to-be-us

"We're bastards. Scums of the scums." Jaq, who had chosen the last name Tobeus, chuckled with his husky voice. We whipped our heads in surprise. Out of all of us, usually he'd be the one with the least words, lest the controversial ones. We waited for him to continue breaking the silence that we were unable to touch earlier.

"Don't you see? What we have here is an inborn ability. Something we were given by a random streak of nature. Yet it makes us to be the way we are. Special. Different. Hated. Needed." he continued to speak in his characteristic low voice, as if he was mumbling to himself as usual. "We can be young. We can be kids. We can be unstable. Heck, we are hardly stable by default. Our performance is anything but constant, yet we can't truly be forced to mend it. What bound us physically is our illogical mentality. We have to be content or we'll just turn idle and die even faster. They have to keep us happy. We're that fragile. Yet they'll still employ us, anyone will."

"Look at our pay." The normally silent adult looked at each of us in the eyes with a solemn gaze. "What do we do to be rewarded such? Sleeping. An inch away from daydreaming. Protected by others with their lives, those who are free to be employed to work harder, most of them with less wages than what we earn. Suppose you say that we actually do more than to daydream, yes, we do. We invade that one most personal privacy that anyone should at least deserves, without even lifting a finger and we're getting paid to do it."

"No wonder we're hated. Describe ourselves to a layman shredding his body to find a job, and he may just kill us out of jealousy. Do it to a high-flyer, and if he couldn't have us he may prefer to see us dead instead. We're bound to live shorter anyway, so we have less need to prepare for the future. You can see it, can't you? Aside from that we're no different from any other human. They have the same capabilities to be stressed out, to be vulnerable and to be weak. It's just that we're that breakable and unreasonably needy. Yet unlike the other types of mentally challenged people, we have something that give us an extremely unfair advantage. Something that makes the world even more unfair than it is already. It is vile and disgusting. It makes us sick, literally at times. Appalling and addictive at the same time, and nobody knows that better than us, else we wouldn't be here now."

"Take a deep, good look at ourselves," he ended his speech as his gaze went blank and his mumbling raspy voice toned itself even lower, nobody would know if it shook, "Everybody wants to be a ____. To be us, except for ourselves."