The young are gods. Their legs bare, skin smooth, breasts perked. When they enter the club the party starts. When they leave it follows. They have no boundaries, no limitation. For they carry the dreams of a nation on their backs. Freedoms and wild pleasures there for the taking. They are the fortunate; for they are gouging on the fruits of life. However, I have discovered that on most endeavors, the ticking clock captures us all. Turning the sweet fruits bitter.
There must be a factory that makes Conference Speakers; and inside this factory there must be a plastic mould that contains the salient features like an inflated sense of self and verbal diarrhea, because they are all the same. Take Mr. Johnston, staggering through the office’s revolving doors with seconds to spare, breathless, sweaty and clutching a cardboard box brimming with power point hand-outs. A colleague mutters “Death by PowerPoint”, it raises a communal smile - not for me.
I'd become lost. People around me speak, cough, grunt. But I hardly notice. Sensory experiences are for the living, but to this world, I am little more than a corpse, stimulated into robotic action. Criminal monotony. My life. This whole fucking facade. I've worked with some of these people for years, but I wouldn't know one stony face from the next, then again I too am just another stony face. Stale air is forced into the room in a similar fashion to how we ourselves entered, forced in against its natural will by mechanical action. The pungent, gentle yet nauseating smell combined with the temperature, just a few careless degrees above comfortable - much like the management. Its just another thing to switch myself off to. This numbness, it isn't a conscious choice, its a reflex action. The human body cocoons itself from emotion, does what it needs to do to survive - this is when the sweetness of the fruit turns bitter.
I can’t help but think how things could have been different; if each class, exam, interview hadn’t brought me to the brink of my humanity. If I hadn’t been relentlessly striving for the approval of the false Gods who engulfed my juvenescence with their unquenchable thirst- forcing me to to acquiesce halfheartedly throughout my time of naivety. Hereupon encroaching on any slight chance, I could have had grasped to taste the fruits of youth. Instead I was left in a state of capitulation, to fall straight into the drudge, the encumbrance; of adulthood. Looking back, it is clear to me now, society gave me no chance... Someone once said to me: I should stop whinging, but how would that be desirable for me? Optimism is a young girls game; just like everything else in this egocentric, narcissistic, god-forsaken cosmos.
They swagger past my desk, bringing with them a confusing dichotomy of emotions which burns up inside me like bile in a soldier's stomach, or puss in a rotting flesh wound. Their neck lines plunge lower than my self-confidence, and like the cretins themselves, their perfect legs aspire all the way up to their indecent skirts. I loathe them, yet I spend an unhealthy proportion of my time relentlessly envying every single inch of them! I mean why? For God's sake why? What does an extra ten years deduct from a woman?
Each night, I close the door of my apartment on the darkening world outside, hear the lock click into place behind me, and enter an even darker world inside; an abyss, not a sanctuary. The celebrities of MTV give me a guided tour of their homes. They are stupid, but they're happy. I envy that. Maybe stupid is the new sensible. And I envy the Sudanese orphans on the news. Their misery is seen as justified, they are the subject of the world's pity and compassion. The most painful part of it all is that nobody else cares, not even myself sometimes. I am fortunate. I am wealthy. I am healthy- well at least in the physical sense. Yet these aspects of my life hinder my plight to enter a cave of protection and pity. Do I not have the right to wallow just because i'm not tenuously close to death. I am on the surface living the high-life, but every one knows that there is always more than meets the eye; there is absolutely nothing wrong with me self-pitying or being totally self-absorbed... This is all bloody contemptible,even with my increasingly more equivocal grip on sanity, I know that these thoughts are abhorrent. But if I can't gratify my delectation, then I'll allow myself the hedonistic exorbitance of indulging in misery...
...Someone once said to me: I should get a grip. But how would that benefit me. Age is a prison. You don't get older and wiser, merely older and less desirable.
