She quickly busied herself with organising the papers scattered on the table. A small move against the Universe's ever-impending checkmate, a small move to prove she still had a bit of fight left in her, to prove, as much to herself as the Universe, that the day she ran out of milk would be the day it really was over. But as long as the cushions were exactly at 30 degrees and there were fresh milk cartons in the fridge, the game could still go either way.
She was a believer in signs. Driven as much by the romance of there being such a thing as a larger plan, as much as the signs themselves, she had left a generous space in her life for the cosmos to make regular interventions. Whenever she made any major plans, even when talking about them to herself in her head, she was wary of definitive words, for what if life needed her to go another way? She wasn't sure why she was such a strong believer, but she called it God and got on with it. However, in her head, God was not a Zeus-like human form, but more like waves of energy, rippling like water does, and occupying all the space around us, too big to be seen as anything but iridescent colour by the human eye.
People often found her odd. They found it difficult to toggle between judging her for finding low-brow humour endlessly amusing, and being taken aback when she would have the perfect metaphor to describe what they were trying to express. Metaphors were her thing. She always had one. She'd read on the internet that metaphors are a favourite of people who 'experienced' life in a way that was more tactile (metaphorically) than cognitive. It sounded about right and so she adopted the reasoning as legitimate.
She was waiting for her next sign. She could sense the energies building, gathering force, somewhere still in the distance, but getting closer. And so she'd started clearing the decks for change. She'd quit her job - a cushy, prestigious one, that paid people well to do utterly uninspired things that would change nothing. She'd asked herself if this is what she wanted to do at 33, and the job fell woefully short. Perhaps, she figured, it was an utterly indulgent question legitimised by the hipster revival, that was loaded so heavy that no occupation could possibly meet its 'self-actualisation-only' standards. Or perhaps, if her conservatively-bred, middle class brain had had the gumption to think of the question, that was saying something. She didn't know which one it was. But fashion, for all its fun and games, wasn't what she wanted to be doing at 33. (In fact, she had a whole theory on the kind of people it takes to make a career in fashion, but more about that on another day.)
While she knew, however, what she didn't want to be doing at 33, asking herself what she did want, would conjure only a vague image of a bicycle and a vague green-brown-yellow background. This random hipster postcard in her mind irritated her much, considering she had utter disdain for the outright festishisation of the unemployed 'simple' life and the fact that she had no idea how to ride a bicycle.
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