You are busy on your laptop working through your usual spreadsheets or your code or your graphic design or whatever the hell you do on a weekday to get your monthly salary.
Suddenly you see a waterdrop splatter on your window, then one more, then a dozen more, and before you know it the heavens have started falling down on your house. You pause for a second and stand up to get your coffee as you look at the watch. It is almost five-thirty and you decide to take a break and sit on your porch from where you can see the rain sizzle on your pavement which is ridiculously baked since the sultry afternoon.
As you observe the rain splattering on the concrete, you also see the sun that has not been hidden behind the clouds because this time the rain is lazy and doesn’t want to make a big fussy thunderstorm. It wants to quietly exist with the sunset on the horizon and in the process give birth to a rainbow.
How does a rainbow stay in one place if the raindrops and the light from the sun is everywhere? You think to yourself. You remember that you have thought that to yourself a million times and always meant to google it and never got around to it. You sip your coffee. You start thinking of the work you are doing for the last however many years and then think another question that naturally follows. Where’s the fucking gratitude?
You remember your teenage self, all excited to graduate from college and be this or that and change the world for the better. That optimism you had was infectious and everyone in your friend circle was obviously so into you and your ideology. You had that confidence that could inspire a whole classroom. You were something else back then. You think to yourself now, who am I now?
You sip your coffee. You remember getting into a relationship with this goddess of a person and how you felt when you first kissed those luscious lips that this was it. Gods would crave for this ecstatic feeling that you felt. This was love and you wanted to shout it from the rooftops at that time. The sex was incredible and you were never exhausted from doing it all the time. You both knew it was now and it was awesome. There was nothing else and there was no never. You think to yourself now, how wrong could you possibly have been?
You sip your coffee. You remember the last time you went out or had friends at your place and had some ghostly idea of what a good time was and how because of this fucking pandemic, you were stuck doing a job in a house that felt more of a prison than a safety net. You remember what it was to have a good sip of ice-cold beer in a crowded pub and how humanity, at one point in time, had managed to be so social and now so alone in a span of less than a year. Where were those friends of yours? When was the last time you talked to your best friend? You think to yourself, this is not at all what my future should look like.
You sip your coffee. You can blame the lack of social circles on the pandemic and you feel at least a little bit of control coming back in your life. But then you remember what it was like to be so sure of what you wanted in life and how without even realizing it, you were thirty years old and single and working on a machine for the whole weekday and sometimes even the godforsaken weekend. The control slips out like a rubber band snapping and you sip your coffee and you remember the times when you were thinner and used to exercise more and had people look up to you and that girl you met on the street that one time winked at you and you don’t remember when it happened because it happened a terribly long time ago and you don’t know…
You sip your coffee and the coffee’s over. You still don’t know where the last five years have gone and how this life was something you had planned so well and you were so confident of and you had mapped everything out and suddenly you are watching the rain on a sunset with a shitty rainbow and that realization is such a bitch! You get up in frustration but you stand there because you have nowhere else to go. Your mind, on the other hand, had reached the moon by now. The rain was definitely lazy and died out the moment you finished your coffee and the sun went over the horizon as was its job. It’s dark but you are interrupted by a doorbell and you see the delivery guy and you smile at the parcel. Your new true wireless buttplugs buds that you were waiting for, for the longest time, are here.
You sign the sheet, collect and sanitize your parcel and try them out. They sound fantastic and you can pair them with unnatural ease and your favorite song is playing and you go back to your table and start working on your usual spreadsheets or your code or your graphic design or whatever the fuck you do on the weekday to get your monthly salary.