Chapter 1.
"Holidays are terrific" she thought to herself, and inhaling the last breath of a cigarette she let it sink into a glass of water she used as a tobacco disposal. At this time of the year, New-York was a desert city, and even if she loved that town and wouldn’t move anywhere else in the world, she couldn’t stand all that loneliness she felt weighing on her shoulders. She gave a final glance at the city, and its gigantic, arrogant buildings, didn’t care about her neighbors living their quiet lives in front of their windows, their empty balconies, waiting for summer to come, in order to flower again. She began to feel cold but decided to leave the window open as she got back to her desk. « God it’s so slow ! » said she, complaining now, about her computer she had filled with useless images of a life she’d never live and people she’d never meet. After all, all that she was good for, was inventing stories, that she would tell to herself, as if she were a kind and benevolent friend or something. She had lives running through her mind, other people’s life, and she was perfectly okay with it, and she had her life, like some sort of embarrassing pack and the drama was she didn’t what to do with it. Sitting at her desk, with the classic old knitted jumper everybody receives for christmas from an old auntie, her big eyeglasses on, she chose too big because she was unable even in very small details, to pick up the right things for herself, the things that would really suit her; she began to write. Boredom was the real subject she would always talk about in every story she would write, but it would never be mentioned as such. One thing that was nice being her, was that because of boredom she knew every single detail of everybody’s lives. She could feel everything, she could touch everything, she could get into people’s hearts even without having to meet them once in her lifetime. It was her sole consolation in this world, knowing that in her brains, she felt the very stream of Life flowing. Or that’s the way she liked to think of it. Truth was, she really knew nobody, even not herself. She was unable to really get into someone, and to let people really get into her, always kept a sort of security distance between her and the world, always standing on the edge of everything. Life had already started, and she was still at the departure, expecting for that goddamn sign she wouldn’t even understand if it really existed. But she couldn’t face the truth so she would write it, everywhere, for other people, never for herself, even if she was in every small cell of every word she’d write in her fiction stories. Her fictional characters were like improved versions of herself, women were always prettier, more confident, more alluring, more seductive, and men were always brave, human, interesting, like knights in the fairy-tales, but kind of nerdy knights. Because she was into nerdy people, teachers, writers, movie directors like Woody Allen who would never stop talking, babbling about obscure and unimportant things and stuff. She liked to be impressed, but everyone she met was disappointing, so she wrote about the people she would have liked to meet. "I guess that’s what normal people do. » She always said. But the fact is that her definition of normal only came from what she knew about herself. And she didn’t know much. That night, she had decided to spend a good evening, so she had bought a bottle of red wine, picked up some cigarettes, an old movie but she felt in a way bored of everything, like she was stuck in a sort of routine. Her boyfriend had left more than a year ago and ever since then, she’d never found anybody else. She wandered around, didn’t go out much, didn’t talk much to people, even if she tried her best to always show up in public places during her day. As a writer her misfortune was that she could as well work anywhere, it wouldn’t matter, as far as she had her computer or paper and a pen. The world was her office, and the world was lonely and wanted to remain so. How could ever you meet someone by staying all day in that same old navy tee-shirt, sitting at your desk, inventing stories about other people’s lifes ? She had a cat, and the day she took him into her flat, she knew it was one more step into the lonely-but-okay-with-that cliché girl, but it definitely was too late. So Mara, 27 years old, single, good looking but not drop dead gorgeous, nerdy girl, into intellectual stuff and people was reduced to being a writer in a comfortable two rooms New-yorker flat. She couldn’t find any solution to it, she felt as she was stuck into that situation and wouldn’t be able to come out of it without a miracle. But miracles only happened in her stories, her books or the stupid romantic movies she loved to watch any day of the week. She had no schedule, no best friend, hers was exiled at the opposite edge of the world, she had moved in New York two years ago and what she had been afraid of at the beginning, just happened without her being aware of it. She knew nobody in the city. She felt like she had to do something about it, but it was sunday evening, she felt lazy, she felt powerless, and she decided to light another cigarette. She couldn’t even count all the small dead bodies of these thin, light, rolled papers she was smoking, around her anymore. Nor could she write because her mind was busy with that thing of solitude, and that other thing of finding a solution to it, and she was trying hard to find something very quickly. She began to think about her ex boyfriend again. He was from New York, healthy, nice, typically american, funny, good looking, she liked to think of him as her opposite in life. And they truly were opposite. As a matter of fact, all the things about their relationship that were discordant she always felt the urge to ignore. Now that she was alone, they all came back to her as a boomerang, but she couldn’t prevent herself from missing him anyway. She knew that what she missed was a presence, someone to get her out of the infernal fortress she had been building around herself for years now, she also knew the only one who had this power was no one else but herself but she felt as she did not have the power to do it. Now, Mara was depressive, she knew it, most of the time she’d tend to ignore it, she’d deal with it, but some times, especially at night, especially when she felt that she had nothing left to do but going to bed and have a dreamless sleep, it would come back to her and hit her hard in the stomach. The problem was she was too proud to talk to someone, she was too afraid to look back for ancient friends she had neglected the past few years, she didn’t want to tell her mother in order not to worry her, and she couldn’t tell her father. She had to win over this « disease » by herself, and she was struggling, she was struggling really hard, and after every fight, every small victory accomplished, she’d feel so exhausted she’d go backwards. She tried to make friends, nobody’s lazy enough to accept to die at 27, she tried to go out, she tried to improve her self confidence but she couldn’t make it. Or so she thought, and she still expected for someone to help her, a hero or something, the greatest lie fiction has always been telling to everyone, she knew it, she was telling herself this lie, and she also perfectly knew it was a lie, nobody would come one day out of the blue and save her from herself. © 2013 M. F.
