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.

She lived as herself

   Amanda had never been known for being kind to anyone, rather the opposite. She was normally vicious to every single one of the people that worked for her and she would never accept a negative answer from everyone. Amanda Carvey was the daughter of the owner of the company, a man that had died only a few years ago in a ski accident in the Alps. Amanda had to step up and take control, something that most members of the board were against. That was, until they were able to see who she really was.

 They didn’t care for a woman commanding the ship. But that was before they saw the kind of woman she was. Amanda ruled with an iron fist from her first day and wouldn’t let anyone tell her something different than what she wanted. She didn’t accept advice and, when addressing her, she would often remind others that she was now the head of the company and not her father. Maybe they had gotten use to him but that was the past. Her father was no longer there to captain the ship in such a careless way.

 In her mind, her father had been an idiot with all the family’s assets. He had not done his job of really taking care of the wealth of the family. It wasn’t like he had lost too much money or anything like that. Rather, he had been exceedingly cautious and the company had run stale, no generating interest of any kind, whether it was with its clients or with its partners. People saw it as a dinosaur that refused to die and Amanda had seen that ever since she was a teenager and she had taken an interest in the family’s business.

 She laid off a lot of people during her first week and forced all the remaining workers to double their efforts, making lunch hours very restricted and putting up a “points” scale in which workers of any type would get points for their mistakes in the eye of the new owner. Too many points would mean that the person could get kicked out at any moment, so everyone tried their best not to upset Amanda. And they stayed there because the salaries were still very good and very difficult to earn in the modern world.

 In her first year running the company, she earned almost double that what her father had earned in his last full year as chairman. She was so glad about it that she even authorized for the most loyal and hard working people in the company to receive a substantial bonus to their usual earnings. People thought, for a second, that it was because she was getting a bit softer and kinder but that wasn’t it at all. It was because she was happy to have made a much better job than her father, she had shut off all the criticism around her and now people trusted her to be the one to lead them.

 However, her abrasive personality took a really heavy toll on her personal life. Her mother distanced herself from everything that had to do with the company and would no let her daughter talk about it when she came in for visits at her countryside home. Beside the company, there was no real connection between mother and daughter. The first had sent the second to boarding school from a very young age, so they had no idea what the other liked or thought about. There was no relation ship or empathy.

 Their weekly dinners would largely consist of silences, only interrupted by the mother scolding the daughter when she pulled out her phone in order to check stocks or talk to someone at work. So those dinners were only about honouring the late father’s legacy and nothing more. They both wanted to show respect to someone that was never there, someone who had drifted through life without ever really making a proper impact.

 The father had always preferred to take the private plane to some far away place where he could use his latest yacht and enjoy the best foods. He would always invite some people to come with him, people that enjoyed his millions and his stupid comments about life that didn’t make any sense, because he had no sense of the real life. He didn’t know real people, not even his immediate family. And his company was the laughing stock of the rich society he inhabited in, he just didn’t know it.

 But Amanda did know. She had always known that her father was just a stupid clown to all other people and that, by extension; her family had been laugh at for a long time. That ended the day she took control of their assets and made her family even more powerful and rich, more respectable and a force to be reckoned with. Her mother was just one reminder of the past, who didn’t even care about anything. She only cared about her check being on time and that was it. She was practically out of reality.

 And yeah, Amanda had no boyfriend or girlfriend, and her friendships were non-existent, unless you count business associated. She knew some men tried to court her because of her success, but she disarmed them pretty fast, with only words. Sometimes, she did “good” things because she felt she could lure more people towards her goals, but there was nothing good or positive about her attitude. She only lived to torture the memory of her father and to prove to everyone else that they had underestimated her and her family for far too long. It was her time to rule and she was not going to leave space for anyone else, no matter what she had to do to achieve her goals.

He was me

   For a split second, I had been unable to recognize him. But then, as I drew closer, I realized that I had known him my entire life. The only thing was that, I hadn’t seen him in a long while. He was still inside my head but only as a fading memory, as something that wasn’t real anymore but does not want to die and disappear. I looked at him and started crying in silence. Suddenly, the past came rushing in like a flood, filling every corner of my being. Because he was me, only much younger and way more innocent than I am now.

