As I watched the give and take of traffic downtown, I realized that people who drove these cars mostly had purposes that were obvious to others: they had jobs, errands, places to go, things to see. For my own life, it was up to me what my purpose for standing there was. As an elevated train sped by on tracks nearby, I thought that the train was made with purpose, to help people with purposes, to aid people who had a direction to their life, a place to go.

For myself, I had a purpose, but if someone were to look at me they would instantly equate me with those in life who had no purpose. To them, life was like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces that obviously fit or obviously didn’t. Most wouldn’t admit it, but if there was someone who wasn’t a piece that fit, they looked down on them in the extreme. For me, I was putting the pieces of the puzzle together, I was looking what the puzzle was as it came together.

What was coming together was something awful but beautiful. It was an image of workers and consumers, of people who were obvious haves and obvious have-nots, with the haves doing their best to extract as much pleasure out of life as the have-nots toiled for them in decreasing numbers, the working class suffering more and more as they disappeared into the cracks of society. The suffering of humanity, the groaning of the Earth under the thrall of humankind was a terrible thing, and it was easy to blame the few, or the many, or those in between who did nothing to stop the horror.

However, the image coming together was a humanity that blamed others, whoever the most obvious other was. Men retreated into their lives, into their phones, and they blasted others on social media platforms that hung in the ever-present Internet like a miasma-ghost. Most of those who walked these streets, who drove these cars, who rode these trains knew there was something wrong, but they mostly had an excuse to be powerless to change it, or to exercise their power for their own exclusive betterment, or to retreat into the teetering scaffolding of political ideology that built a disastrous, misshapen world.

People found ways to just barely get by, just like me. As long as people were barely getting by, this was enough for those who retreated into the after-work drink, their phones and their streaming movies, their feigned ignorance, their blame, and their eye-popping orgasms. It was enough to just barely get by, as long as they weren’t one of the ones just barely getting by. But the world can only just barely get by for so long before it collapses in a heap, and people knew this. Everyone knew this. Geniuses and idiots alike knew this.

I blamed myself; I blamed myself for everything. It was my job to write, to show the world a better way, and it would be easy to blame others for not reading me, but perhaps I didn’t write enough, perhaps I didn’t have good enough ideas, perhaps I didn’t even have the knowledge to formulate good enough ideas to save this world. I doubted my life, my mythos, my purpose, and my pain. I saw that people fit into the jigsaw puzzle that we painted for them, that we wrote, drew, and photographed into existence; each piece was painted by us, colored by us; we wrote the stories that people read, photographed the pictures people deemed important.

We had to draw a better picture, write a better story. Because though the bustle of the city seemed the same as always, under the surface it was dying a painful death, it knew its demise was imminent. Men hailed cabs, buses picked up people, this happened the same as always, but cancers were snaking through society under its skin, and it had been on life support for a long time now. The Earth would mourn its own demise with bloodshed, and if we cried tears for it, it would be our fault, the blood of the Earth’s inhabitants would be on our hands for our shortcomings, our failure to paint a better puzzle. It was our doing, our lack of doing that would bring this to an end, and in the end we would probably be blamed for it, if humans were smart enough to point the finger at those most responsible.

So it was essential to write, to take the blame for the disease beneath the surface, to take the heat. Because only in taking the heat can one put oneself in a position to come up with an alternative, something better. I knew that others would blame us, and I knew that we had to accept the blame as we so richly deserved. It was our job to make a puzzle that fit, and we had scattered the pieces.