S.A.D.

Today I walked down the street in the bitter cold. The wind picked up as I crossed a parking lot and carried myself down another road. The muscles in my back were stiff and sore, but I pressed on around a corner and down another road. Another parking lot lead me to as yet another avenue as the snow began fall. This one was longer, however, and as I pushed forward the wind blew harder still, my lips chapped and fingers shrunken inside my gloves clinging to the warmth radiating weakly from my palm. I passed many persons as I plodded along, some familiar others new to this bleak, white and grey sort of purgatory. Finally, I crossed a busy street and arrived at the end of the first leg of the journey of which I was only too conscious to remove myself from.
Now began the waiting game. So I stood there, in the wind, in the snow neither grinning nor frowning. Neither anxious nor hesitant. Neither concerned nor ambivolent, but always painfully aware. I waited. I looked at the others who had gathered to share in our collective predicament. Not really so much a team, but rather a group of sympathizers who could only go so far as to do each other the favor of not stepping on each others feet. I stood out in front like a scout. My face remained as stone as I stared out into the white abyss waiting for a ray of light, but the cold did not fade and the so called 'chariot of the people' was slow in coming. So I stood still and waited.
I shut my eyes wishing somehow that the bus would come or that it wouldn't. I wasn't sure which, and it was in that moment of doubt that finally like some sort of half assed, half hearted, back handed miracle. The grey sardine can that was this city's 'chariot of the not quite so well financed' screeched and stopped in front of the lightly frozen group.
I stepped gingerly and waited my turn, but some of my fellow citizens were too eager and even broke the group's only unspoken rule. I winced in pain as the heal of a hardened work boot came down on my toe.
I stood patiently. At last it was my turn to ascend the steps of the awaiting carriage, but alas people were already crammed out as far as any could fit, and the driver shut the doors and pulled away. So I stood there frozen. My back sore, my foot in pain, my mind trapped within the confines of its own corporeal being. Straining, begging for some change, some sign, some signal, anything to let it free from this drabbest of the drab prisons. This was the morning of the workday commuter. But like so many before me, I did not yell. I did not lash out. I did not so much as groan as I was pushed toward a future of brutally tedious, mind numbing repetitiveness. Society could not crush my spirit, however, for at that moment I knew that inside I always already broken. So I stood quietly and waited.