The train to work was shaking at the weight of the people it encased. Warm bodies sticking to one another; the intimacy of strangers forsaking their boundaries. A woman pushed against the opposite doors was gasping for air. She was hugging her messenger bag close to her chest. The whirr of the train hummed in the back of her head as her thoughts raced. She was late to work. Dread filled her body, not for her tardiness, but at the idea of spending another precious day caged in four walls, a flickering lamp over her head, sitting stiffly at her desk, pretending that she cared. Her own insignificance made clear to her as the hours passed by, and she was asked to redo a document or her numbers. Presenting her ideas to a team she barely knew as her colleagues archly smiled at each other. Sweat collecting in the crevices of her hand, her heart protruding from her chest, asking to be let out, to breathe.
The train came to a stop, a flush of people dissolving from each other, spilling out onto the platform. A robotic voice repeated the station’s name in a cheery tone. What was it about robotic voices sounding jovial? Was the norm for voices to be happy? Her voice was often described as a cheerless baritone. They often asked her to inflict her tone at the end of sentences to catch the attention of the listener. The station name was repeated one last time before the woman realized that she was supposed to leave. Yet, her feet remained planted to the floor. She looked down to peer at them. Estrangement seized her as she looked at her beaten black loafers, she didn’t remember buying them, in fact, she hated this type of shoes for their tightness. Her eyes wandered from her shoes to her legs and her bewilderment grew. When did she start wearing pencil skirts? For the same reasons as the loafers, she hated feeling trapped in her skin.
The robotic voice came back, the coast station, it said. The coast? She forgot that she lived in a seaside city. Her feet, finding a will of their own, took her out to the platform. The moment she stepped out, the wind carrying the scent of the maritime hit her face. Flushing her cheeks, and blowing her hair on her face, making it difficult for her to see. Her muscles started relaxing.
Leaving the train station, the sun was breaching the dark horizon, hiding behind a dead willow tree. It was surrounded by a cemented square, preventing it from expanding its roots. Its branches twisted on themselves, bending in sharp angles to make their way to the trunk. It was as if the tree shrank from the world, forgoing its primal need for photosynthesis. A certain kinship arose inside her as she remembered how she sewed herself into the seams of rooms, avoiding the world. The need for socializing withered when all conversations spun around marriage, promotion, kids. Things she neither wanted nor was interested in, even as she repeatedly expressed her nonchalance towards such issues, her peers always felt the need to reiterate these conversations as if they needed to make sure that she would come back to the right path.
You’d see reason, they’d say, you’ll regret this when you grow old and wrinkly. Their worship of conformity made her pity them. To have Life constrained in a metal can of a premade life, to feel forced, to let life become a cage rather than letting it flow and be driven by the currents of your non unique thoughts, even in their mundanity, they were yours and living by them would only make your every breath easier. Why spend most of your life agonizing over present rules that you have no desire to abide to?
She bid goodbye to the tree, wishing it a graceful end. She let herself be guided to the sea that had been whispering in her ears since she stepped off the station. The lovely drawl of water washing up onto the sand, trying to take some of it with it to the depths of water, a piece of earth into the kingdom of Poseidon. As she got close to the point of convergence between land and sea, where white froth kissed sand, she took off her loafers.
Her bare feet sunk under the wet sand, grounding her to Earth. She was part of this world, this planet that spun slowly around itself, but its people decided to spin harder, faster, wanting to race time itself.
She rolled the sleeves of her blouse to let the sun warm her skin, bones, and cells. It would have been a tragedy to spend another nameless day in a company she couldn’t care less for. Toiling her life away for money that would unsurprisingly be gone. What is money but a flesh-eating curse anyway?
She wasn’t oblivious to the ways of the world; money became the currency of life but what about the time that she was bestowed on this delightful earth? Wasn’t it itself a currency of life? To live a fulfilling life that doesn’t shred her flesh into strips, to live without restraint, unbound like the sea in front of her, her only concern being that point of convergence, where life meets her inner self.
Commentaires
Enregistrer un commentaire