What Would You Do to Feel Alive?

We all choose our cages. Mine just happens to be freedom.

Photo by Warren on Unsplash

Under the overpass, I can see only a sliver of the sky. A thin thread stretching across the concrete ceiling, a reminder of something vast and unreachable. To most people, it’s just a patch of blue, but to me, that strip of sky is everything — a reminder of all that’s above, all that’s beyond, yet separated from me by this fortress of stone and steel.

I’ve been here for days now, counting the cars as they rumble overhead, feeling the vibrations in the ground beneath my back. They’re a steady, mechanical heartbeat, a reminder of a world still rushing somewhere I no longer belong. Or perhaps never did.

People pass by, sometimes close enough that I can see the discomfort flicker in their eyes before they look away. I’ve become invisible in my visibility — just another shape in the city’s shadow. They say they see people like me all the time, and yet they never really see us, do they? We’re the ghosts of their own unacknowledged fears. Invisibility has a strange clarity to it; you begin to see the world in sharper relief when no one is looking back.

But what most people don’t realize is that I wasn’t always here. I had what they would call a normal life — a home, a career, a family. I was someone who would have once…