Contextual Mediocrity, Pt. V (The New Aesthetic)

A crisp breeze rolled down the street and nipped at Nicholas's face, and he drew the collar of his jacket up around and his chin and braced himself against the cold.

It was rush hour. All around him, on both sides of the street, pedestrians trudged along back to their homesteads. Working men, men in suits, women in heels, people with coats and blazers and dresses and large hats. None of them looked at each other as they passed, bumping into each other with barely a murmur of apology as they hurried along. Nick saw all this and felt even more despair. He wondered how so many men and women could occupy so small an area and see each other every day, coming and going, yet never even acknowledge them or realize that they were all people, all the same deep down. He wanted to reach out and grab them by their lapels and shout at them, demand that they explain why they had all abandoned their fellow man. An even worse chill was blowing through him, and it wasn't just the weather. It was the cold, impersonal way every person on the street treated each other. For a moment, Nick marveled at the irony of how technology had utterly failed in its one sole purpose: to bring people together. Cell phones and social networking and personal computer tablets. Instant messaging, emails, texts. None of this was improving the way human beings interacted with each other, Nicholas realized. In fact it was having the opposite effect. Technology had revolutionized communication, all right, but it had turned everyone into isolated, solitary beings. A whole new generation of people living a life aesthetic, self-absorbed and tone-deaf. A text has no warmth to it, no real sense of connection or understanding. It is cold and impersonal. It rings false. Friend requests are not friendly. Emails cannot be sealed with a kiss. And you can not hug someone, kiss their lips, feel their heartbeat next to yours, through a video chat. Nicholas watched all the cars rolling up and down the street, breathing and undulating through the natural flow of traffic. It was like a living organism, he noticed, but even the drivers always stared straight ahead or looked at their phones or lit cigarettes. The only time a typical driver on the road ever interacts with another driver, he realized, was out of anger. Someone cut me off. Someone is speeding. Someone forgot to use their turn signal. It was pathetic. Didn't people care about one another anymore?

He saw and felt all these things and shoved his hands in his pockets, looked down at the sidewalk, and began to silently weep as he put one foot in front of the other. Nicholas no longer wanted to be on this planet. He did not want to be alive, not with these people. He thought, what's the point of continuing on if things never get better? If you cannot reach out and touch someone? Humans were not meant to go through this life alone, and what exacerbated his feelings the most was the fact that he had become one of them. He, too, had fallen victim to the new system. Nicholas Allen had been sucked in and now, he feared, he would never return to the real world.

No one paid any mind to the young man shuffling down the street and crying as the sun sunk lower and lower, plunging the world into night.

Ariel sucked down the rest of her margarita in one long, exaggerated slurp and lightly pushed the glass toward the center of the table where it joined the other three. Emily wore a perpetual frown on her face and kept looking around, mostly staring down, occasionally looking back at her friend, wondering if she would say anything. Hoping she would say something first.

The two of them had not spoken in over thirty minutes. Once Ariel put up her walls, it was nearly impossible to tear them down. Emily did not even know how to try. What was especially distressing to her at that moment was the inescapable feeling that she had forgotten how to get through to anyone, be it a total stranger or her best friend.

Ariel opened up her purse and began fishing around. Emily, not without a small degree of hesitation, opened her mouth nervously. “Ariel? Are you leaving?”

No response.

“Hello?”

She reapplied some lipstick and examined herself in pocket mirror.

“Please talk to me. Say anything.”

Ariel straightened her hair and scooted to the edge of the booth. “We are two completely different people. And that's fine, we don't have to be like each other. We don't even have to like each other. What use are friends anyway? I have plenty of friends like you, they never did me any good.”

“You've had a lot to drink. I don't think you should be driving.”

Ariel swayed as she rose, and planted a hand on the table. “I don't think we should meet up anymore. Let me live my life, you do the same.”

Tears welled up in Emily's eyes. Her face started to grow red and puffy.

“Oh, come on.” She rolled her eyes. “Look, it's not that big a deal. Okay?” She flashed a false smile, then whirled around and glided her way toward the door, her steps marked by a drunken swagger.

“Ariel, please don't do this.” But her words fell on deaf ears. She sat in a sort of stunned silence for a moment, and looked around the restaurant. Most of the patrons had left, drunks were now grabbing their keys and shuffling toward the door. She glanced at the bartender, who looked away quickly and pretended he hadn't been listening and observing. He looked back. Their eyes met. He shrugged.

A moment had passed while Emily paid her bill, when suddenly a car horn sounded outside followed by a god-awful screech. She turned on her heel and ran outside.

Nick approached the intersection and wiped tears off his cheeks, sniffing loudly. His heartbeat singularly pushed him along. What happened next was fast and nearly imperceptible. A harsh squeal of brakes, an abruptly loud car horn. A feeling of something extremely heavy and powerful slamming into his side. All of the breath being forced from his lungs. The ground falling away from his feet, a view of the sky that rotated, glimmered in twilight, and then concrete rushing up to meet him. A brief sensation of extreme pain. Blackness.

Ariel Schuler stared straight ahead, unable to believe her eyes. Her knuckles held the steering wheel in a death grip and turned white. For a moment she could not think, was paralyzed by shock, and then quickly yanked her seatbelt off and leaped from the car, ran to where the boy was lying on the ground, unmoving, and her heels nearly slipped in spatters of blood and chunks of hair and flesh that surrounded the body. She had struck him with her car, catapulting him ten feet in the air where he twisted horizontally before colliding with the pavement. His head had hit first.

Suddenly Emily was at her side, crying and hysterical. Ariel merely stared at the lifeless form of the young man. She did not know how much time passed while she tried to make sense of the scenario. A strange silence enveloped the previously chaotic street that deafened Ariel until the faint wail of sirens could be heard from far off, rushing to the scene, but all she could say when the paramedics and eventually police officers arrived, over and over, shaking her head, was “I never saw him.”