From dawn until dusk: sleep, eat, and work in unending repetition within a grand design of concrete, fluorescent light, and surging machines. People's lives are meaningless in the grand scheme of society, wandering the endless streets of a cold prison of metallic origin.
Wake up, eat, go to work — work, work, again — until your very essence extinguishes itself, cloaked in the repetition of a learned routine.
You become a machine, trusting its masters — who are themselves slaves to the system — offering your entire being as a pawn to their bidding.
you dream of better but cannot escape the fire that burns your soul slowly, not understanding that to truly live somethings must be lost.
You dream of something better, yet you cannot escape the fire that slowly burns your soul, not understanding that to truly live, some things must be lost.
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New York, 2015
A nameless, overworked soul staggered across Manhattan in a meaningless search for entertainment, only to find himself back at the torturous ground he sought to escape. Once again, he was met with the hateful eyes of his superiors, soul-crushing stacks of papers in his hands, and his personal workspace buried beneath the overbearing weight of passed-down work.
Once a radiant soul chasing a dream, now nothing more than smoldering ash — ambition suffocated beneath the shadows of other hearts. He walks the plank of shame toward the open sky, prepared to surrender the hollow struggle against a life no longer his own.
as he arrives on the platform overlooking the complex structure infront of him, a single phrase enters his mind "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." [1]
All he sees is a prison — subtle in form, yet impossible to ignore. A towering megastructure forged from the suffering of thousands and the quiet enslavement of millions for the indulgence of the few. A gray kaleidoscope of interlocking chains, pulling and directing the masses like clockwork.
A Prison made of grey.
Then, as quickly as the thought enters his mind, his body feels the freedom of the sky. Freed from the chains of gravity for but a moment, he feels the truest sensation fade — and fear leaves him.
He descends through the sky, stripped of fear, emptied of worry.And in the final breath before the end, a thought returns — cruel and sudden:
"Was this all so meaningless?Zackary… why didn't you fight? Why didn't you fight back?"
The sound that follows is sudden and absolute, shattering the silence beneath the open sky, a sickening crunch of flesh and bone against the unforgiving concrete floors of the prison.
And still the masses move on, circling the fallen as if he were no more than debris — a life, once sacred, now treated as a minor inconvenience.
But for once, the cycle falters.An unscorched soul pauses among the moving masses and truly sees the fallen. His heart hardens against the grotesque indifference of the world, recognizing yet another casualty of its unseen prison.
He acts before the others can. He gathers the scattered remnants — the wallet, the personal effects — and then his hand stops.A single book lies among them.
"Chaos et libertas, tela catenarum occultarum."— Walter P.[2]
He conceals it all in his duffel bag and steps back into formation, rejoining the human procession before suspicion can brand him an outsider.
A brief flicker of hope warms his heart, only to fade once more into the chill of the modern soul.
The prison does not tighten. It does not rest. It simply persists.
A prison of metal and false hopes, a hidden web of chains dictating the lives of the living and weighing upon the dead, trapped forever in the merciless design of man.
Another soul witnesses the end of its own race. A long-loving heart, which resisted the crushing of its hopes, now burns brightly with newfound hatred toward society.
A love that could not bloom within its beloved, a dream of a future together that will never come to be — a lady forever awaiting death, longing to reunite with her dream man.
A lone witness to life's unrelenting cruelty.
In that instant, she resolves to return everything the world had taken — a rare clarity coursing through her soul. A moment when she embraces pure hate and the consuming drive of revenge.
Two souls touched by a crushed soul's passage into oblivion.
One embraces hatred and revenge, while the other has glimpsed the open door — and must choose whether to step forward or be swallowed by the soul-crushing machinery of normality.
Within this gray prison, life is hollow, freedom a forgotten word, and the thought of escape never crosses anyone's mind until now.
[1] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1778
[2] Chaos and freedom, the web of unseen chains