Imagine, for a moment, a hamster amusement park. Naturally you are shrunk down into hamster form, and so waddle around with the rest of the company through the chutes and escalators. The gravel is rather nice and it’s relatively clean and there’s even a sprout for a hamster fountain.
So you take you and those most favorable in the larger company toward the rides. Towards the scarecrow exhibit, as well as the loose change exhibit. Concession stands are packed with carrot slices and confetti. Scatters of sparkle along the wooden walkway. Rails made of toothpicks to lean on.
You know the place pretty well after awhile. You had your drinks and nights roar into day and nights once more. There’s, of course, an avenue toward the hotel district where you gather yourself before diving into the amusements once more.
So time passes. It does. The hamsters around you get older. Luckily there aren’t any casualties from broken equipment, but what makes someone a casualty anyway? They are the amusement park. You are too.
Ah, the criss-cross cage bars come into view. You even see the entrance where you were dropped off at day one. Whispers in the hamster pub say if you lay still for 3 days they take you out. Who’s they?
Malaise burns deeply in the hotel room. Burying your puffy cheeks in your palms. The carrot slices just aren’t cutting it anymore, nor the pumpkin kernels. Appetite fading, fur rising. Enough! Out, out, out!
And you pull it off. In a criceta ex machina you are snatched up gently and onto the floor of the larger facility.
White tile spans for miles. Giants in dark shoes with slim jeans stare down at you.
Ah, you finally realize. Maybe the amusement park wasn’t so bad after all. They even had nice music piping through each box connection.
Out here is just a dial tone.
A dial tone.
Dial tones walking along white tiles.
What do you mourn? The fact that you need these giants to make an amusement park for you, or that you left it, or that you cannot even begin to understand the tile room, let alone all the rooms surrounding and forming into a building of buildings in street corners and larger lights with roadways spindling down and out throughout a whole new scary, large, breathing world? A breath not meant for you, it feels.
Dial tones. Dial tones. You can’t go back to the amusement park anymore.
Dial tones, dial tones. What will you do with your scrawny paddle hands?
Walk and walk and walk. The metallic vent pipes leave an overcast as it juts out from the ceiling, along the lighting.
Where will you go?
Can a hamster fit in this new world? You’re going to have to figure that one out. Maybe you find a reverse-shrink gun. Eventually.
Is this a larger amusement park too, you wonder, or is everything here finally self-directed? You cannot even begin to imagine those who rest higher. How high does the chain go? Everything that was in your old park doesn’t seem too appealing anymore anyway…
Stop, stop. You don’t need these questions.
What will you do?
Learn to love the dial tone is an option. Maybe make your own music by opening and closing your ears to it. A little nifty beatbox. Perks of hamster ears.
And now a tune increases in volume over all your amusement memories. Is it from your own hamster head? Fading to gray, darker shades. Lost breath and out of reach.
Giving the meanest scowl and tensing your hamster shoulders, aren’t you?
The new game begins.