentioned in this work is in the external link, and is a legitimate ad.

Oh, and title credits go to All Time Low's song, Fool's Holiday. 

It’s Christmas again. The snow has started to fall, people are getting out the little lights and the trees, and there are even more wandering the streets looking into the shop windows. They all seem happy for the holidays.

Personally, I dread this time of year. I’ve only got a box over a subway vent for a home. Even then, it’s horribly cold, and there’s the muddy slush that gets in and makes the atmosphere damp and uncomfortable. But the worst part is that I’ve got no one to buy toys and gifts for. I'm not exactly one for festivities, given my situation.

It wasn’t my fault I ended up without a roof and in destitute conditions. I was born into this life of sitting along the streets, begging for money. Barely sixteen and I’m already being scorned upon by everyone else. My parents died three years ago, in that city-wide blizzard that froze the entire sector that we stay in. No power, no source of heat, even from the subway stations that most of the homeless stationed their rags and boxes above.

Now, I spend the days digging through landfills for the tiniest morsels of food, and the nights curled up in the pile of rags and the box that I call home. It’s always the worst in the long months of winter that us homeless people experience. We have to scramble over each other just for a piece of half-frozen chicken in the middle of the street. It's kind of like being a flock of pigeons, fighting over a minute, picked-over crumb of bread.

People expect the homeless to be undereducated and devoid of all value. They couldn’t be further from the truth. We take government-regulated courses in hopes that we can make something out of our lives. I regularly join them because I'm waiting for a day where I can finally experience a warm home.

Anything better than this damp box, that is.

Those sessions are the only reason I’m literate, not an - what was it again? Yes, an attribute. Not an attribute you’d normally see in someone like me.

Most of the time, I just sit in the alleyways between high-rise buildings while watching the “middle-class” citizens as they walk in and out of the various stores that line the sides of the overly cluttered roads. Roads that bring people to where I live. That means more chances of getting money from the few kind souls that pass by. 

I remember shuffling back to my box above the subway in the dead of night, when an advertisement caught my attention. The first lines were written in angular font. Too formal, too narrow, too upright. Why can’t street kids just get a life? it said. Below it was a giant, poorly formatted block of text. I didn’t bother to try and read it. 

 

We can’t get a life because they tell us to. We have to work for it. We're not just mindless idiots wandering around looking pretty.

But then again, we’re all there for a reason, however ridiculous. It’s because we have nowhere else to go. It’s not like we have a family that welcomes us home every night. Not that we have a home.  

Maybe we don’t have a life either. Maybe we were only put on this earth merely to exist, to show people that they’ll always be better off than us.