I wonder what this looks like from the outside. - FLASH FICTION

I wrote this in my final year at high school. I think that is fairly self-explanatory. 

I wonder what this looks like from the outside. What must we look like to other people? We are ridiculous, we are cliches. - I want to shout it. 

We complain about the panic in our minds that we cannot shake, we procrastinate and spend our time like children and then try to face deadlines with the air of adult. We make the same mistakes as those before us, scorning the advice given by those whose job it is to care. Because it is never really clear who actually cares.

We scrape at the walls of our lives to search for originality and, left with bleeding fingernails and empty hands, we rebel in the same way that everyone else does. And the rebellion does not taste like rebellion.

Our shelter is free and there are people whose job it is to look out for us and we follow the mapped of years of education, walking the lines of colour coded timetables with reluctance and frustration.

But from the inside it does not feel like a ‘we’. There is no collective. That is what humans do best; group people together and refuse to see their faces. I am on a conveyor belt surrounded by a thousand seemingly identical humans- to our teachers, we are just names with faces. Faces pass by each year.

And everything is underlined by that sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. That gnawing knowing that one day I will reach the cliff, and stand on the precipice and look out at the sea. There are no roads in the sea. There will be no plan or timetable or knowledge of what lies ahead. I will jump or more likely be pushed into the waters, and then my life will be lived in the abyss. Floating.