by Ksenia Vlasova-Kuznetsova
Garrett Newman took the A bus every morning where each day he was greeted with the same sight. People of different cultures, backgrounds, with different jobs who mingled together on the bus. They were all different, all unique – because as the rightful saying goes, everybody is unique.
Unsurprisingly, they all had one thing in common. The adults, the seniors, who usually denied this fact, and children were all staring at their phones. People in headphones, people taking a call, people playing a game; all were preoccupied with their gadgets. Such is the society we live in..
So, on a cold windy March morning, Garrett Newman was waiting for the bus. His woolen olive scarf was wound tightly around his neck. His peacoat was thick and toasty, but his teeth were chattering and his nose matched the red poppy pin that he wore all year, regardless of the fact that it wasn’t Remembrance Day. Birds were chirping and the faint sound of traffic could be heard from the bus stop as the city began to wake.. Wet snow still covered the pavement and feeble trees vainly tried to sprout new leaves. It had been a harsh winter and it would be a hopeless spring. Garrett shivered. Finally, the bus came. The sickly yellow paint was peeling off the side and an advert which had been spray painted over numerous times was peeking through. The doors unwillingly slid open and Garrett stepped over the puddle of muddy water onto the bus.
Immediately he relaxed. The collective body heat and general toasty-ness of the bus warmed his frozen limbs. His shoulders slumped as he shook out his legs and then his arms. The heat which spread through his body had improved his mood. Although Garrett did not think of himself as an aggressive person, he genuinely wanted to murder someone after reading in the morning paper that one of his all time favorite authors had passed away. But Garrett’s good mood would not last. As soon as he looked up, he was thrown face first into reality. His gaze landed on the people absorbed with their phones, which caused his mood to drop to near-murderous again. When would these people realize that their phones were a barrier between themselves and a better future? Their phones took up so much of their time that they had no time to do anything productive, improve the world nor themselves. They were the future, and this was not a future Garrett wanted for the world.
All of a sudden, Garrett’s gaze landed on a young girl whose eyes were not locked onto her phone. She was gazing outside the window, her eyes glazed over, her gadget on her lap. Her mother was sitting next to her, tapping away on her own phone. Garrett’s heart sped up. Was this girl like him? Did she see that we were all trapped in a universe that was dedicated to social media? Did she want it to end as much as him? No. It couldn’t be possible. For as long as he could remember, Garrett had been searching for a friend, a comrade, a person who understood his plea to help the world. Garrett remembered as a child trying to bond over a book with a classmate, who instead just laughed asking him why he wasn’t on Instagram. Yet the young girl was real and she was here. Her curly hair had been pulled up into a messy ponytail and her fingers were toying with the phone in her lap. She was looking at the landscape outside the bus window.
However, Garrett noticed that the trees flying by and the abandoned fields were not catching her gaze. Her eyes were glazed over, and Garrett guessed that she didn’t even see the trees and the fields. He wondered what she was pondering over. Suddenly rain started pouring outside the bus. A cold shower melting the splotches of dirty snow and breaking up the reflections of the grey sky that was mirrored in the muddy puddles. Raindrops chasing each other down the window panes, unbeknownst to the gruesome fate that was the dirty asphalt awaiting them. The girl did not seem to notice the crying sky, and continued to look beyond the fields and the trees, unfazed. Her sneakers were barely reaching the bus floor, and her legs were dangling off the bus seat like they would’ve been dangling off a swing maybe 40 years ago.
The bus abruptly came to a halt and the girl shook her mother’s arm, who without looking up, stood up and grabbed her bag. She motioned for her daughter to follow her as she headed for the crowd of people trying to descend the bus. The girl wrapped her arms around herself as she was only wearing a thin hoodie, and stuffed her phone into her back pocket. It was the next sentence that she uttered, and the only words that Garrett would ever hear her say, that absolutely shattered his heart and hope to ever be understood. The world seemed to slow down as the girl turned her head towards her mother and muttered in the most uninterested voice Garrett thought he would ever hear, “Mom, my phone died. I need a charger.”
It was only then that Garrett realized that he was alone in this battle against electronics. He thought he had finally found an accomplice, but he had been tricked. There was no hope for anyone. There is no hope for anyone. Unless we wake up. Wake up from this blinding lie that is social media. From this need to post or check the internet every day. From this addiction to our phones. We must see that we are getting nowhere with our virtual lives and we should rather concentrate on our real lives amongst this messed up world. We may not be perfect and the world that surrounds may not be perfect either, but we must learn to live in it one way or another. Else, we will destroy what humankind was born into. Although it is the society that is at fault, not the gadgets, we must wake up and realize that in order to turn our society into something we could live in, we must turn away from our phones to accept that our fate lies in our hands only, and not in our phones’.
