He continued walking in the misty drizzle. The tiny raindrops, almost apologetically, gently landing on his face, and ever so slowly mingling with their brethren on their random traverses across his cold cheek. He didn’t particularly like to face up to the idea that the next five days would be spent pecking at a keyboard in an antiseptic office, but the weekend wasn’t much of a respite at all from the jarring futility of his excuse for a life. He wondered which he hated less…. The weekend won…But only just…Weekends were something he had always looked forward to as a kid. The promise of a couple of days break from the rigors of the unimaginative and institutionalized, almost ritual boredom called school…. Looking back, he tried to remember when the concept of the weekend stopped being a novelty and became a tooth in a wheel, mindlessly being driven by an iron chain with a will of its own. Somewhere between the time he’d sleep walked through school and found himself in a university, he hadn’t planned on getting into in the first place, he quipped soundlessly. He tried pinpointing the exact point in the crowded timeline, despite a voice in the back of his head trying to reason with him about the meaninglessness of the entire exercise. After a relatively short battle, the voice won.
The rain helped. It kept people in their homes, leaving the streets and the little puddles for him to negotiate in a calm he so loved to have around him. He allowed himself a rare smile. Not rare, because he didn’t smile too often…Nope, to most people around him, there couldn’t be a happier man... It was rare, because it didn’t have an agenda…
The voices made sure that these moments were far and few in between though.
Although he had lost his religion somewhere along the way, he believed in a certain interpretation of cosmic justice, almost bordering on the concept of Karma.
The only way he could explain his present situation was through this means. A certain part of him, told him that this was an escape route the mind sought to explain seemingly random connections between unconnected events. But there are times when a refuge in such “reason”, however farfetched can make life so much less complicated. Also, the “reason” gave him hope… He had been a good man, a confused man but an honest man in the last couple of years that he knew what exactly he was up to…or so he thought. Yet life had dealt him the cards, from a deck, he desperately hoped in hindsight, had been shuffled one more time. Using his definition of cosmic justice, he reckoned that he should be in the black sometime in the future. His not so distant past’s bad karma should be annulled by the events in his all too recent past. Maybe not entirely, but certainly in the near future…..
The rain suddenly morphed into an angry hail of thick raindrops…He looked up …He smiled again… Not a bad weekend he muttered and kept walking.
