Mirrors and Light

Kevin is eighteen, a high-school graduate, on a quest for the freedom of possibilites he thinks he should feel, but doesn’t. Why? Partly because freedom is a cliche, a hackneyed platitude, a nightmare that comes in the form a voidless dream. So what’s Kevin gonna do? He’s gonna wander through his city and try to reflect on how he got to where he is (where ever he is). He talks about working at his job in the grocery store, his fear of being a victim of a racist attack (“my skin is brown,” he explains), his encounter with a Greek immigrant who has worked for ten dollars an hour for 30 years in Canada, just kept his head down and worked to support his family. Toward the end of the zine, Kevin tells us he “feels like there’s a power failure and he’s out of candles.” But, a page later, he applies to college to study journalism and photography. There’s hope out there, amidst all that darkness. It’s not that he doesn’t believe in his own miserable rhetoric. It’s that Kevin realizes, as do we all, that the path to freedom isn’t through the shirking of responsibilities, the eschewing of education, or any of that. In fact, there is no path to freedom. It’s all just mirrors and light, blinding us which ever way we turn. (HN)

zine / main creator: Kevin / free / 61A Foxfield Drive, Nepean, ON, K2J 1L7

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