The lights under the laptop keys were our city skylines at night as we flew over the world wide web, catching flights from one website to another, the lights from our lamps as we read the quaint countryside homes who still had their lights on.

The headphones worth a hundred dollars each thudded as the loud music flowed into our ears like the fast and roaring traffic racing through the napping cities and slumbering towns

The bags under our eyes either represented friends and drinking and media or the luggage of depression, who decided to stop by for a visit.

Some viewed the old as oppressive and racist, others saw them as wise and helpful- they had simply been raised in a time where different things happened to be the social norm. And others still simply couldn’t find it in themselves to give a damn, now that it’s the twenty-first century.

We struggled to find the right words and blocked up our throat to keep the wrong words coming out, our unwanted sentences coming up through the cracks like smoke escaping from the burning buildings of our sympathy and niceties.

We labeled ourselves the New Generation because we didn’t know to label ourselves as Worthless or this world’s Saving Grace.

We stuffed our words and sentences and poems and essays and books and speeches full of metaphors and similes and lilting voices and changing expressions and the literary sleight of hand to disguise that we are scared, to give the impression that these people do not scare us and we don’t think of the end of the world on a daily basis, when the truth is our world already ended, it implodes upon itself every time there’s a shooting or a new terror or we simply witness cruelty and hatred.

We call ourselves the New Generation but really we are the Old Generation reincarnated, like the phoenix rising from the ashes of a destroyed world just to set fire to it again one day.