IRC-Galleria

Rev. 3.11.2010

"Why is it that you never bother any of these people?"


The glass-walled street had suddenly come alive with the casual stomp of footsteps on the stone tiles below the catwalk. It was full morning by now, and all the identically faceless, well-clad business people were pacing to their glass cages. We'd been here for a while now, and despite the appearance of a harbinger, nothing had happened this time. I was starting to feel anxious. My familiar stranger stood there, leaning on the railing; his habitual smug grin attained dramatic features in the contrast of the direct sunlight. And casually he answered, "They make money."


His first answer never satisfied me, and I often grew irritable through our dialogue. I replied, "But they're always more stuck than me in their caffeine cycles and spacious cubicles. They'll make money to feed their insatiable urges of consumerism and all that sinister system dialogue we've had earlier. We've agreed I'll never walk along with this loose crowd. Why are we here?"


"Why does everything make sense?" He looked at me condescendingly. He'd always have patience to outlast mine, maybe the only merit of this unfunny jester of a mentor.


We had stood on the catwalk from early morning making such uneasy conversation. We arrived with the air still fresh of dawn and the quiet business district barely catching its first rays of direct sun. Today had been different from all our previous encounters. This time he had come for me, not just appeared out of nowhere in a public place as he had always done. I had been so certain for the whole time that he, as always, had something important to convey. He was, after all, my harbinger of dissatisfaction, of change. Slugging on without resolution only fed the ridiculous desperation I volitionally tried to fend off.


I settled to answer with a traditionally hopeless long-shot definition, "Because everything attributes to a rule. The real question is only whether we can play with that, even without knowing the rule."


"What do you have - more than these people?"


I rarely found logical transitions between his questions. He was again dragging me through something. It was progression according to his pace, on his terms. With him, I invariably felt I was a life away from a right answer. He knew I felt more and more insufficient with each answer I coughed up; this was his game.


Still, he never continued without my answer. I answered with a vague recollection of our previous conversations, "My freedom to end up anywhere - I've ambition and my dreams. There's the path thing we talked about earlier. I've still my options and junctions. I've only a fraction of their anchors."


Something entirely new swept his face: he looked the slightest bit worried. He turned to me, and with a grave voice perturbed me, "They are all satisfied. Tell me: when are you going to be any happier than these people?"