Touched

Individual One

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I feel the anger and resent growing in me. The mob is thick and dense, and it becomes increasingly difficult to escape. All I can hear are complaints; they're petty, materialistic. Someone knocks me into a man, standing alone. He screams and tries to deflect me, and I gather myself and apologise. I am drowning in the people around me. Fragments of their conversations invade my thoughts. Celebrities, clothes, their 'massive' life problems. It offends me that so many people can be so oblivious to the world. Society can be blamed for that I guess. The constant search for acceptance and attention is what we are conditioned to do; you have to be strong to resist it. 

It's difficult.

Living in this world, it’s like there is one massively controlling, hypocritical bitch who's telling you to try harder and harder, and you do, because you think that one day you will be good enough for her, so you keep trying and trying, looking for even the slightest allusion of acceptance and praise, but it will never come. No one will ever be good enough for the bitch we call Society. That's how she likes it. 

I reach the end of the narrow path, where the crowd begins to disperse. The intrusion of the city landscape is a stark contrast to the artificial parkland it surrounds. The bright groundcovers are like mint to the eyes, and the shy, elegantly assembled flowers peer out from behind their covers to greet the day. What began as a whisper, has become a crepitation. As I look to the source of the rustling, I see what I believe are dried, maple leaves dancing across the bright, soft grass. I watch them, as they make their way across the park, through the trees out on to the footpath and across the banked up road. I absorb the life in my surroundings, and admire its artful simplicity, but a thought staggers across the outermost part of my mind, making its way closer and closer in.

This is just a distraction.

Just one of the many she provides, to keep us numbed to the world, so we don't realise how awfully we treat the Earth; Society’s nemesis. We tear up the ground and pull down the trees, all in the name of Society. A little known secret is that, in the process, Society is not only destroying Earth, but herself. This is a fact she tries to ignore. 

I walk out into the park, which is deserted. Not one person, aside from myself, stands on the green, spongy ground. I begin to remove my shoes, right, then left. The trees bordering the park dull the sound of busy traffic and car horns and angry, frustrated shouts. The park is my calm, my escape, the only place I truly know myself. The grass scratches my feet and finds its way between my toes. I take a deep breath in, and feel the corners of my mouth ­­­­­­­­­­­quiver as they curve up.