Gray city

Concrete and metal suffocate the earth, the sky is perpetually covered by a blanket of gray gas. No way out of what we call home. Night and day have the same flavor, the same yellow, blue, pink, green artificial lights. The smell of car exhaust is soaked into our clothes, our food, the lips we kiss. Everything is hostile to us in the world we have created at the cost of our lives, even the law itself. Most people here barely survive, day after day, in an exhausting existence constantly looking for loopholes to bring home a piece of gray bread rolled in plastic. Nothing tastes anymore, only the sauces taste like oil, and the drinks taste like gas. Life flows, in the endless cycle, through the main streets, alleys, and building stairways. It all seems temporary to our mind "I won't be here long", but we don't know that we sit every day in our coffin, moving through the crypt that contains our souls. Our city. We owe her everything, she allows us to be who we are, we are grateful and rejoice when they talk about her on the news. In the world we wait for people to recognize her. That they know the clubs, squares, bridges and monuments by heart, without ever seeing them.

Moving through the crowds of poor people on the streets, cluttering the passage and not letting us run to our next coffin, makes us nervous, feverish, morbid. An anger grows inside us day after day as we try to smother it with sandwiches and sauces, with fun and waste. We try to ignore the desperate cries coming from the camping tents piled along the sidewalks, as streams of black water drain into the sewers. Some of them sit, their abandoned arms dangling from the plastic chair they call home, as they stare at the void with a surprised, anguished look and drooping jaw. While worn-out syringes are still attached to their veins. These are those who cannot afford to live, do not have enough money to be housed in concrete, are left to their own devices as they desperately try to get back into the good graces of she who makes men great. Inferior even to animals, no one wants to be looked at by them, because their eyes soil our clothes with indecency and pity, they try to put it on our shoulders while WE work and WE toil and WE are accepted by others as WE are. THEY are them and that is how it should be.

The city has spoken plainly, it has created a suitable space for them and allowed them to die there, any other requests must be rejected outright, any prayers coming from those things must be weeded out and our minds cleansed of them. Walking down the sidewalks we smell their stench, we see their food inside boxes on the ground, their things inside shopping carts or garbage bags. Ironic, because that is just what they are and what they deserve to be. So it is written and so it must be... Their only pastime, their only medicine, is drugs. There are all kinds and for all tastes, or rather, for all wallets. The least expensive are synthetic drugs; there is no room for nature even within us, but science and medical technology are what the body and soul need.

While huge ships from all over the world arrive at the port to unload tons and tons of colored cubes, while day and night people run around like ants seen from above, with the sole purpose of dying in the name of the anthill, the market gets bigger. Sacks, flasks, blocks of powders of all kinds are unloaded and transported to the suburbs, inside brick factories with broken glass, to be cut, stretched, colored, modified. Employees who make piles of sand to divide into sachets know that when they return home they will have to take a bath, to wash their bodies of the substances that have settled on their skin and their minds of the consequences of each bag they have closed with the fire of a lighter.

During the night the streets fill with them, teeming with those things that jerk about, arms outstretched, straight, drooping and backs arched as if in ghoulish and dreary dances, barely walking in small strides, many falling, some getting back up. Moms call at the top of their lungs to children lingering in the park when the streetlights come on, illuminating the artificial grass with yellow, because fresh organs are worth a year's worth of drugs, and the law of the road is one and clear: never let an opportunity turn into regret.

Some drugs make you happy, some make you go hungry, and some make you forget that your body is rotting because of the infected holes in your arms. Holes that get bigger, rotting whole portions of your skin, making it black and scaly until it falls off, leaving white bones exposed. Often the only thing that protects them are thin plastic sheets those things put on to cover themselves, like an oil skin for the new being reborn in the belly of the asphalt, becoming one with the streets.