The treatment of a person in a place, in a time, in a way that befits is always considered in a context from the outside in. Said person wants to be seen as themselves, the little boy or girl they internally agree that they are. The good person, the person their parents always wanted them to be, the active person, the whole person. The together person. Lest they be judged incorrectly. The context is the bubble; the encircling shade that decides for itself how the person will be perceived how that person will be associated, forever remembered.

Contextually, they are so privileged in this city where there are slums and the advertisements are shocking in their truth. Shocking in their necessity but shocking in their dark humour and brutal irony. Who has time for insurance at the best of times, who has time for considering what 'if's' in the daily demands of survival. Does anyone here need to be told that tomorrow is not promised. So maybe the message is for him. Maybe he's hallucinating a divine message that sums up how lucky he is to be here and to see this, even if he can tell himself that at home he is poor and at home he has no community and home has been his only lucky draw in the face of the world's hardships. The opportunity to travel here has come from work, he never paid for it. So there is his skill, his own ambition and guile to find and be offered work that will present to him a small truth of a country and small truth about random chance. Is anything ever promised? It's barely even promised that he would return, this country is not of his heritage, not in his holiday plans despite it's beauty.

How honest does one need to be with themselves before they travel to any such place from the western world, leaving a decently tough struggle of a life to see a unimaginable struggle for a life. There is the rub that the unimaginable is unimaginable... "They are such happy and welcoming people" he hears a lot, but all he thinks is "Privilege is beguiling, hierarchies are unavoidable, tourism is business, 'warm and welcoming' equals pride in national representation and good reviews equal money" The unimaginable is unimaginable because problems seem unfixable and true involvement is an abyss of time and thought and emotion.

The plane ride home the struggle with platitudes is real, 'amazing place with such beautiful people and such hardship' What do you say. The land is beautiful. The people are real people, really real; nice, mean, honest, liars, creative, destructive, communal, individual, contradictions, surviving. The people are surviving. I cannot help them in that survival in very many meaningful ways. I can acknowledge their survival is different, harder, more difficult. More or less real? To me it seems more, to them, mine seems more. Random chance can be unkind. Random chance cannot be unkind. One born every minute. Random. Chance. 

He laid out the change as he thought how escape was near, the escape he had found on the cheap. The cheap that would never be cheap enough but its value would be worth its weight in gold. He considers how lucky he is, no dependents, no contractual obligations, none of life's anchors. How free he is, how adrift he isn't. How the sight of the change on the table, of his 'savings' are a little token of his commitment to his escape but also a view into his future after 5 weeks of flights and sun and new culture. He's grasping at the offer of leaving who he is behind, trying not to judge himself for creating his own poverty. 

He leaves the house into a rainy November day, with no idea how he will get to work. He's calculated how he could maybe manage using buses and, therefore will be late, but only if he can add just a few pence to his oystercard. Or he could just walk, walking could be a good way to punish himself for not having any clue how to handle his money. For pretending to himself that he could enjoy spending on that big work lunch 3 weeks earlier. Lunch is out the window this week. He still has a roof over his head though, he covered his rent for the month. Why can he not get through to himself that no matter how much he works that he is still poor, still in debt, in the most expensive city in the world. He's feels so lucky as his heart beats out of his chest, that he has a roof over his head, clothes on his back, a working mobile, a job; but that he can't get to work today. He can't eat today. But he's going on holiday in two weeks. As a pay check will land the day he flies and that temporary money will carry him over the five weeks and onto the plane home.

The money he cannot keep a handle on, he will be able to manage in another person's country for 5 weeks. Because the pound is so strong, because his country of birth leaves him privileged. The stock market deigns his country to be rich, first world, western, developed. Capitalist. Enforcers of a worldwide system that benefits the creators. Easy to conceive, bloody to create, insidious to maintain. He will step on the soil of a land that will embrace his tourism, he will distance himself from a life he created, a life he disowns heavy in the knowledge of his empowered state to be able to disown it. The little he's able to earn at home brings much to this new continent. He feels an urge to embrace being ripped off, please take him for all he's worth, use it to improve your shop. Use it improve your families lives. Use it to give yourself a fighting chance to disown your life, if you so please. Can he offer freedom? Is the freedom he so desires the perspective of a spoilt privileged child who cannot see what he has already, enjoy what has been given too freely. He holds his phone in his hand to calculate the exchange rate, as he stands in a shop barefooted, monolingual, buying sunglasses and shower gel. The child of the shop owner smiles at him. Also barefoot, wiggling her toes, also monolingual. Her life will be something he can't imagine, he hope it's blessed, with all his heart. He doesn't know who to thank in his ability to be here and not be judged as he believes in no god. He donates to their freedom, puts on his sunglasses. He hopes they are free, beyond his prison of a capitalist world view. That they never experience his loneliness, how adrift he is, his need for freedom. He doesn't know who to thank. So he thanks them in their language, profusely. The least he could do.