It’s 5 am

I don’t know you but it’s 5 in the morning and the rest of the commuters are either at their midlife crisis or not even old enough to truly comprehend it. You sir with your cane and orthopedic shoes walk as fast as your legs won’t allow and yet here you are. I can’t help but to wonder what you are doing or where you are going that’s so important for you to travel before the light has woken up. It makes me wonder what will I be doing once I’ve achieved your age? Will I be walking to a job that overworks me because no one I know is 1 one percent enough to influence ballots and retire? Is this the reckoning that awaits us?

I’m beginning to wonder if you had children or did you have a spouse? Did you love them? Did they love you? Were the choices you made by the people actually loyalty seem worth it or did you hide behind concepts that existed only in your mind?

You stand out amongst the construction workers carrying their gear and hard hats. One step…one very slow step at a time; there are emotionally disturbed individuals seeking the highest of attention and you are unable to stand erect like the woman next to you ready to open the doors. Your cane is supposed to start around your hip on your good side but at your age I’m not sure what side that is; and because of how you’re bent over clearly rushing but it looks like it’s in slow motion your cane is at your chest.

Why are you not at home? Where is home? Do you have one or just heading out to prevent the lost of it? Days pass by a lot faster than people anticipate because time only seems slow when you’re young and you think “oh man I’ve got all the time in the universe” without the grotesque calculations of being overwhelmed and overworked with a carrot of success dangling just out of your reach sold to you as an American dream.

It’s calculations of having to seek out how to accomplish the shortest of goals, the friends you lose, loved ones you must let go of because family will always abuse the family card for one way loyalty, the bosses who tell you “we’re family” and treat you just as such, the liars, the fighters, the very calculations that dry the soul up in the heat of one too many moments. It weighs on you and you tell yourself oh I’m gonna do it just for this time while your youth is pissed away on a street corner drunk once you realized you’re lost and alone.

I wonder which one of these calculations led to you traveling earlier than the sun where the streets are dark and dank; and just filled to the brim with hardworking targets for the shadiest of people. It’s clear you’d be unable to defend yourself but here you are with the rest of us; no car just walking and using public transportation when you can barely stand up high enough to see traffic. Yet, over here there’s a worker on the verge of passing out like myself; it’s not rocket science to see why the people are exhausted & why they are so angry.