No happy endings

   After it happened, I went right into the bathroom and pretended I was doing what people do in a bathroom. Of course, I had closed the door properly and, after a few minutes, I turned the faucet on to make water run and make them think I was washing my hands. But the truth was that I wasn’t doing any of that. I was staring at myself in the mirror, looking at a person that I knew but not really that well. I got closer to the glass and really tried to get in there, I really tried to see if there was a human behind those eyes. Maybe the one I thought I knew or maybe another, a new person that I had to get to know better.

 But no, it was me. It was me there, naked on a bathroom in which I had never been in. I decided right there that I wanted to leave but, after what was happening in there, I had no idea if anyone was going to let me leave. To be fair, they both looked like decent people, not the kind that put a lock on the door and then do something unspeakable. No, they really seemed like any other people or at least like any others that liked what they had started doing after a lot of drinks. But I did want to leave so that had to be my priority. In this day and age, I couldn’t just do as they pleased and forget myself in seconds.

 However, that was exactly what I did. I tried to forget myself for a while, trying to pretend I was some other person or that I was in some other place. It worked for short periods of time but then I had an interruption from reality and I had to start over again. But that had been a very good idea because, not much long after my escape to the bathroom, everything finished and we found ourselves catching our breaths. It was then I stepped out of that place, after arranging myself properly that is and checking that I had all my belongings on me. I know very well how rude that was of me, but there was no other way.

As I walked towards the bus stop, I tried to convince myself that was the best thing to do. After all, I didn’t even know them. I hardly knew their names and not so much more about them. I did not know what they did for a living and had no idea of the dog’s name, the one that had been sleeping in his little bed for all the time I had been in there. I didn’t get to ask how was it possible that they could afford such a nice place in such an expensive neighborhood, being only two people with, as far as I knew, fairly common incomes. But none of that was ever mention at any moment, as alcohol had played too much a role.

 I sat down at the bus stop. The place was lonely and freezing. Luckily, the next bus would pass in just a few minutes and I would be home in a rather short time, or so I hoped because of the late hour. When the bus got there, I noticed there were very few people in it at that time and the only ones there were all alone, not talking to anyone or having any kind of interaction. Somehow, I felt I belonged there at that moment, in that exact place in the world.

 When I got home, I checked my cellphone as I took off my clothes off for a second time that night. They had written me that they had loved their evening with me and would have loved for me to stay. I felt strange, wrong somehow. It was all made even weirder by the fact that the guy that wrote had a picture of their wedding as his profile picture on the app he used to contact me. It made me feel like an invader, like someone who wasn’t supposed to be there. And also, it made me feel lonely and not worthy of anything.

 I spent a few minutes in the dark, sitting on the edge of my bed, only wearing socks and briefs. I wondered about my life, my shitty little place, my horrible job and my absolute lack of friendships and real love possibilities. Instead of spending a fun night, which had been my intention all along, I was feeling horrible. Feelings of loneliness and sadness invaded my body and it was then when I moved to get under the covers and tuck myself in tightly in order for the warmth of the fabrics to make me feel a little less horrible.

 However, the mind always works more when left alone. So, I started thinking about the cute couple that I had met earlier. They had seen me at the bar, and we started drinking right then, drinking and drinking a lot. We did that for only a couple of hours and then they talked about their place and I just said “yes”, without any hesitation or doubt. I just pushed myself into something I didn’t know about, without measuring any possibility of danger or any outcomes. They had chosen me as their person for a while and it was just when I entered their place when I realized what I had become, at least that night.

 I was just a guy. I wasn’t me, with my personality and all the things that make myself the person that I am. They weren’t interested in that, so the alcohol collaborated with some part of my unconscious brain to just hide all that was me and “enjoy” myself that way. And I did, I cannot pretend I did not feel pleasure or happiness in different amounts. But it was right before running to the bathroom when I realized they just wanted a body there to be with them. I was not myself in the sense that there was no one inside that body, at least not the full me controlling everything, as it should always be the case.

