[So, holiday time means I get to clean out my room, amongst other things, and so random stuff keeps cropping up... I thought I'd take a trip down memory lane w/ some of my prize writing pieces from aaaaages back, actually the only two I could find, of which this is the first.
A little bit of background might help: we'd just watched Freedom Writers, and so that's where most of the mood is, and I know the others in the class all had stories which reflected the same kind of thing, if not exploring the same topic. It's from grade 8, so obviously the writing style needs maturity, but I've kept it as true to the original as possible. My topic of choice was, simply, "Life in the Big City", and I think I did reasonably well considering all of these are kept to a max word count.]
There is a place which is dreamt about. Those hard workers in yonder fields, the ones who spend their days manhandling the smelliest breeds man domesticated, hammering away at their beloved iron harvesters as their fathers' fathers' fathers did, toiling day after day: those chaps tell their home-educated sons and daughters not only about God, and kindness, and how to grow asparagus, but also about this dreamt-of life. Their misconceptions, however, are as boundless as their hopes.
Welcome to the Big City. Your life is already over.
It looks brilliant from a distance, but, then again, you can't judge a hardcore porno mag by its cover. Those skyscrapers look so flashy, but in reality they loom over the putrid streets like giant, inanimate prison wardens. Those stuck-up, self-centered, suit-toting snobs of Virgin Mobile look at life like any old soulless passer-by would look at the silver they work in. Their matrix of pixelated lights tells nothing of the lives below.
Down here, life is lived like nowhere else on the planet. Looking across the cold tarmac stained with blood and shattered glass, one can see the dirty people, those no-hopers who can do nothing that will ever amount to anything in their short, miserable lives. Why indeed do they live? There is no reason for it.
You can see the factory girls in their twilight gear, selling their bodies for all that it takes to stay alive. Under the soft, flickering neon lights, those n*****s hang out in their Lee Fontino shirts, wild personalities not given away in anything they do. It is them responsible for the obscenities sprayed on the walls inside which the Nips make daily trade, those ruins with their ripped-off Coca-Cola ads where there are boxes upstairs hiding the crack. Then, there are the Latinos, with missing teeth and shaven heads, no longer holding any traces of the culture they came from.
It's not only the people. Also hidden from the panoramic sweeps showcasing urban conquest are the spaces behind the brick walls; behind the concrete shadowing the streets. It's fifty-fifty that along any stretch of wall there will be a hidden club, chop shop, or some weed parlour. These people live their lives in such confined spaces.
There are secret, uni-racial nightclubs where the same throat-throbbing music pumps around the metropol, accompanied by strobes and half-naked bodies. One can take their freshly-gotten, sparkling car, drive it round the back, and it will be untraceable before you can say, "Toyota". You can get to the underground dealer, where the "brothas in da hood" will outfit your frame with the best of dinner-plate-sized specs, "genuine" fake shirts of varying hues, "don't mess with me" sneakers, and cold steel which holds twelve in the mag, straight off the USMC production line.
The epitome of capitalism will leave you stranded in the rubbish dump of evolution's rejects, and no-one will give a damn.
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