The Modern Way

Is this all there is? 
Is this all there is?
Is this all there is?

We follow scripts. We take steps. We set goals. We meet goals. We make more goals. We make excuses for not meeting goals. 

We ignore the nagging feelings of emptiness inside, if we are lucky enough to feel them to begin with. We chase them away with drugs and more drugs and more drugs, until we are so dazed that everything goes by in a blur.

What was nature? we ask.  What were the trees supposed to tell us? Why am I afraid of spiders, and why do they still crawl into my dreams?

We step on blackened gum on the pavement. We step on broken glass, but nothing hurts. We step on wildflowers painted on the street. Our shoes are hard and pointy, and they keep us from the filthy ground.

We wash our hands with alcohol. We paint our faces with cement. We stare into tiny screens, summoning one another in the dark, typing in gutturals, sobbing into tiny messages that never come.

It’s the modern way, they say.  

A tiny voice inside us tells us that it doesn’t have to be this way, but the voice is far too faint, and it doesn’t stand a chance above the other voices that scream at us day after day.

The tiny voice is right. Sort of. We’ve been living in prison for a long time now, so long that we’ve withered, so long that we’ve forgotten what it is to be alive.

But there’s hope. Maybe. We may have forgotten, but our bodies haven’t. Our brains haven’t. Deep inside, we have all the secrets to feeling alive.