It’s been a long day. It’s always a long day. That’s a huge understatement. The days are always unbearable, and each moment feels like an eternity. Work, work, work, work, work. Faster, faster, faster, faster, faster! Better, better, better, better, better! I don’t feel like a human. I don’t feel like a human after work is over. I don’t feel like a slave even, I feel like something worse. I feel as though my life is something worse than slavery, worse than death.

I exist in a limbo that even the most wretched souls cannot access. Even though my lungs still breathe. Even though my heart still beats. I cannot convince myself that my lungs still breathe. I cannot convince myself that my heart still beats. Each breath feels like breathing twisted, poking wires. Each beat of my heart feels like instead of blood, my heart is pumping ashes. My veins are filled with ashes. I don’t know how I’ll keep going.

But at least I’m not alone. Or maybe, curse the world that I’m not alone. If I was alone, I would be the only one going through this hell, day in and day out, every single day that I’m alive. If I was alone, no-one else would be suffering. But because I’m not alone, we can all stand in solidarity together, all the billions of people who are working like me, who are trapped under the heavy weight of factory work like me. Because I’m not alone, we can all understand each other, we can all help each other, and we can all be enraged together. And I appreciate that. I appreciate that a lot.

There are crowds of people all around me as I walk. They are all bone-weary, blood-weary, soul-weary. This weariness is so much greater than humans can hold inside them, so much greater than humans can express through any medium at all. Human emotion can never be expressed, only felt and shared. But this is beyond even our understanding, even our conception. It is enough to drive anyone mad. Humans were never meant to feel this ache.

And, despite walking home with my paycheque, my stomach is empty. My stomach is always empty. Not completely empty, my job prevents it from being completely empty. But it’s empty enough for it to hurt, for it to ache, for it to pierce and grate inside me. I hate this constant hunger, this constant, biting emptiness, this constant, screaming need. I hate it but I can do nothing about it. I don’t get paid enough to do anything about it.

I walk with the throngs of the masses. And we all exchange soft, sweet words to each other as we go, striking up conversations despite our weariness. Actually, no, because of our weariness. We all want to pull each other back to life. We want to get our blood flowing again, get our eyes shining again, even if it’s just a little, tiny fraction of a bit.

“Hard day, huh?” the man beside me asks, already knowing the answer but searching anyways.

“Isn’t it ever?” I reply. “Isn’t it always? What about you?”

“Yep,” he tells me. “And I’m so enraged about it. I want to kill someone.”

“I want to kill someone too,” the person beside us chimes in. “I want to kill so many people.”

“How do you think this happened?” I ask. “How do you think everything ended up like this?”

“Greed,” the person responds. “The owners and buyers always want more, want more, want more. They don’t care how many people they crush and how many lives they step on in their constant quest to get more. We’re not anything to them except machines. And so, why would they care about us? Especially if we’ve outlived our use.”

“I know,” I reply. “But still, why can’t things be different?”

“Because society allows people to indulge in their most antisocial desires,” the man replies.

I then make a horrible mistake. I look up into the dark, winter sky. I look up and I see the moon. The moon that we all know to avoid looking at. The moon that we all spend a good portion of our time looking at anyways. The moon that never fails to make us terrified, never fails to make us maddened, never fails to make us scream.

On the bottom right corner of the moon, there is a small, black scar. A dark, desolate line that jaggedly cuts a piece of silver-white from the rest of the silver-white. A crooked, curving black line that has many spindly, hair-like slivers reaching from it to grasp at other parts of the moon’s surface. It is a malignant, malevolent parasite, more than a scar, an ever-growing wound on the surface of the moon. And it serves to show us that not even the moon, not even the moon is safe from the conquests of the rich, from the violence of the cushy and comfortable.

The moon is not meant to be like this. The moon is meant to be pristine, untouched, unmarred. The moon does not want to be built on, to be cut up into pieces by black lines that the comfortable call progress. I know this in my very soul, in all my organs, in the marrow of my bones. I know this because each time the moon brushes against my eyes, and my spirit, it says that it cannot live like this, as a resource for the cushy to use, just as we cannot live as resources for the cushy to use. The moon is meant to shine down on us, untouched by the hands of human colonization, greed, and destruction. It is meant to shine down on us and our spirits are meant to rise and shine back up at it. We are not meant to twist it into something so different from what it was created to be.

If the moon cannot protect itself, then what in this whole universe can protect us?