The first thing I had notice when I walk into my apartment is that the walls are not beige as I had expected. They are cream. Now you might say they're the same and that even if there was a difference, the slight difference wasn't enough to matter. Except this is wrong because any incredibly devestating moment in my life has been accompanied by a cream envelope with a crimson seal. I can't spend one night here, let alone the next couple years it will take for me to earn enough points to buy a different place.
Luckily, the 22nd Division "of age" gift from the government isn't just a Purpose, rather also a sum of 2,000 points. It seems like a lot but it runs out quickly when you have food, bills, and other necessities to pay for. If you don't get a high paying Purpose, the first few years are impossible and you find yourself scourging for food. If it weren't for the fact that homelessness is ristricted by law, people would be all over the street. Anyone seen living in a grotesque or inhumane manner with no way out is taken to Desperto and killed, aparentally for the good of everyone. When a city starts to look poor, it reflects it, according to the Protectors.
In any case, however, the first purchase I make with my 2,000 points is a bucket of bluegreen paint along with those roll paint brushes at the supply stoor squished between my apartment building and the next one. This will take all night but I do not care. I won't be able to sleep at any rate, seeing as I will be receiving my Purpose assignment tomorrow. I really don't want it.... I don't want to ever see another cream envelope and I don't want to open it knowing that any future I could choose for myself is over the second I read the words on the page.
I suddenly realize that my future has always been anything I wanted it to be in my eyes. I have always known, or at least thought, that it was up to me. I didn't realize that this wasn't true until today, in all honesty. From tomorrow on out, my entire life will be predictable. No children, unless I'm a Breeder. A husband if I apply for companionship. Promotions planned out to the day so that there is room for new jobs and people filling the ones that have no people for them anymore. This will be my life. This will be me.
It's moments like these that I think of my mom. Of how she felt when she was going through this and what she thought when she opened her cream envelope to find that she only had 15 years of life left in here. Of what she thought about the fact that to the government, she was nothing more than a child birther. Someone that belonged at home, in a kitchen.
The thought makes me want to throw the paint across the room at the cream walls but that would only make another mess in my day. Instead, I breath, control my impossible temper and pour the pain into a paint plate or whatever it is, rolling the roller brush in it and beginning to change the walls. I only bought enough paint for my bedroom because I know it'll take me a week to finish the apartment and I can live in it as long as I don't sleep in a room that reminds me of the enemy.
What am I even saying? The government isn't my enemy, rather they are my family. I belong in the 22nd Division as much as anyone else here and it is home, no matter how many things are wrong with hit. Nothing can be perfect can it?
I sigh, finishing up with one wall and continuing onto the next one. It will be a long night.
............................................................................................................................................................................
I wake up on the makeshift cot in my bedroom that is comfortable enough to sleep in until I earn enough points to get a bed. For a moment it feels like anyt other day in which I would wake up and go make breakfast for the family before heading off to school. It seems as if I hadn't taken my aptitude test yet. But only for a moment. Because I know that there is a cream colored envelope waiting for me just by the door where the mail man slipped it under.
