The light from the afternoon sun passing through the broken mirror of the window seat painted a pale yellow face. The air coming in through the windows picked up the scent of roasted plastic. The scorching heat of the summer sun melted metals and also the morning freshness. Her body was bleeding sweat, garnished with uneven patches of perspiration all over. Unable to shuffle those overwhelming thoughts for a cool shower, she kept shuffling the playlist instead. She kept hopping until she found something fresh, something alive. Then she would hold on to that melody until she drained the life out of it. She sighed after noticing the emergency exit signs painted in the glass behind. “I don’t need to break glasses to get away; my emergency exit is just a tap away.” She thought. Music was her portal into something intense. She looked at the world in motion, one melody at a time. The tunes sometimes created quakes that sent shivers through her bones, fine-tuning her body to the sounds in her mind. Then her body would transform into some instrument with tapping feet, dancing fingers, and a humming voice. All her adrenaline rush was crushed as the bus jerked on a pothole. Hans Zimmer collapsed her dreams and dragged her back to the world of sun and sweat.
She got off the bus and started walking. The newly constructed road created a divide between the concrete jungle and dense forest. The grass that tried to penetrate the concrete was cut down and people who entered the dense green were hacked by the wilder beast. The road just pierced its way through everything, unaware of either of them. Half a mile down the road she was greeted by a short cool breeze, which vacuumed her sweat patches. She was deliberate in the choice of her location for a house. She wanted to stay in close proximity to the countryside with lush green vegetation extending far and wide. This choice also facilitated her finances as she never had a stable source of income. The long-awaited shower lost its privilege due to the cloud burst. Freezing breeze at the end of the long summer day penetrated through her like a shock wave. Water drops passing through dry parts of skin set it on fire. This chilling effect lasted only until every part of her body was wet than her body just went numb until it was dry again. The aroma of the boiling tea infused with the fumes of the rain scent breathed back life into her. Out on the patio with piping hot chai, her thoughts of a beautiful evening were shattered by those irregular animal mating calls. She laughed on the thought of mating on wet grounds.
The alarm disrupted her meditative sleeping look. She woke up and untangled her curls. In spite of her work, she loved being a night owl. “I would prefer dark and intense over bright and shiny, just like Coffee over Tea” she replied to the interviewer. She worked in the mental well being section of a domestic corp, who recently employed her to fill their employ well being scheme. Her employer was not concerned about the qualifications of a twenty-year-old girl. According to the employer, the whole scheme was just nonexistent. It was supposed to be some application running some algorithm that would send automated and smart replies to their workers with issues. “People do it better!” the interviewer would exclaim. So, instead, they would pay her to replace the algorithm. All she had to do was to sign a contract, claiming she would never disclose her identity to anyone in the organization. She would have to stay anonymous. She had no degrees in understanding people. All she wanted was to have conversations and people with issues have a lot to talk. She neither cared about the people she spoke to nor the firm they work for. She was advised to be inspiring, motivating, and above all comforting. She had no problem doing that because she believed motivating or inspiring people is idiotic, at any point in time; people do whatever they feel like doing based on their own rationality. So, she doesn’t have to carry the guilt of manipulating people about her identity. Besides, this was her side gig, something she would do before going to sleep with some coffee and cigarettes. Initially, it was interesting; people would talk about a lot of things about life and work. Almost everyone had some complaint about something. She was amazed at the level of dissatisfaction that was looming over people. She never solved their issues; instead, she would poke them to continue talking with her whats and whens. They came to her, not for the solutions, but because she would listen; when they were cursing their own lives for being dull and boring. She had become a parasite feeding off the darkness in their lives. Later sometime people started sharing happy thoughts. “What should I do with all this happiness?” she would blurt out sometimes. “I’m a complaint box!” she wanted to shout. “I guess people can’t hate anything for long, beyond reason; not even their life” She would send a random reply. She was devastated, she wanted to leave the job, but she couldn’t. Not because of the finances, but she didn’t want to lose something that would keep her up all night.
Later that year she died after publishing a book titled Conversations with the dead, which no one read, and everyone despised. Under the author’s note, she expressed her hatred towards happy people.
“The reason most stories have happy endings is because happiness is the end of all things. Happiness is the instantaneous whirlpool you see while flushing the toilet. It is that illusion which you can’t hold onto. Happiness derails life resulting in a crash landing. Our lives are born out of conflict. Conflict is the life source of this planet, the conflict between thoughts, opinions, and beliefs. Happiness ends the conflict. Happiness is checkmate”
-Urmica
