For Life Out Here - LJI Episode 2
It’s funny, the things we think are important when we’re young. Good grades, beautiful place to live, a job that makes us happy. Fulfillment. I can’t remember the last time I felt fulfilled. I’ve spent more days just questing to get my belly full. Out here, it’s all skeleton trees and dead farm crops, scrabbling against folks just like you, with loose joints and creaky brains, for the last piece of bread. Fingertips reaching out and hoping just to close their fingers on a crust to chew. And never mind butter. Wouldn’t know what to do with butter even if I had some - should I sell it for the remains of vittles or gobble it all down for myself with remnants gleaned from empty cans? They said this land would make us better, make us whole and free. And maybe that was true at first, some of us did build houses after all. But they were overnight overrun with rats and squirrels and whatever else could sneak into the cracks in the walls, the slots in the eaves. The places we hadn’t closed off yet. They were starving too, and didn’t they deserve warmth and safety just as much as we did? Of course. But we don’t get fat off oats and flour, and those buggers did. They took our stores and we let them. We were so kind we stunk, they could tell that straight away, and we let those vermin stink up our houses until there was nothing left for us. That’s when the scrabbling got bad, when milk prices went up so far here that it got doled out by the spoonful. But out here is where you learn to live lean, learn what it means to live on the edge, a feather’s breath away from the abyss. You just try and stay on top of the cliff for as long as you can. And when you inevitably fall? You better keep your jaw shut tight and not scream on the way down.