The Prestidigitator

Disclaimer: FICTION!

I walked out for a cup of coffee. Honestly, I’ve never felt the effects of caffeine but I was sickeningly addicted to it. Maybe that was the effect. Addiction. I guess I took it because it was the only drug that was both legal and affordable. I waited for the last drip to make it’s way out of the machine and then for a second to make sure that I didn’t miss a drop. Java in hand, I walked to the nearest window and slowly sipped it and waited for the bittersweet taste to register. It felt good.

An office on the 6th floor had given me the opportunity to be a silent onlooker onto the unsuspecting world below. I could go on and tell you that the little girl playing in the sand made me long for my own childhood or that the labourer toiling in the sun made me hate my easy life. I could tell you a lot of things that people would normally say…but then, I’d be lying.

I looked out the window and all I could see was the clear blue, cloudless sky and the multitude of buildings and not-so-building like structures fighting for space on the already crowded landscape. Billboards with scantily clad women and muscular men advertising things I didn’t care about caught my eye. Roads, if you could call them that, kept crisscrossing into each other and harboured countless souls on their way to God knows where. God knows where. God knows. God. Did God look down and see all this? All this chaos? Did He ever look down? It sure didn’t seem like He did. To me, everything out there looked so lifeless. It was like staring out the window to see a movie that didn’t have soul. A movie that inspired no emotions.

Nothing affected me anymore. Nothing. Not the coffee or the life outside. Things like love, poverty, famine, heaven, hell and the likes didn’t seem to matter. All that mattered was money. Money. And maybe happiness. Only if I knew what happiness was. I mean, I know when I’m happy. I laugh at a joke, I’m happy. I hear a peppy number, I’m happy. I’m out with my friends, I’m happy. I go back home, I’m happy. But how is being happy different from Happiness? Is happiness a state that lasts for a period of time or is it just something that’s as overrated as the movie that won some award?

I glanced sideways to see her standing beside me. Coffee cup in hand, there was a calmness and serenity on her face that I never saw when we were at work. She looked almost other wordly and I was actually taken back by how beautiful she looked when she wasn’t talking about ‘mitigating business factors’ or ‘deferring of ideas for evaluation’. At that moment, she was another person. A person I could learn to like. Love even. She turned to face me.

“I really hate this place.”

“Oh.”

“I wish there was some higher meaning to all of this shit.”

“C’mon…”

“There has to be meaning right? There has to be! Or is everything so…so…so fucking random?”

“I like to think it is. I mean, c’mon it’s not like somebody’s gonna come and tell us that we were on Candid Camera or something.” She didn’t even smile.

“I need to get out of this…this cycle. Are you coming?”

“Um…where?”

“Anywhere. Everywhere.”

“Look…maybe we should get back to work.”

“Well, I’m going anyway. You can come if you want to.” With that, she climbed up the sill, slid back the giant window and jumped out.

Shit. What just happened? I craned my head forward to peer out the window, only to bang my head on the glass. It was closed. I heard a faint chuckle behind me.

It was her.

“I really hate this place.”