Flowing

A picture worth a thousand broken smiles—a caption: the backs of hundreds of thousands of children bend so you can dance in a shiny cropped top. Liked.

BANNED—it screams—STOLEN. Our rights, we fill in the blanks, that must be it. It is these blanks that make us all believe that life is harder than we are told it is—that some hidden politician is twisting some handles within the shadows that are pulling us all into a miserable existence. Liked.

Rising it is, the deaths—our plague. It pleads for us to stay back, stay away, to save ourselves. Liked, for the simple fact that someone will know that I am conscious—my username serving to be a stamp of my duty. I know this, but I will still stumble out of my house at night and pretend the world is wholly ordinary.

The yearning of a population—farmers begging for rights, being pulled and pushed around by letters stamped on a piece of legislation. Shared. Only because you had to be there—scrambling on the dusty inner roads while the police barricaded the highway—to know what the pounding heart of hopelessness feels like.

Sued—for talking. The wrong way though, a government calls for equality while performing for purity. The picture has demon faces on it. Liked.

Starved faces, hollow eyes—how should I stand when they have fallen? Liked, shared—reminded. I could be them, but I am lucky.

Save a family, war in the Middle East. An array of images—don’t forget. Liked. Re-posted. There is a link, click to feed—save. It is clicked but forgotten.

The rainbows—back at it. Flowing colours everywhere, we stand stuck. How to help and not fall into the whispered stares as people try to find out if you are one of them too. Liked, but not shared. It could have been shared.

Switched off—set down. The sky outside is still blue, the air still stale. There is no yearning of a thousand broken voices, so one forgets sometimes. That in the real world, suffering exists to be shared—to be helped. It will go on and on and on—new problem, no solution.

Rhea Mehta is a freshman at the University of Southern California and is majoring in Theatre. She’s passionate about storytelling and engages in visual art and theatre design along with writing.