Signs
By Alice / Spinebreakers Crew
I’ve been travelling down this dusty road my entire life, completely on my own. There is one road sign that I find myself repeatedly hesitating over. It’s on the right hand side, about nine miles in from the junction. Dirty orange with big black letters reading:
GIVE UP NOW
I find that there are signs placed every mile, the first two no longer mean anything to me. I seem to remember that they’re placed oddly, low on the ground in the centre of the road. I don’t think they’re even written in English. Anyway, I haven’t been back to them for years now.
I’ve gone past 15 miles a few times, but the signs are blank. If you walk far enough you get dizzy and black out.
GIVE UP NOW
*
The dust embeds in my cheek, scratching the skin under my eye. It’s agonisingly painful, laying flat on the road, mangled like a victim in a car crash. I like the idea of dying, moving on to a new road, being able to breath new air, study new signs. But somehow I don’t want to tear myself away from this sign. Not until I’ve figured it out. And believe me when I say that I have tried. How many times have I rearranged the letters? How many times have I substituted in numbers for letters, symbols, making new words, phrases, meanings? It has to mean something. I look up at it now. The large black print amuses me, the way it stands out against the orange, rebelling to be different, longing to be different, how pointless it all seems. I scrape the grit from my skin and begin to move. I run at a slow pace for two miles, passing two more orange signs, dust surrounds my feet like flies to a light, they run with me, dropping in and out as they please, the sun dances across my exposed body, taunting me. FOOL it screams, GIVE UP NOW
I come across something new 13 miles in, something that I’ve never taken in before. Twisted wires rise up from the ground on either side of me, flowing like tortured snakes up and down, twisting passionately around each other. I follow their movements for the next two miles until I reach mile 15. They give me a good feeling inside. A feeling of luck.
And for the first mile I feel great, sprinting down my road as a free human but soon no matter how fast I run, how hard I try to fight it, I know that I’m not free and that I can’t change my life. Soon, I begin to feel faint, falling down, collapsing into the snakes. I’m caught, my emotions shredded in the barbed wire, precious memories fall victim to this twisted system, the more I struggle, the more it hurts, the deeper the cuts become, the harder it becomes to fight this battle.
GIVE UP NOW