The first version of the story I wrote for a friendly contest in a writing group. I used a pair of prompts—a set of words to use—from which I picked joint, monolith, stole, Jeep, and perhaps one more; and the idea of something that has lost its symmetry. A flat tire on a Jeep in the desert came to me almost right away.

When I started out as a writer, I wrote a lot of poems. My style of poem was story-like in verses. A good piece of writing should take the reader on a visual journey, diving them further into a clear sense of imagination. The main aim of my choice of words is to leave a long-lasting imprint of my story in the minds of the readers.

This is me trying to capture what it feels like to live under systems that incentivize short-term, profit-over-people thinking. Genuinely, if you’re trying to figure out why some aspect of modern life has gotten worse in the past twenty, thirty years, you could probably point to private equity.

I think a lot of people live their lives very small. We internalize barriers that don’t exist. I think this is heightened by tech, which would have us sit in chairs all day, reacting to nonsense. The human mind can expend only so much energy, and we sap a lot of it scrolling pointlessly.