Crawlers

Day after day, I step outside and walk the streets of the city centre. Sometimes my eyes fixate on the decay and odour that surrounds me. I feel the gaze of a salivating white man on my body when I walk past him on an empty street. My heart starts beating faster at the entrance of the underpass as it echoes from the screams of the bum living there.. Then I walk past a billboard advertising swarowski watches and beer, below them a horde of alcohol smelling beggars.

At Andrássy, a sunglasses-wearing fifty-something speeds past me in a Ferrari. I open my phone and drown in the swamp of sponsored political content. After the „today 6000 acres of rainforest was cut down and 10 more species went extinct” comes an ad from Meta: „consume more and don’t think”

My stomach tightens while my hands clench into fists. Somebody asks how I’m doing, apart from my disillusionment with humanity and hopeless despair, the only thing I can think to answer is, “Yeah, everything’s fine.” On my way home, the person I’m least angry at is the raging homeless man in the underpass.