 One has to do what one has to do, so I did. I made them happy or at least did exactly what they had probably thought about for a long time. I was the vessel for their imagination, for their pleasures and fantasies. And that was nice, I guess, but I have to believe someone, only one person, can also feel something for me and not only for the me that moves around the world but for the me that lives inside this body, the me that thinks and hurts and feels insane sometimes. Maybe someone can find a way to actually love me for who I am.

 But I won’t keep my hopes up. This is life, not a silly movie. There are no real happy endings.

Fortune favors the bold

   Every piece had fallen exactly in the place she had wanted. Every single one of them represented something she had been looking to achieve for a long time and now, she was finally able to reach every single goal she had ever wanted to attain. She was merely hours away from all of it and the only thing she could do was looking at her laptop and then at the city from her balcony and then again to the screen, where everything should appear at the right time.

 She had decided to be alone for that moment. The idea had never been to share this monumental achievement with anyone else, but to celebrate it alone in a very personal way. She had a bottle of her favorite champagne at hand, her most comfortable and loved clothes on and she was in the most private place she could ever be able to get to: her own home. Everything was just as she wanted and she had insisted on disappearing for that night, avoiding people constantly in order to have a few hours all to herself.

 It’s not like she was going to party hard until the next day came. She was not as young as she was when everything had started and, even if she felt younger, she had never been one to do that sort of thing. She had achieved her goals because she had been so focused, taking care of every single thing from the moment she had decided she would stop being the person she was during her youth and start her transformation into the woman she really wanted to be. It would take time but it would all be very much worth it.

 And it was. The sole feeling of being there, in that beautiful apartment, nestled in the mountains, with such an amazing view of her preferred city in the world, could not be topped by anything. She had everything she had always wanted: not only objects such as clothes and jewelry or furniture and the proper décor, but also things that no one could never buy with money. Things that only experience and intelligence could teach a person their worth and the real position that every single thing and person had to have around them.

 She had been patient and very controlling of it all, and it was worth it. Only minutes away from the awaited time, she poured some of the champagne into a tall glass and opened a box of fresh strawberries that she had picked up herself from a local farmers market. The smell was sweet and luscious, the perfect thing to go with the night she was having. She felt as if tears would start coming down her face in any minute, but she had also learned how to prepare for that: just open her eyes wider, smile and let the waves of good energy enter her body. When the clock on her laptop struck the hour, a shower of pyrotechnics covered the city.

 Champagne disappeared in a moment. She poured herself another glass and then another one after that. She saw the bright lights over the city and felt as she had never felt before. It was then tears begun pouring down her face and she didn’t bother to wipe them out or do anything about them. She wanted to cry and scream and to whatever she wanted because, when time had come, she became who she had always wanted to be and it was something that had never been guaranteed, so it was an understandable reaction.

 She remembered how, in her first years in the company she now ran, many people had tried to make her feel as if she didn’t belong there. They made comments very often, about her parents and her siblings, about their house and her clothes and a truth they claimed to be irreplaceable: that no girl from a background like the one she had would ever be able to achieve anything in such a competitive world. Everyone was against her and she had to take it all with patience and care, always thinking about the future.

 Every time they slammed her with horrible words, she would deflect them with indifference and, with time, she learned to outwit them at every turn, making them feel that the girl they had seen coming into their company was not the same they were standing in front of years later. She became much more certain of her choices and even dared to share her past life with no regrets whatsoever. Contrary to her enemies’ beliefs, she gained a strong following because of that choice. People regarded her as a true beacon of light to look up to.

 Power could be gained easily, or so she thought, if she followed her well thought plan from the beginning. That had started years before, when she had decided to save for school doing horrible and menial jobs. But she got to the point where she could study and also work, and she did. By the time her bosses understood she could not be so easily “taken care of”, she was almost untouchable because of the support of the people that worked under her. They knew that if she left, they would leave after her and sink the company in the blink of an eye.

