Life as it happens

Daily drabbles as told in the third-person.

[lifeasithappenstome]

Chapter 3

Or is it fantasy?

Were she blindfolded and led into her own room without knowledge that she would be pulled into there, she may have mistaken it for a walk-in freezer. With the A/C shut off, the chill that lived in the small room was inexplicable. Especially since the forecast for today promised temperatures in the lower 80s.

Perhaps the ghosts of her troubled past decided to linger a bit to freak her out. Or perhaps she possessed the ability to control and conjure snow and ice and her surroundings represented the cold, bleak emotional state she currently found herself in.

She mused about how, as the older sibling in her immediate family, she was in fact the more reserved, introverted sister afflicted with mental anguish and a stormy sense of emotional well-being. Her often chilly, aloof demeanor was a stark contrast from the warm and gregarious disposition of her beloved younger sibling.

“I’m basically Queen Elsa, is what I’m trying to say here,” uttered the troubled twentysomething to herself. “Except less cool.”

Pun unintentional, she wished to add.

“And I’ll never be a royal,” a good thing, too, for she knew she may be a despot if she were to be handed an inherited throne.

“Royals…ROYALS! We aren’t caught up in your love affair!”

No, no. This was not true. She would be a warm and benevolent leader, but would initially be misunderstood to be an Ice Queen given the icy-cool mask that covered the volcanos of passion and love of which she knew herself possessed.

Now what was she trying to get at here, if there was really a purpose for this particular chapter? Nothing, really, she would respond if she were not obligated to write in the third-person.

[lifeasithappenstome]

Chapter 2

Existential Bullshit

“All I’m really doing these days is connecting our in-house code to third-party services or libraries built by people more accomplished and more intelligent than me. And when I’m not doing that, I’m really just plugging UIs (also normally already built by other people) to our backend stuff.”

Shoulders drooped. Swollen hand. Throat sore. The young (female) software engineer felt listless in spite of the fatigue (or perhaps, because of it).

She couldn’t help but wonder, “can’t I do more than just this?”

What she really wanted to do was to build robots to replace humanity and write software libraries that other people could use. What she really was passionate about was creating software that interacted with the physical space instead of simply existing in a virtual reality lacking any real impact on the world.

Instead, what waited for her the coming Monday would be an IDE anticipating some terribly-written tests for the poorly-specced, hurriedly made, debugging feature her boss wanted in the company’s flagship app.

“When I have accrued enough wealth to be financially independent, I will start my own company. This way I can do what I want instead of working for somebody else.”

Briefly, in that moment, her mind wandered into the dream-filled castles in the sky of what her life could be like. The heaviness that she’d been feeling lifted, momentarily. She could build what the hell she wanted to the way she wanted to without being scolded about being “too distracted” or some other bullshit like that. She’d given up trying to defend herself from these accusations.

A quick glance at her calendar and the annoying shuffling of somebody’s feet in the hallway dragged her abruptly back to the shackles of her current existence.

Maybe it was good timing that the universe had decided it was time for her to resume her studies in higher-education instead of slowly wasting away in startup life. Could her disenchantment be mitigated by explorations of the theoretical, of the esoteric?

Her life had been reduced to a button on a screen. On better days, the engineer saw a beauty and art to the exacting and technical composition that belied the existence of a button on a screen. Today, what she saw instead was a mish-mash of third-party tools and code that was haphazardly put together by various parties, like legos duct-taped by idiots – or rather, an idiot. Her.

“I could be doing so much more…”

(Ah, the curse of the young woman more concerned with what can be rather than what is. )

Less than a month from now, she would be back in university, dusting off the computer science books that had been competing for her attention since she bought them off Amazon and Ebay many moons ago.

Excitement attempted a coup of the disenchantment and depression that tyrannized her current mood. But it couldn’t be declared a revolution just yet.

The young woman still felt groggy at the grim prospects of Tomorrow, Monday Mourning, where she would spend the day fiddling with a resistant IDE and grieving over her lost potential.

[lifeasithappenstome]

Chapter 1

In which things happen

When she tried to heave herself off her bed this morning, she had wanted so badly to simply lay down and allow herself to be consumed by the perturbed sleep she had had the night before. But it was not a choice she could make. Not this morning.

She tempted herself to wakefulness with visions of Italian hot chocolate, sniffing the stale air of her room as if it would conjure up the sweet scents of that drink.

Today would not be the day she would skip out on her therapy appointment, even if she struggled to come up with something to discuss with the doctor. That very question posed at the beginning of every session terrified her more than being trapped in a dark castle with a murderous clown or something similiarly frightening (are clowns even considered scary at her age?).

Later, when she got home from a frustratingly unproductive day at work, all she wanted to do was to disappear into her bedsheets and be wrapped like a human burrito. And if one were to peer into her room when she decided to doze off for a bit early in the evening they would be struck with that very sight.

“Oh. What a life I lead,” she sighed.

The depressed young woman resigned herself to the cold reality that if she were to make the deadline for her self-imposed writing experiment that she would have to make this particular post boring and brief.

“Ah well. To be continued…”

[lifeasithappenstome]

Prologue

"Good lord.” 

She glared at the computer screen. 

"What have I done now?"

Just a few minutes ago, she had been bemused by her own strange desire to narrate her life in this way, enchanted by her inexplicable need to flex her long-dormant writing muscles.

“What a cliché that was,” she groaned at seeing the phrase take shape on the page.

With the blank page now beginning to populate with bits of her own thoughts, she found herself wondering whether this exercise was in fact a symptom of some mental distress yet to be diagnosed.

She held back the dark chortle waiting to tremble out of her vocal chords, settling instead for something resembling a grimace and a wicked smile.

“I’m crazy,” she admitted to herself. “Certifiable.”

This in fact was no half-joke said by somebody who was merely plagued with a few neuroses here and there. Oh no, this young woman responsible for the words being spilled on this page, was in fact *certifiable*. 

Her health records cast little doubt over her mental stability (or rather, lack thereof). 

From her teens onto her early twenties, she had been branded a depressive with anger and anxiety issues, diagnoses she did not really find herself rebuking. At least, not anymore. These days, she had accepted the inherent brokenness of her mind. She accepted that what she was, really, was merely a nutcase attempting to make sense of a world that itself seemed mad.

She smiled faintly at that last sentence, feeling grimly satisfied with her words there. What had she been narrating? Oh yes, her craziness.

In this world, people are always attempting to make events happen as if they operated on some irrefutable laws of nature. But if such laws existed, how can humanity attempt to force events to follow their tenets when they understood so little of these laws anyway? 

And why, the young woman mused, was she so intent on going on these hifalutin philosophical tangents when she ought to be writing the first post of her new “masterpiece” (enclosed in quotes sarcastically, as if she would even be capable of conceiving of such a thing)? It’s as though she *wanted* to fail at this enterprise. It’s as though her greatest enemy in achieving her dream of becoming a renowned, influential author was the reflection that glared at her from behind the mirror.

“Well, none of this will make sense tomorrow.”