An Unfathomable Life

uno

It is an incomprehensible fact that at least 80% of humanity live on less than £6.44 a day.

That movie you just watched on an illegal website? You just cheated a poorly paid actor out of their money.

That song you just downloaded illegally for free? An unnoticed guitar player who contributed to the album is unable to buy food for their family.

Yet the thing is, we do these things everyday because they are normal, everyday things to do. We do them without thinking about the awful consequences.

Most people in my class want to be doctors, authors, dancers, etc. when they grow up. Their aims and goals are to be famous. To make an imprint on the world.

Alas, this world? It's a selfish one.

And my goal? To take one person out of the seven billion and make them realise how corrupt our society is. To manage to get someone to try and help our world.

Because it isn't a realistic dream that a raven haired girl with blue eyes and a huge smile will change the world.

London during autumn is cold, even inside Starbucks, I realised and wrapped my cardigan tighter around me while I carried on writing my auto biography in my worn out leather bound note book.

On the front of the notebook, in big magazine cut out letters, it read:

"An unfathomable life" - the title of my autobiography.

My fluffy white gloves made it hard for me to hold the scalding hot coffee cup in my hands but it was too cold to take them off which proved a problem.

It was so hard, in fact, to hold the cup in my hands, that I almost spilled its content all over my pleated black school skirt.

I was in my last year of Royal Eagle Secondary School. It was a school for boys and girls, with a horrendous uniform, complete with a scratchy tie that strangled the neck. The neighbourhood in which my school was in and that I lived in only thought of the school as a home for pretentious and rich snobs.

Which on a certain scale, was not far from the truth.

I liked to think of myself as the one humble and down-to-earth girl there, although I did know that in the end, I was probably just as bad.

There was a small chime as the Starbucks door opened and I noticed a girl from my school (in the year below) strut in. She sat with her friends at a table further back and I tucked my notebook into my school bag.

My nose crinkled up when I took a sip from the coffee as I realised for the 100th time that I hated Starbucks coffee.

But it was warm, and there was a Starbucks on every street, one very close to my school, so I made the reoccurring mistake of going here time and time again.

It was a problem, because the coffee was so expensive but I could be spending that money on someone who needed it more.

That was my issue. I wanted to save the world. I really did. But I didn't know how. And I seemed to always do the wrong thing.

I stood up and threw the remains of my coffee away. Always, always doing the wrong thing. As soon as the contents had been spilled, a mental list of a thousand and one useful things that I could have done with that coffee piled up in my brain.

I walked out of the coffee place, the bell that hung above the door ringing as it opened and shut. The weather seemed to attack me as I slid and slipped over the icy sheets covering the pavement.

A newsstand caught my attention a little further up my road.

There was a newspaper there (well, of course) but I couldn't pay any attention the what the article was about as one word stood out to me, consuming all of y interest.

Unfathomable.

It was rare that I found that word written in any books, magazines or newspapers.

In fact, this had been the first time I ever came across the full word just sitting there in front of me.

Without a second thought, I bought the newspaper and ran all the way home.

My fingers had shook with excitement while I fumbled around and managed to get inside my house.

It was stupid, I do realise, but at the time? Words were everything.

That afternoon was spent with me taking off all the blu-tack that was stuck into all the word cut-outs that I put up on my wall. I rearranged them, placing my new one right in the middle.

I never understood why the word unfathomable stood out for me so much. It was just more important then the others.

I think that in this selfish and cruel world we don't understand the true importance of words because their significance to mankind, whatever the language, is really quite unfathomable.