 I hadn’t been able to see myself like that in a long time and I seemed to have changed. Well, it was expected to be that way because many years had passed, more than a decade in fact. Not only had my physical appearance changed a bit but also what I had inside my head. It was like seeing a mirage in the middle of the desert and just standing away from it, hoping it won’t vanish. Because if it does then it doesn’t exist anymore and it fails to become something real, something that I can point to when trying to explain who I am.

 That was one of those damn questions I wanted to answer so bad back then. I really wanted to know who the hell I was and how I had become who I was and how I could move forward. The need to know myself was first and foremost in my mind, so much that it was shortly after when I started stepping outside of my comfort zone, making it easier for others to take advantage of me without me actually realizing it. I was so much younger in mind and body, and so silly and plain. But I guess I was also brave, beyond my wildest dreams.

 I know that because I can see myself now, what I do and what I’ve done and all of that can only be the result of someone having the balls to run away from his or her life and just go for it, whatever “it” is. I never realized the dangers I had faced and that many of the moments I had forgotten were forgotten for a reason. Because it was then, and not before, when I realized that life is not so simple and so easy as many make it seem. Life can be horrible and tiring and just too much for a young person to handle. Just too much sometimes.

 I had no idea before that, of all the things that awaited me. And I know many think that it’s precisely that what gives life its meaning. That mystery and the unknown are supposed to be what living is all about. But they never tell us how frightening it is or how horrible it can be sometimes. You do things and then you realized you have crossed several lines created by mankind in order to controls us and you freak out because you’re not that innocent little boy anymore. You’re a grown man doing things, left and right, and they could be a deal breaker in life with many people or even yourself.

 A movie was the one that made me think all about this. A beautiful simple movie rocked my brain and made me remember moments and facts that I had completely forgotten. Moments populated with actions and thoughts and people, all of them part of that big dream we all call the past. And that dream keeps getting larger and larger and I have no idea if I should keep believing in that dream. Maybe that was the reason why, all of a sudden, everything exploded inside my head. Maybe I have to make a choice.

 But I don’t want to. Because choices in this world are never permanent, they are never something you take to your grave. Choices always get mutated and manipulated, whether you do it or others do it. Nothing is permanent, so why should I do something that makes anything seem forever when, I know for a fact, that forever doesn’t really exist? It’s a thing in our heads that makes us think about our legacy or how capable we are to survive our own lives but the truth is that we don’t. We die and that’s it for us. Nothing more.

 Watching the “me” from the past makes me feel very bad, it hurts me very deep. I disappointed him, so I try to avoid looking directly into his eyes. Because I know that even that figment of my imagination, of that past we keep recalling, can understand that my life did not get to be what we always thought it would be. The paths I walked on are not the ones we always thought we would walk on. And my life is not the life of someone in a movie, but the life a lonely boy who doesn’t really matter in this world.

 None of us really matter, by the way. I don’t want to sound as if everything had happened to me and only me. It is the world that doesn’t give a shit about any of us and that’s why our pasts or presents or futures are not important. Even if we become the worst person on the planet tomorrow, nature has an expiration date on all of us, and that will never change. So the mistakes we’ve done and will do, are never really important in the grand scheme of things. It’s just that we think too much about ourselves as a species.

 Thinking condemns us every single day or at least it should. Most people are drones who live their lives from one side to the other, never really thinking about themselves in a profound way. They fill their lives with things in order to fill holes that they don’t even know if they have or not.  They have friendships and relationships and try to be as similar as the norm says, because if you step out of the line traced by people before you, then you’re on your own and no one will help you survive. You will have to learn how to navigate life by yourself and that’s scary, so few people actually go down that way.

 The only thing I can do now is to wait for my memories to go back to sleep, deep inside my head. They will fall in a deep slumber because they know I have no use for them right now. But they will always be there, waiting in the dark for me to need them or for them to teach me a lesson about myself, again.

 As for the movie, it’s something that happened and now it’s gone. I will probably reflect on it some more but, as I have no one to talk to about it, the need to have that on my mind will also die down. And he will go back deep inside my soul and not comeback for a very long while.

 However, I’m sure I’ll see him again. At least once more before the end.