Living in the red

It is very simple. Even, most people who call themselves disorganised managed to do it right. But when at ungodly hours, I drag my bike along isolated roads, looking for 24-hour petrol bunks, I know something is wrong with me.
It is then that i feel like the needle on the fuel indicator that has been veering around the 'red' area. It has been a short life, I think, but nevertheless it is flashing in front of my eyes. From one end of the red to the other, never in the white, mind you.
Yes, I know totally well how it is to be that needle.
The red is where I live. The brink chases me and I race just a little bit more.
And each time when the brink has crossed me and looks back triumphantly it finds me...
Staring at the phone that is not more than an alarm.
Digging into the innards of my bag/purse searching desperately for the money that I probably have forgotten about.
Pushing my bike.

Citizen

There must have been a time when it was all out in the open.
Stretched out proudly, letting the rays of the sun and the drops of the rain touch every single pore and side of its existence.
I don't remember such a time but I would like to believe that it was there somewhere as uni-dimensional spaces make me feel claustrophobic.
It is almost akin to the feeling I get when the a phone rings continuously, near my ears. It is the feeling of an unanswered emptiness.
So I tell myself: This is how it must have happened...
There was this yellow city somewhere at a time when corners and crevices were allowed to exist. All the colours danced in and out and around the city, but I call it yellow because yellow registers. Every morning, people in the city could see the colours floating around in various shapes and colours. And it stayed that way till it went to sleep when it was warm and took up the colour of dreams.
One day, the clean-up warriors arrived. "Oh so much colour. Can we sweep it off somewhere?" Thank god the city had aforementioned corners and crevices. Two years of dedicated work was all it took for them to sweep away all the colours into these spaces.
For people who missed the colours, these spaces became welcome deviations.
Then the straighten-up warriors marched in. "Oh what are all these corners and crevices for? We need to smoothen things up." So, within three more years of focussed efforts, all the corners and crevices were stitched up.
That is how it must have come about.
That here I am in a smooth and straight city. Where colours hid into the corners and corners disappeared in the vastness of possibilities.