You lock the bike downstairs, as you usually do. The key slips away from the lock several times before trigger off the mechanism that will protect you once again from future robberies. You are tired. Your gloves hide sweaty palms. The body knackered after hours and hours of being a small gear inside the colossal machine that is the capitalism. A machine that crushes you down.

Your mind is also jaded, in a way that you would never have expected. Hardware and software stay tangled, interconnected. And yet somehow the energy to combine them feels finite. Limited. Not enough. The machine rests when the soul wanders. And vice versa.
You go up the stairs, with your heavy feet, smelly flesh, and tired brain. Every step sort of resonates without a sound. Why do they sound like you have heard this before?
You have heard this kind of silence in the past.

Another key, another lock, a scarlet door that slides right in front, revealing another set of stairs, these ones carpeted. A dead light coming from the corner.
And you caught the smell. The synesthesia triggers. You are disgusted. Your face receives the neural command to draw a bad grin. You know what’s there to come. The view of pain, fear, and mediocrity. Once again.

And again, you turn that corner in the hallway just to audibly sigh.

Something overcomes you as the backpack falls.

You really want to punch him in the face. You really want to. Maybe not just punch him but grab his neck and put his face into that boiling pot that’s simmering on the fire. Let his skin peel while the burning liquid destroys his face even more while he screams and fights against the disfiguration.

He is already ugly. Not ugly in a way that people would turn heads in the street or stare in the bus. Just nothing to see, nothing interesting to look at. He just fades into the background. Giving him a scar, a pulverized dermis would be giving him a story to tell, he would have survived the trial of his own mundane face. Maybe he would be perceived as a hero a martyr.

No. Stop.

Too dramatic for his pathetic life. Too grand, too ritualistic.

Small talk. You take out the gloves, the hoodie, he is talking. His mouth moves, up and down and his voice starts. Your fingers slide into the wireless headphones and press the middle button for couple of seconds. The electronic music stops to bang in your eardrums. And his voice starts to fill the void.

He is talking looking at the pot in the fire, source of all that awful smell that’s invading everything. He eats the same thing every day. Chicken and rice, with some softened onion and cheap tomato sauce. You cannot eat chicken since you know him. He buys it on sale, just about to expire, and he freezes it. His little brain cannot comprehend the fact that the freezer is not a time stopping machine.

You are not listening.

He is just going on and on about some bullshit.

Ugly socks with sandals and an old tracksuit that is dirty. He slithers his feet when he walks like he has no will to live. He does not have nothing to offer.

Nothing. Someone who has lived with you for a year and yet is a stranger.

Would be best to just finish him right there. Kick him in the guts so he falls in the floor. Keep on kicking him, keep him down, on a fetal position, his pathetic voice begging mercy in his broken English.

You have that primal need, the feral desire of grabbing a knife that lays near and stab him right in the stomach. Feel the blade of the cheap kitchenware crossing the muscle, skin and cartilage, and right after the blood abandoning the fresh wound, elegantly, as you retreat. And his body trying to stay alive, functioning, the metabolic functions shutting down as you stare impassively.

The knife in your hand, the dripping of the red organic element making the brown tiles on the floor dirty.

All those possibilities come to your mind and went away. Vanished in a second.

For a brief moment, you hate yourself. You fear your own thoughts. Scared of what you felt, of what you envisioned yourself performing. A violent act concentrated in a split second. Something horrific, ominous that only you know that could do.

He is the one doing nothing. He might be happy even. Eating his fucking chicken and rice. Burping and making dad noises. Doing nothing. On furlough, being a failure, wasting a year of his own life. Living in a country that does not acknowledge his existence. Living in a country which layers of linguistic complexity go way over his head. Wanting to be something, with no vision, with terrible execution.

Ending up being nothing.

You are the one with the fault. The one who is feeling all this rage. His existence just creates all this desires inside of you. Maybe you are the slave. You are the one who is being guarded in chains, who is under the influence of his deadly aura. A victim of a system who rewards the laziness. The ignorance.

Is just not worth it.

He is already dead anyway.