Entitlement

by Rumaan Alam

You’d have known it was Monday. Some sobriety in the air, some frankness in the light. There was a feeling of beginning.

The people who are obsessed with money aren’t the rich who have it or the poor who don’t. They’re us. They’re the big middle, it’s all the rest of us, because we know what money can do. We know how we’ll never get our hands on it, but we know it could make us free.”

She wanted safety in a mad world. She wanted what people most wanted and was the thing that rich people hoarded: not money, but the grace of God and the universe, a way to be in the world and enjoy it. She wanted selfhood.

This happened every day between strangers the world over, the one breaking some unspoken agreement and asking the other for their money, their time, their attention, so minor a violation you couldn’t feel it unjust. It was merely something that happened.

The thing that makes life interesting is that it ends. The thing that makes love worthwhile is that it’s all we’ve got.”