Morning all and welcome to Monday. Its a chilly one so bundle up cause that wind is fierce. Warm inside let’s start the morning prompt shall we? Timers at the ready and off we go, fifteen minutes and don’t stop until the timer is done. editing can come later.
This is clearly not the beginning of this story. I think first we have to see him in his elite environment and then watch him leave. Then we knock his confidence down til he will except the manual labor job and then this piece would go in. I really like the thought of figuring all the bits out actually. What a great way to start the week.
Monday, December 4th: He stretched out on the bed.
He stretched out on the bed. After a day like today, it felt good to lay flat and to have something soft and supportive beneath him. He figured he must have lifted and carried far more than he had ever lifted and carried before in his entire life just in this one day.
‘Not to mention the deep knee bends so I can lift with my knees instead of my back.’ He told himself.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He could feel his muscles and bones relax into the bed, letting go of the tension he carried. He suspected everything would feel sore in the morning.
‘When I have to do it again.’
He tried not to let the thought trouble him. He always considered himself strong. He was active and wasn’t carrying around extra weight. But he also didn’t do a lot of physical activity. It simply wasn’t required of him. He was simply young and healthy.
When he left, he thought highly of himself. He thought that he would be able to do anything he wanted once he left the confines of his former life behind. The world stretched out vast and unknowable before him. He was raised among the elite classes and had always thought of himself as somewhat superior if only subconsciously.
When he decided to leave and conduct his time of pilgrimage here, he didn’t think it would be difficult, he simply thought it would be interesting in a way the other avenues open to him would not be. He hadn’t counted on the fact that his training left him with no skills usable outside of the elite classes. The jobs he was trained for simply didn’t exist outside his class.
Here he had no marketable skills. Needing to get a job to feed himself and acquire anything beyond the rented room and attached bathroom would require far more effort than he thought it would. The only job he was suitable for was as a human pack animal. He moved boxes from one place to another in spaces too tight for the machinery the others operated so adroitly to reach.
Those operating the machinery were on a level, or even several levels abocve him as they knew how to operate the machinery and had licenses to do so. He had no training and no liscence. So he spent his shift lifting one heavy box after another often walking them down long and narrow corridors and lifting them up onto shelves. Sometimes the shelves were low and he could bend to place them, while other times the shelves were high so he had to climb a ladder to reach them.
It was certainly an experience but not one he was expecting. ‘It was not how I thought I would spend my year away,’ he thought.
As he lay on the bed, letting his body relax from his efforts and attempt to digest the meal he managed to find to feed it, he contemplated other options. He was here to learn something of the world. To experience it in a new way. Spending a year simply moving boxes wouldn’t show him anything.
‘Except that I have no real skills and am not so elite as I thought,’ he told himself. He stared at the ceiling. While it was a valuable lesson and one he could tell to his teachers upon his return, he understood that now. He didn’t think he needed to spend a year lifting boxes to continually learn the same thing. There had to be something he could do. What it was just yet, he couldn’t figure out.
Ten til Midnight 