There’s a sort of thickness to real-life poverty. The smell of it seeps into your clothes, it gets in your hair. Plug your nose and you can taste it. Rancid. Close your eyes and you can hear it, begging you for money. I’d turn off the TV if it didn’t have it’s hands all over my feet.

Call me an ignorant, spoiled American but I couldn’t help breathing a sigh of relief when we got to that mall, away from those stifling, turbid slums. Let’s say it was the anonymity. In those slums you’re a wallet, for sure; but in the mall you’re just a wallet. But more than that, more than the anonymity, or the smells, or anything else, it’s the connectedness that I can’t stand. It’s the no longer being able to hide from the things that you have done. It’s Frankenstein’s monster crawling through you’re window, pleading, begging you to love him because he is from your own body.

It is that darkness of the Self which manifests itself in the absolute destitution of the other that I can not stomach. Why? Because I know that it is the only thing I have given of myself to this world. Listen, You are poor, so I can be wealthy. You live in filth, so that I may live in luxury. You shit in piles of garbage, in order that I should smother myself in excess. I took your house, please accept this trash. I took your money, would you like some shit? I mangled your fingers and crippled your limbs, now where is my thank you?

But in the mall, oh god yes in that mall, it simply doesn’t matter. Who cares about those bastard children, sleeping in their own filth. In the mall I can escape once again, back into those recesses of luxury with which I am so familiar and so often call my home. I can forget about the lives I’ve destroyed.

Who cares about them?
Not me.
I need some new shoes.