She never belonged anywhere. This was not her world, this was her parent’s. They dictated her life, values, and choices. She was not one to speak but, 17 years of this tyrannical puppeteering was enough. Her father never payed any heed to her when she would describe the worlds outside, like the ones on the television. Friends would meet at coffee shops just to drink and talk about their minuscule problems. The wondrous planet of animals interacting and creating beautiful fields of flowers just by touching, not talking. A constant traffic in every ecosystem like the bazaar she would go to with her father as a child.

Her father had a different recollection of the world. He had seen villages burn and empires crumble. He had seen acts of aggression, like the destruction of a car that blew up into a million specks of dust, in a crowded park just to put fear in the regulars of that park and the community. He had seen cities swept away by an ocean not even Poseidon himself could not stop. He saw a child hungry, alone, and crying for its mother, with no one to answer.

He’d seen families get torn apart based on a war governments want to fight. The only one who suffers is not Uncle Sam, who claims he’s, “for the people.” Rather it is the sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers who perish, and with them a sense of family for their loved ones. He saw people criticize an entire generation for being to lazy when all they wanted to do was make it easier for their future generations to thrive.

He saw a mythical troll sit behind a keyboard and still hurt as much as he did under a bridge. He saw boys no older than 16 and girls no older than 14 end all hope from the cut of a knife or the grasp of a rope on their tender necks. He saw the love of his life get eaten from the inside out by her own body like a wake of vultures surrounding a decay body, But this body was still living and breathing.

He had seen the truth. There are no flower-infested fields, rather plague-scattered hospices and terror-driven countries closing off from others. All because of how they look or who they look up to. The planet of animals is overrun by concrete blocks and mindless workers working only for some S’s with a line through it. These slaves wake every morning to a loud alarm to use the loud automobile they bought to head to the loud office they hate, only finding two weeks of solace through a vacation to another island where others slave away their lives. There is no coffee shop, no matter how badly we want there to be one. We all want a drink there, but only the ignorant get a seat and others must wallow.

I wrote this after being really moved by a piece we read in class. If only I wrote down the name of the piece. It really moved me to write this piece on most of the things that are hurting our society.