An attractive yet carefree, college girl.

Meanwhile, on the busy sidewalks and crosswalks, hundreds of thousands of working men and women, young and old, take their ritualistic treks from the factories, self-owned business, and corporate offices through the labyrinth-like traffic grounds. Happy families and dysfunctional families take their walks through here too, with little girls and boys being exchanged each weekend from one parent to the other.
High-schoolers tend to leave their friends houses for home around this hour, to beat an ominous curfew that would kill their privileges of ever seeing life in its fullest. Amongst the menagerie of old men and women, crying babies, and baby mamas and baby daddies, a lone walker looking like a high school schoolgirl if actually me walking home from class.

Name's Michelle and I'm 20 years old. I am on my way home from class. I take random classes in my college several blocks from my house. I have to walk there because cars and gas are so overly priced these days. In addition, I have roughly no income apart from what my parents give me each week, which is so embarrassingly low that I won't even mention it to my close friends. All my parents are focused on are each other but it isn't anything positive.

I am one of the few girls around here taking evening classes at a community college. Most of my friends from high school are more privilege or have better parents than me, so that they can fly, drive, or ride trains to distant places to study and then get placed in a predetermined career and live happy in their future lives. For me, I can say that I'm too lazy or unlucky when it comes to doing work or at least being employed. All I can do is stay home and hope for a miracle. Parents are too busy doing their own business to be worried about me and since I'm already 20, they don't need to know how I'm doing or what I'm going to do. They have ignored all that 2 years ago.

So there I am walking home, avoiding the chance of running into somebody and thus getting the groceries in my arms to be dirtied by the treaded sidewalk below my feet. I had to get some things from the grocery store nearby because my mother called me right after class to get some things. Occasionally, I peer down into the brown paper bag to see if I got everything. Soy sauce, tomatoes, and the trusty jar or ferment shrimp paste. For a second while I'm walking down the sidewalk, past the stoops of homes adjacent to one another, I imagine myself as one of the itty-bitty little shrimp packed into its buddies in the jar and how it resembles me in a thousand million faces going through the same thing.

But daydreaming has its consequences. Having my eyesight completely focused on the contents of the bag, I can't see the upcoming obstacle I inevitably run into. With a sound incorporating a rustle and thud, you could foresee that you would hear splattering and the sound of glass shattering. Instead, my sight refocuses from the contents of the bag to the obstacle. There standing about six inches from me, and apparently holding both my triceps in his hands, is a semi-formally dressed man with light-shading eyeglasses.

"Are you okay?" he asks me, staring at my face with a concerned look. People around us tend to notice but since they're overly concerned about their own lives, they walk past and ignores us. The man holding me offers to get me balanced by pulling my body towards his until my body becomes straight.

Now balanced and seeing that both my bag and the groceries in my arms are still intact and connect to me, I reply to the man, "Yes, I'm fine."

"You be careful, y'hear," he says as he lets go and continues to walk in the direction he was walking in. "Both you and I need to start looking where we are going."

His last remark gives me the oppurtunity to say or ask something back, but he soon disappears through the walking crowd and across the street. His remark makes me believe that he wasn't paying attention to the sidewalk and he was focused on something more important. Well, it's a good thing that I didn't fall down and embarrass myself. And also that all the little packed-in shrimp are still intact, their eyes looking elsewhere.