Work Text:
listen. listen. i’m tired of being the apocalypse generation, of global warming cooking us slowly as frogs in a cooking pan- and yes, i know that this is not actually true, that frogs do jump out of cooking water, but my spine is built of methaphors and my tongue is tied and my hands are shaking and i want to make this clear
so, i think about my waste and i drink water from the tap and i don’t take the car and i take care to never throw away food and my words are stale and my fingers don’t find the right letters on the keyboard and i think i want to live, i want to live without a care, without the knowledge in my bones that we are killing the earth, that all what i do is just a drop on a burning house, evaporating immediately
and i’m tired, and i’m scared, scared of what the future will bring, because the future is now and the future is thinking about the money i have saved up and knowing i should save more but also thinking that i want to live life to the fullest and apparently this means spending to the fullest, and i’m scared of love lost and love found and loneliness and i’m scared of not finding a job, of hating my life if i end up working whatever just to sustain myself, because money does buy hapiness, it buys you a roof and food and basic human rights
and i’m tired. of violence, racism, sexism, death, so many things wrong in this world, knowing that tomorrow my heart may decide to just stop and knowing that when i die i’ll probably die with regrets and business unfinished, i’m tired of killing the earth and i’m tired of this knowledge living like a buzz in my ears and never leaving me alone because i do not want to care
i want to be so careless i’ll maybe go blind because everything is too bright, i want to listen to music so loudly i’ll maybe go deaf, i want to gorge myself on food and not think about animal abuse and suffering and poverty and hunger, i want to buy pretty stuff and clothes and not think about the trees that died, the people that died, the consumption society, the carefully constructed capitalism being injected into my left earlobe, the cut off fingers of the poor, the way they just should care for themselves
i want to scroll without seeing people asking for funds to put food in their mouths, without seeing people asking back their lungs and their heart and the parts of their souls that got trapped in the conveyer belts
i want to walk through the city without seeing ratty blankets, without feeling the cold in my toenails and elbows, with straight shoulders and straight held up head and not look at the chocolate wrappers on the street, the cracks in the stones, not carefully step over sleeping bags of people without a roof to hold up over their heads
so, listen
can’t we just, get in a car and drive without caring about the emissions and the dead animal bones in our wake, can’t we just turn up the music and listen to all our favourite songs, and sing about freedom and life and never hear the news, can’t we just keep going, leave behind our heavy hearts, free our shoulders from the burden, love so brightly it will kill us?
can’t we just, laugh until our stomach hurts and have not a single problem, leave it all behind, the shame and the taboos and the suffering, just run through the fields without a care in the world, make wishes on falling stars and have them all come true, run like nothing will ever be able to catch us.