 That power grew exponentially until she made it to the top ranking of the company. She made it to the board of directors before she turned forty years old and, by then, most of her competition had either died out or moved on to other endeavors. She ultimately took over completely and then, it was impossible to pretend she hadn’t achieved something that seemed impossible. The former owner was still there, but she had become the face of the company they had owned for so many years and there was no way they could live without her. And she knew it very well, even if her plan still had some stages to be accomplished.

 The night of New Year’s Eve, the one when she celebrated with champagne on the balcony of her elegant home, she fifty-six years old. She had effectively ended her plans, the ones she had designed from the age of fifteen. She had executed every single stage of the whole thing and she celebrated the fact that she had won. No one in the planet could argue with her that, after so many years, she had been the one to come on top and not him. Not Anthony Klein Volker, the man that was supposed to own all of it once his father died.

 Anthony was her prime target and the one she really wanted to get with all of her scheming and plotting. Of course, Lavinia and Arthur, Anthony’s siblings, could not be left out of it all. And not his mother Clara either, or his father Jonathan. None of them were going to be left alone until she got what she wanted and, what she really wanted more than anything in the world, was to have every single thing that belonged to them: every property, all the money, their precious company, their transports and even their pets. She wanted it all.

 And although most people loved her for being who she was and became, some hated her. Most of them sided with the Klein Volker’s because they had business with them or because they knew the truth and were the kind of people that hated when someone brings out the shit that has stained the carpet and is making everyone ask themselves why there’s such an awful smell in the room. Of course, they knew, she could clearly see that in their eyes when they tried to scare her out of making one of her bold moves.

 But she moved. She moved because Anthony had been the one that had assaulted her one night, after he had seen her in one the company’s open picnics for children in need. The oldest of the Klein Volker’s raped her and his father Jonathan, instead of vomiting when he saw what his son had done, he rewarded him with objects and ordered the girl to vanish, forcing her into a life of prostitution, a life she would never be able to leave. They thought she was weak and that she could be punished into compliance, shutting her mouth forever.

 And she did, for a while. She did work as a prostitute and saved money that way. Then she got another job and then another and she started school and education became her best weapon against everything that had ever happened to him. When they saw him, they didn’t recognize her at first.

 But, after a while, they did. But it was too late to say or do anything. She had them right where she wanted them and she claimed revenge in a myriad of ways, in every single one of them because they all knew what had happened and had all collaborated in her destruction. Yet, fortune favors the bold.

Our necklaces

   The necklaces came in different colors. Actually the only choice we had in the whole matter was to choose the color of our liking. Of course, we couldn’t make that choice the moment we were born. But once we grew to be five years old, they accepted our requests for colors. That way, kids would compare their necklaces in school and change them every few months during the puberty. When that was done, the change was done every two years, in order to download some content and replace it if it was needed.

 Nobody really remembered when the necklaces were put into place. Some say, the reason we don’t know the exact date is because they have wiped out our brains of memories. Not all of them, of course, but the ones that are important to the government. They say the necklaces are there to ensure our safety and, to be fair, even top officers use them. Of course, theirs are much more beautiful than the normal ones, some even made of different materials and adorned with jewels or other beautiful things. But in the end, same as ours.

 It has been like this for a long time and we just live alongside the whole thing. Our necklaces record our daily lives and all of that is passed on to the government in order to decide who is loyal and who is not. We are taught that’s a good thing because we cannot have rebellious people around. The yare the ones that could hurt us the most and they sometimes do. The explosions and attacks that happen sometimes are all of their doing and its because they don’t want us to keep living like this.

 To them, this system is wrong and we are also wrong because we let it exist. But the truth is that most of us don’t make our lives being like this at all. We just wake up in the morning and then go to work and then comeback to our families, like every single person has done for thousands of years. The necklaces don’t make any difference in our lives; it’s just an accessory that we have to carry from the moment we are born to the moment of our death. Not more than that and we accept it.

 Rebels, people say, are people that want everything to be as it once was. We are taught in school that the world was chaotic in the past, filled with war and poverty and hunger. We don’t have any of that to today and we fail to realize why some people would like all of that to come back. Back in the past, people fought for everything that we have now, so why would we even remotely agree with a rebel that just wants us to fight and fight and fight, with no end in sight? They are crazy people and they have to be detained by the government, the only ones that actually care about us.

