Is The Future Being Gerrymandered?

Two days ago Earth Day passed me by. The earth seemed much smaller that day, miniaturized.

The future had been gerrymandered, or so it seemed to me.

I was out walking in the park, watching how other people walked. It seemed to me that the people I was watching came from all walks of life and from all over the world, men, women, children. Each spoke a different language than I spoke, each was seeing something entirely different from what I was seeing.

I could see clearly that everyone out walking was happy but me.

I was happy for everyone else. I didn’t hold their happiness against them, that would be the wrong thing to do, but I did feel an ineffable loneliness, the kind of loneliness that had been established the moment I was born and couldn’t be unestablished. It was as if I’d been placed in a certain congressional district by people more powerful than I was, and was therefore forced to have leaders who could not possibly represent me in either my present or future life.

I laid down on the grass, there’s lots of grass in the park, to collect my thinking. There wasn’t much to collect, only a thought or two that I could carry, being a responsible citizen of my time and place, to one of the many trash bins in the park meant for recycling.

Later that afternoon I entered the museum to look at the art. I found myself looking at art no one else was looking at, mostly because no one else was looking at it. Because no one else was looking at the art I was looking at I deemed it the most interesting art I’d ever seen, having it all to myself.