The Body Also Takes Its Toll in Bills

I move through life like I’m walking down supermarket aisles just scanning labels, checking expiration dates. Sometimes I wonder if I have one too. A best-before. A use-by.

Lately, I’ve realized that the more often something is purchased, the less I want to keep it. It’s simple: the more frequent my access is to  privilege, the easier it is to forget its value. And so, I’ve started to believe that a person’s schedule becomes a set of barcodes. Time sliced into neat, scannable blocks for someone else to purchase and profit from.

Productivity has become performance. And as I set my alarm straight into an eight-hour work shift, I got to thinking:we used to dream during sleep, now we try to optimize it. Honestly, I should give special recognition to the genius who made unconsciousness a task. I'll take a rain check on that ceremony. Maybe I’ll attend the day we stop calling “growth” the blind embrace of a single ideal, squeezed until the last drop of sap seeps from the trunk.

We live just fine knowing the price of everything and the worth of nothing ,according to Oscar Wilde. It’s true. I notice it each time I pause for a rest and pass a nearby television when commercials just pop in and linger, like companies presenting “knowledge,” filtered through the lens of whoever chooses to believe it's real. After all, there’s that very famous saying: “It all depends on the color of the glass you look through.” Or, more precisely, it depends on the amount of sunlight you’re allowed to receive from your glass cage. A cage that’s more like a cave with a rooftop cracked open halfway. Just opened enough to feel a breeze of injustice, but never wide enough to escape from it.

And then, as we pass aisle 3, we catch a sniff of bread: fresh and just out of the oven. It’s like news, baked with empathy and appealing headlines, though still just the recipe of sensationalism. They say baking bread at home is cheaper than buying it. Sure. I can’t find flaws in that reasoning, but who has the time? Or the flour, even?

Even when there are no windows left in the supermarket, I’m expected to let my time elapse as I continue spending my most precious things that set my value among people: my time and money. Yet from the cracks in the system, the ones too obvious to patch up, I can still catch a glimpse of the outside. And what do I see? The buildings that watched me grow up, now charging me rent. The little flower pots I once decorated on the porch, are now withered. And families are just divided into white, fresh paint fences. No questions are to be asked by neighbors, who seem unbothered by others' small property, or their pocket, in pain. There, in the blink of an eye, the Bermuda Triangle, a complex system that must be avoided in any interaction is fulfilled as a sin: economic situation spoken of, political ideologies revealed, and personal problems are just exposed dirty laundry.

In a panoramic shot, the lovely windows that used to reflect my joy have become invoices. They’re now storefronts that offer no immunity from temptation. And the moment everything seems as part of a movie I get struck by the epiphany that those scenes of window-shopping plans have never been optional. Even mannequins stripped of their exquisite fabrics still stand, desperate for a patch to cover, the red thread that lures us straight into credit card debt.

In aisle 13, I’m just trying to find breakfast. Between boxes of cereal, I struggle to reach the top shelf. So I settle for what’s left at eye level. All my neighbors do too and each of us reaches upward, none close enough to the immediate staircase that leads to the avoidant of the public space as a privatized object. Now I realize: convenience has a hierarchy. And apparently, even hunger obeys a vertical logic.

On the other hand, in the so-called “women’s aisle,” necessities got mislabeled and priced as luxury items. What a mess! A pink razor costs more than a black one, though they do exactly the same job. “A small mistake,” they’ll say. A branding strategy, perhaps, in their world. But in ours, we’re taught early that it costs more just to keep up in a race where there isn’t even a finish line, let alone a rational purpose.

At the end of the supermarket, I finally catch my breath. I’ve been rolling non-stop in a shopping cart I probably outgrew years ago. I pass my fingers slowly through the coupons that seek to get rid of the mess that mass production leaves for enterprises. I get stuck in the five layers of plastic some products are wrapped in. Sometimes I laugh because things are more protected than the Earth itself. And it looks like we made it just in time because the sale only applies if you buy wholesale and with the expectation of a finite future.

Now, we’re not being matched with people: we’re matched with products, with trends, with lifestyles. “They’ll blind-date everyone until you love them too.” “Something you love becomes something you miss. Something you say becomes something you mean.” Or at least, that’s what the algorithm hopes.

So yes, I walk the aisles with caution now. Not because I’m afraid of what I’ll buy but because I’m afraid of what I’ll become.