Visibly Invisible
The world passes by as she sits by the coffee shop and stares through the window. She watches as a mother scolds her son to tie his shoelaces, she watches a young couple kiss and blush, and she watches as a homeless man sits by the pavement, hope long sucked out of his eyes.
Her heart blossoms with a strange feeling, a feeling of lingering longing. Longing for a time when her problems used to be taken care of by someone else, today her problems are her own. nobody is fighting her battles for her today. She curses herself for, ever wishing to grow up fast, to leave the safety of her mother's scarf behind. She wishes she could hide behind that scarf where all her worries would be drowned away by the warmth and love it holds. A single piece of cloth that could take her back to a time when the world used to be different and her biggest worry used to be 'What if my sister eats my ice cream.'
She sighs and looks into her coffee mug, the warmth it held long gone. It sits there cold and unwanted. These days she feels as if her life is a movie, the people are just characters passing by, and she has no control over anything. It had begun to feel like someone else was directing the movie that is her life. All semblance of control was lost to the director. Every night in her dreams she tries to see the person behind the directing chair but each night she gets closer to finding out, she wakes up.
She knows that thinking deeply will not take her anywhere, it never does, all it does is distract her from her pending work. The word work reminds her of all the files kept on her desk in her house that she needs to get back to. The never-ending pile of doom. No matter what she does, it is never enough. It doesn't get the work done, she doesn't sleep peacefully, another night that ends too soon and another morning that descends too fast another day where she has left people disappointed. Sometimes she wonders, is it only her that is so out of it and cannot handle the pressure? how is nobody complaining? She fails to realise that everybody is complaining they are just great actors at hiding it.
She thinks of what she is doing these days, waking up to do meaningless and endless work that puts food on her table at the end of the day. Is it worth doing such a job that you feel disassociated with? no zeal or passion for the subject, doing it just for the sake of doing it. She wishes she could escape the cycle and do something different. She feels deep envy for the people who have been able to achieve and do exactly what they dreamed of doing, those who are happy with their jobs.
She remembers a time when she had a passion and a younger version of her believed that she would be a writer in the future. Writing fiction novels for young adults. She mourns the time when she lost sight of her passion and the other things in her life became so important that it overshadowed her love for writing. She still has documents and WIP folders in her laptop, deep down, buried somewhere among the files of her work, never opened in many years.
No matter how hard life gets, one must never leave behind that which gives one peace. In the hardships of life, we forget that which has helped us through our worst times. Writing used to be her escape from reality, her bomb shelter when the world outside was burning to hell, but it got left behind in the tragedies of life. She made up her mind. She asked the waitress to heat her cold coffee and opened her notebook.
She began writing which hopefully would give her life a new beginning as well, she titled the chapter 'A New Beginning.'