The People Who Report More Stress

by Alejandro Varela

I felt penned in by the driver’s posture and my proclivity toward decorum. Even so, I was besieged by a base desire to tell him off, to let him know that whatever potato famine or religious persecution had inspirited his great grandparents to abandon their leeward-facing, bluff-situated stone cottage and risk their lives on a transatlantic voyage was no longer. That he could probably apply for any number of EU citizenships and return to his ancestral village, where he would be welcomed (arms open, eyes blue) because of its stagnating population growth. That his family line had gone stale here, and because social mobility wasn’t what it had been in the 1950s, through no fault of his own (unless he voted for the villainous clowns who’d decimated unions, diluted the minimum wage, and opposed every egalitarian policy of the last fifty years), he had no chance of achieving one sliver of what his parents had wished for him all those years ago when they’d cradled him in the well-appointed room of a fully funded hospital that had since been razed and was now a luxury high-rise.