author's note: woohoo! i got em all in! and i even managed to title it. go me!
Purple in the City
Sometimes I think I must be an idiot for moving to the city. Back home, I could always look up into the night sky and see the stars, but here, there is nothing but darkness to see. It's hard to be in a new city without those familiar stars winking at me as if they know a secret and they'll let me in if I could ever reach them.
Every day, I get home from my job and pull something out of the freezer to thaw. Usually some vegetarian frozen dinner that tastes like raw sewage. I miss stopping by the farmer's market on the way home, picking up some fresh vegetables to steam and some rice to cook. Around here, there's only the corner store, and most of the food comes in a package. Nothing is fresh and nothing seems edible. I don't even know where the food came from, so how am I supposed to eat it?
At work, it's like I'm just filling out an empty space and if I wasn't there, management would just fill the space with some other brainless peon, scrambling for a paycheck by pushing pencils and papers around on their desk and clacking away at a computer terminal. I'm not even really sure what I do. I input data here, print out data there, attend meetings which I have no idea what they're about, go to lunch with some of the other workers at a restaurant down the street, punch back in and input some more data. It's not enough to fill a day, so I usually prowl around the internet, looking for something I know I won't find, mainly because I don't know what I'm looking for.
Yes, I look at my life and see this gigantic hole, sucking away all the life and energy that I used to think was me. My eyes have taken on a distant look, darkness shades them and my freckles are starting to fade. And every night when I look in the mirror, I tell myself, "This was your choice. This is what you wanted. You need to make the best of it." But aren't we allowed to make a mistake?
Mistakes, big or small, are hard to take back. Sure at work, I can ignore most of the mistakes I make (and man, do I make plenty of mistakes) or at least blame them on someone else (I learned that one fast, as other people always blame things on the person in the cubicle next to them). I've learned a lot of things from this job, but mostly that there's always a way to elude responsibility, and that nothing I do really matters.
And I guess that's the reason I'm turning so inward and eating disgusting slop I normally wouldn't touch if it were the last bit of sustenance on the earth. I feel like I'm stalling, although I don't know what. Stalling to fix my mistake and crawl back home like a failure? Or am I stalling life, pretending to fit where I obviously don't, playing an elaborate game of make believe, convincing myself that tomorrow will be better. That's when things will change.
I don't even know why I'm writing all this down as it's not coming as a relief. But something struck me on my walk home today and it was a flower growing between the cracks in the pavement. It shone a vibrant purple. It was so defiant against all odds. It struggled to life amidst the harshest of environments, in a place where no one will look to appreciate its beauty. And when I saw it, I was reminded of that line in Alice Walker's The Color Purple, something to the effect of God wanting you to notice and appreciate the color purple if you pass it in a field. And even though I wasn't passing it in a field, there it was, the color purple, so bright and apparent in the middle of this city. And I just had to notice it.
I'm done writing for now. I'm going to pack my bags. I'm going home.
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