 Once a year, there are public showings of a movie shot by drones that fly away to other areas of the world. Our country is large and prosperous but some others were actually destroyed in the wars of the past. They want us to see all of that for ourselves because the truth is more important than anything. The footage is always different but the message is always the same: we cannot keep rising because when people do that, other people, less fortunate people, suffer all of the consequences. And that’s what happened.

 None of us remember the wars. None of us remembers when the bombs were dropped from the skies and from the blackness above us. What we do know for sure is that some of the people, those that survived to create the government, they hid for years in deep caves, eating only canned goods. Nowadays, we have all the fruits and vegetables that we would ever need. We don’t buy them, because they are delivered to our houses and distributed equally among the populace. We don’t have to suffer anymore.

 Rebels, apparently, say that the government keeps most of the food for themselves. But they don’t understand that we don’t really care. Because we are able to eat what we want, we can ask for it and it will be delivered. Only a few things are commonly rejected and it’s due to the low amount of some resources. But we understand that. We have learned that oil and coal and so many more things became almost extinct after the wars. So we have learned not to ask for any of that. Actually, we have mostly replaced it all.

 Complaining and complaining. Not wanting to fit into a society. That’s what’s wrong with those people, with those rebels. They just don’t want every single one of us to be happy. They want to create chaos because they are the kind of people that love to kills others and see the world burn. They do what they do because the amount of order in this world makes them mad. They cannot bare to think that we have peace, that we finally have a world in which we can be ourselves, just by giving up a little bit.

 And yeah, we do. We give the government access to our lives; we keep our necklaces because we have agreed to live in peace with everyone and everything else. And they cannot understand it, they are furious every single day because a bomb hasn’t killed a whole family or a soldier has not been slaughtered with a knife. They find chaos amusing and they thrive in it, as if they were flowers fed with blood. Deadly flowers that have nothing pretty about them, they are only poisonous and looking to kill us all, slowly. Rebels are that type of scum and we don’t want them here.

 Sometimes, not too often, a billboard is raised to announce the number of rebels leaving the country to be sent to a specialized facility where the government can take care of their kind. Some people say its located on one of the caves that our ancestors used after the war. Some others say it’s an island just a few kilometers from the capital city. Well, of course most of us don’t know where it is or what it’s like because we are not rebels and we haven’t done anything to deserve that kind of punishment.

 The idea is that rebels are stripped of their ideas there and then the yare sent back to the country, in order to be valuable members of our society. Most of us think that’s a great idea but we know it doesn’t happen very often. The few times the military makes raids, they kill all of the country’s enemies and we celebrate it by applauding for a whole minute at home. We do it to make our boys and girls in uniform for their fantastic job. Without them, it is quite possible that the world would be lost.

 It’s not common to see one of those rebels that have become a member of the community once more. They are rarely seen in the cities and, people say, they are mostly used in the large farms that feed all of us daily. It must be a nice change of pace, from carrying weapons and killing people, to milk cows and planting rice in the fields. Maybe they don’t deserve it, or maybe they don’t, but the government gives them a chance and that’s a lot more than they deserve, that’s for damn sure.

 We also partake in an event called the Games, every four years. In the Games, we face each other in different sports. The idea is that every single member of society should have an ability to exploit. The Games are most important for teenagers; because that’s the way they find out what their jobs will be in the future. Adults participate too, but it’s more like training and a gathering of different people to share experiences and get to know one another. It’s not something we do a lot and its fun sometimes.

 Something curious is the moment we loose our necklaces, when they are being replaced for one reason or the other. It is then when we all change a bit. It is a very short moment, a glimpse in time. But we all react differently when we are disconnected from our government. It is a very peculiar thing.

 Some of us scream, as if we were staring at a monster. Some other start crying profusely and others even laugh their heads off for a few seconds. We all do something. Or at least most of us. They are some, not many, that do not react to loosing their necklace. They don’t move or make a noise. They just wait.