Dedicated to.. | Chapter 11: Us / Lost Souls (Epilogue Pt 1.)

A Collection of Short Stories on the Flower That Grew From Concrete

The world had gone mad, and so did everyone with it.

We were all so eager to experience something spiritual or exciting.

We were bored with our everyday life, knowing that the next forty years would be spent in a fluorescent-lit office cubicle, or if you were lucky enough, a corner office with a view.

Even then, we couldn’t succeed ourselves out of depression.

Everyone had a vice — a substance to drown in. Some way to escape, some way to prescribe ourselves a medication of detachment, to deal with the trauma of our lives. It was an epidemic fueled by society. Society had made it readily available. We didn’t have to go searching. Whatever we needed, whatever vice of choice, whatever toxic coping behavior, was at our fingertips.

It was a way to cope with the stress of living in a country rampant with poverty, structural inequities, and unattended mental illness.

It’s how the system kept us trapped. We were trapped in ourselves and in the system — a symptom or cause? The only diagnostic was to find a way to disconnect, no matter how brief the experience.

But then what were the consequences when you no longer believed in society? When you no longer participated in the system?

Depressed and weary, we choose to forget the issues we had.

We were addicted to the cycle. Lives were lost trying to find a way out of it.

Trauma. Grief. The world kept on.

There was darkness. We searched for light.

We were lost, souls. We were only human, cowards at best.

DEDICATED TO..

is a collection of flash fiction short stories on the stages of life we grow through, the battle of youthfulness, and the transition into adulthood.