Page 6 - Demo

tilt of the wineglass. Her wrist quivering with her repressed hopes and dreams. Doubts caging them in.
It has gotten worse these years. I know they need me. Some of them mope about in their apartments waiting for little windfalls. A thirtieth birthday wish from a local NEET, “I wish to win the Mark Six next year”. Scattered lottery tickets, number combinations crossed out pathetically in a notebook. His adrenaline rushes come from handing in submissions at the Jockey Club. A life running on lazy luck, forever trapped in a delusion that I will never be able to save them from. These people, I cannot bear to even be in the same room with.
Rush hour, another day of being trampled utterly under leather shoes. The pedestrians dash by, heads bowed, feet forward, and I wonder where they are actually headed. Do they know how many alternate realities, how many new breakthroughs they’re missing out on when they abandon me?
It is morning again, and I am hovering uncertainly in a classroom. The students are slumped over their desks, lethargy seeping into their limbs. Questions are asked, and the students keep their heads down, uncertain, gingerly swallowing the answers they are told to give. Best to keep it in the back of their throats if there is a chance of them getting it wrong. Could have been so much more, I want to scream. Eager hands raised, rapid-fire exchanges, knowledge instilled into young minds. I waft around, slapping students upside the head, yelling in their ears. It never works. They never listen to me, and I am starting to think it is their own doing.
Rush hour. I cannot breathe in the wake of the exhaust fumes that cover me. For them, more haste, more forgetting that I exist, more opportunities lost. A young girl crushes me in her palm as she turns away from a flyer proclaiming a job as sales associate, her indecision getting the better of her. A man in overalls stares vacantly at the door he is supposed to approach for a pay raise, and backs away slowly, his heel mashing me into the sidewalk.
It has not always been like this, but days later I find myself on a ledge, the building a high-rise, the 23rd floor. The boy dangles his legs halfway across the concrete, his lip trembling with a repressed cry for help. Alarmed, I turn to leave the scene.
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