I have dreamed this dream.

I have come to understand that envy is secondary to an unfulfilled need. 

Rage, a certain breed of fury is the outcome when someone comes to the conclusion that their need will never be gratified and this belief is mentally and spiritually fastened taut.

This fury is usually directed towards those who possess what they feel deprived of, 

what they crave deeply.

I have dreamed this dream.

It went like this.

 I see a rich girl with her expensive clothes that cost extra so they look worn and ragged. Frolicking right past me. Me with actual tattered and filthy clothes I stole from one of her kind a month ago and am still fucking wearing. With extravagant bags of material luxury carelessly dangling within manicured hands, her biggest problem right now is a text she is anxiously awaiting from a guy she has a crush on.

 The rage is always strongest if they are peers or younger.

I feel it most when I see a student open up the shiny glass doors of the N.Y.U campus, his purple badge hanging proudly across his chest. It hangs around his upright neck and which holds his arrogant head and I swear by the gods it mocks me. 

"I could teach him things none of his professors ever could..."

 A cruel whisper in my mind. 

Then I march right up to him and grab that fucking badge and spit in face and drag him around the corner. I smash him in the face until his blood is spitting back at me and he collapses to his knees. I kick him mercilessly until he his gasping for air. I have managed to puncture his lungs by breaking his ribs in multiple places. Blood is pouring from his mouth and nose and beginning to seep from his ears. My heart is pounding above it's aching. Through his gasps and the new spaces I have created from knocking a few of his teeth out, I hear a gurgling trying to formulate a word. A one word Question. Finally it is audible. All he can manage to say is 

"Why?" 

In between desperate gasps and attempts to retain the depleting oxygen. 

Now he is in the fetal position and my rage has still not subsided. Again I hear a moist and piteous

"Why??'

I kick him once more so he is flat on his back and put my legs astride him. I lower my body down and clench his badge and lift his limp head. I pull his face to mine so it is only an inch or so away from mine. I look at his averted eyes and and shake him, He looks into my mad gaze and I meet it with all the hate I have harbored for ages and I say only one word as well.

"Need."

I rip his purple pride from his neck and let his body hit the pavement.

I walk away with it clenched in my fist.

 Breathing heavily at first. 

Gradually my longing for a better life returns. 

Two tears fall from my eyes in succession.

 I realese my grip on the badge.

I allow the piece of plastic- so symbolic and so far from my reach- I let it go, It falls to the cement.

I keep walking.

I dream this dream no more.

Mary Catherine, Cowardice Queen