Caged
2021
The mouse scurried around the cage, kicking up wood chips behind it, its milky white fur dirtied by dirt and food pebbles. George peered through the plastic bars, his eyes following the diminutive creature as it went about its day, although his mind was on other things.
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This was his first day off work in four weeks. It had been so long since he wasn’t working that he didn’t really know what to do with himself. Every day felt the same, from dawn to dusk to dawn again, and he would often ask himself why he continued to devote his life to the most mundane job in the world. He felt trapped, trapped in an endless cycle of mediocrity and boredom. Maybe someday he could escape his treacherously dull life and find something he loved. Maybe someday he could be free.
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George’s mind came back from the clouds, and he watched as the tiny mouse scampered into a pink toy tunnel in the corner of the cage, with only its face poking out of the miniature arching doorway. George looked at the mouse, and the mouse looked back at George, both with curious expressions on their faces. Perhaps the mouse was not curious, George thought to himself, but rather hateful, excited, or any other variety of emotions. Perhaps the only reason George thought the mouse looked curious was because the expression on the mouse’s face was the same look that George has when he is curious.
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He felt bad for the mouse. After all, it was trapped in a little plastic world where it couldn’t go anywhere beyond the walls of the cage. George on the other hand, could go anywhere he wanted. At least that’s what he thought. Then, George had another thought. Maybe to this mouse, the cage was its entire world, and as far as it was concerned, it could go anywhere it wanted to in its world, while everything outside was unreachable, no matter how much it wanted to go there. Similar to how outer space was unreachable to George, no matter how much he would like to see it.
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The mouse is like me, George realized. It's stuck in its little fake world, where it is forced to repeat the same things over and over again. It wishes it could escape, but deep down it knows it never will. Eventually the mouse will die, in the same cage it was born into, and the world will be no different without it. Another mouse will come in to replace the old one, and that mouse’s fate will be exactly the same.
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George spent an hour staring at the mouse in the cage before leaving the pet store, barely hearing the ring of the bell atop the doorway as he stepped onto the pavement. He trotted down the street towards his house, embroiled in his crisis of existence, while the little mouse scuttled from the pink tunnel to a blue one.