children waiting for the day they feel good

people run in circles. humans are a race of packs and classes, conformity a security blanket out of which not a one can manage to grow out.

i was scrolling through my friends' myspace profiles, as i sometimes do, and adding to my ever-growing collection of music the songs on their profiles that i enjoyed. nothing out of the ordinary, except me.

like moving backwards on an escalator, i can see everyone in my life as they shift from one thing to another. crappy minimum-wage job to something more specialized; a shared three-bedroom household is reformed to accommodate visitors instead of boarders, while cockroaches greet their new flatmate. the higher up i get, the faster they flit, these people with whom i shared months, sometimes years, of life. shrunken figures scampering to the next "big thing," the newest "big break," that will provide them everything they want, though they shuffle slower after each change of plans.

i click through these pages of people with thousands of friends and millions of comments, and wonder just how many of those conversations are between the same three persons. how many of these oh-so-close acquaintances look right through one another? i always thought it was something unique to me, that, packed into claustrophobic spaces of however degree, i was continuously as alone as though i had never felt any other human presence beside me. recent conversations aim to convince me otherwise. i never gave them much credence before, as everyone who insisted loneliness was simultaneously ingrained into some sort of clique or club; there was always a place for them to return at the end of the day, no matter how unsettled they felt at that day's apex.

i suppose now that i am the fortunate one. though my shambled society is small, it is genuine.