[A thirty-year-old man with a hip hairstyle and clothes. He looks timid, but speaks with firmness despite his strong accent.]
“In my country you have to stand in line for everything… for bread, for gas, to see a doctor.
It’s a way of life… people stand in line and gossip or play games, they flirt, or even get drunk.
But I never got used to it. I hated feeling like a number, one more letter in a long sentence and with no other function but to wait, and wait, and wait…
To be clear, I’m not against order or civility, but I had the feeling those lines were not really necessary, that they were there just to give us something to do, to keep us controlled and away from any subversive tendencies.
Of course, I didn’t say that out loud. They would have laughed at me… Or worse.
In the end, it was the lines that made me realize immigrating was the only way I could live with dignity. And so I ended up in this country… don’t ask me how.
I was so happy, I felt so free… for the first time. Free to walk down the street hand-in-hand with my boyfriend.
And yes, there were lines here too, but these were different. Optional. Like when you go to a place for brunch and the line is too long, so you just decide to go somewhere else.
But, the other day, my boyfriend insisted on going to see one of those summer blockbusters. You know, the kind of movies that are so hyped it’s almost a social imperative to watch them.
And we went on opening day.
We got to the multiplex roughly two hours early. We’d planned to buy the tickets and then have some dinner.
But the line to the ticket window wrapped around the block.
I asked my boyfriend if we could try again another day but he wasn’t budging.
And I didn’t complain.
As we took our place, a familiar sadness soon engulfed me; the sadness of standing in a line… but this felt even worse, because I wasn’t waiting for bread or a doctor, I was waiting to see some movie.
I realized we were being duped by a system not much different from my country’s…
We were free to watch another movie (or have lunch in another restaurant), but we were in that file forced by the artificial necessity of being part of the hype, of experiencing, first-hand, what everyone else was talking about. Oh, and being seen while doing it. We craved to belong to something bigger than ourselves; a movie, a sports event, a concert… even voting. Something we could contribute to with very little effort.
We just had to get in line and become a number.
That’s what we did that Friday when we waited for an hour to contribute to the highest grossing opening of all time…until now.
Truth to be said… the movie sucked balls.”
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Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016