Life sucks…

O, come on now! You know full well, it’s exactly like that.

The world is a horrible, shitty, disgusting place, full of horrible, shitty, disgusting people, situations, and just, you know, stuff in general…

As hard as you try to keep your head above the water, if only for a little while, if only to take in one short breath, there is always something pulling you back down, sucking you in, not letting you go. And the constant onslaught of wave after crushing wave, tall as the highest skyscraper in the world and more ruthless than tons of falling steel, is endless.

And they take you away…

They take away you, your dreams, your goals, your aspirations. They take away everything you’ve built, the years of hard work and effort, all put in so that one day you may reach that fabled moment of sweet respite and release that you’ve been aiming for your entire life.

Yet you’re still there, still alive, still fighting, hoping, existing. And screaming, screaming desperately at the Mother Universe: “Why me? Why the hell me? Oh, hell, here comes ano…”

They come and wash over you… And they drag you in… And you scream.

You scream, you beg, you fight for just one more breath of air, just a little more light, just one last desperate sliver of hope…

And no one bloody cares.

No one cares, that you’re there, suffering.

Because it doesn’t matter. You don’t matter. For these waves, that come and drag you deeper and deeper into the never-ending ocean of the forgotten, are made out of Time. And Time destroys all. Before Time, naught matters.

For in the unimaginable archive of Universal history, your life isn’t enough to even fill an entire comma sign.

You are nothing. You are a weak, pathetic little creature, aimlessly drifting through the ocean, desperately looking for something solid to grab onto. You are just another drowner, thrown over the board of universal mercy, who will never reach that beach of salvation. You are powerless and nothing you say or do will ever change that.

Especially if you’re a woman on this wretched, merciless Earth… Especially if you’re a woman!

Now before you get completely frustrated, throwing this book to the other end of the room with a loud snort and the desire to go back to your own personal fight with the large waves, I’d like to divert your attention for a moment to the story of one specific drowning woman, that you might find interesting. Or educational. Or in a perfect world - both.

Linda Pearce was a young, 25 year old woman. “Oh, how lovely”, you say and immediately imagine some typical American sitcom character - good looking, successful and able to seduce any man crossing her path with her high-heel twisted legs and covered in more makeup than any self-respecting cake can take glazing… Now I’ll ask you to throw this grotesque image out of your head. Permanently.

Real 25 year old women in this world have exactly as much to do with it as a fly has with an elephant.

Real 25 year old women don’t own expensive apartments in the middle of New York, because they cannot afford them. Real 25 year old women don’t have a whole harem of men to booty call at 3 in the morning, because on TV these characters may seem charming and sweet, but in real life they’re called by a meaner name, usually describing the accessibility of their private parts.

If in series and films the strong, ambitious and capable young women are liked and loved, down here, in reality, those same women are told that they are cold, arrogant, untraditional, feminists, man-haters…

Do you get the fine difference?

Great, let’s start over then.

Linda Pearce was a young, 25 year old woman. She was living in a small, simple apartment in the Bronx, which in the better days of the week was shaking immensely from the loud rap and hip-hop music blaring from various stereos in the building, and in worse days was infested by cockroaches and rats, clearly moving around in search for a bit of peace and quiet after the wild parties on lower floors. Linda had a boyfriend, not so much because she really loved him, as to shut up her relatives, who firmly believed that unless she chains herself to someone soon, she’ll never find “happiness”. Apparently, female happiness in the 21st century still revolved tightly around settling down. Yay progress!

Linda worked as assistant-editor in a publishing house, which pretty much meant, that even though she was paid slightly better than a secretary, the editor’s coffee wasn’t going to bring itself over to his desk. And neither would his doughnuts. It also meant, that no one cared the word “beam” wasn’t really written as “beem”, nor that the cheesy romantic novels and crime stories they were printing had a little less literary value than the essays she used to write in high-school on breathtaking topics such as “My extended family in school.”

She had fun sometimes switching up the first and last chapters of the “literary masterpieces”, before sending them over for print, just like that - to see if someone would notice any difference. They did. Apparently it was really “cool” and “fresh” and became a whole new trend… Start at the end and “untangle” the deep complexity and uniqueness of the story, until we end up right back where we started. Linda was still slightly nauseous from the fact that the word “fresh” exists freely in the vocabulary of an editor-in-chief at a publishing house and thus she categorically denied taking responsibility for the fact that her little prank had inspired a whole new arsenal of scribblers.

Of course, her own personal ambitions to become an author were squashed in their infancy by her loving family, which made sure to instill in her the oh-so-necessary for every young girl feelings of insecurity in her own abilities and a paralysing sense of helplessness in the face of her own destiny.

Only a select few could become famous authors and creators - people with powerful connections and money, who could afford the luxury to sit around all day with their head in the clouds, as her father liked to say. No, she should just stop with these childish things and grow up. Become a real woman, interested in the actually important things in life, as her mother would add. Like, for instance, finding a medium-ugly and impressively mediocre male to attach herself to, like algae to a coral reef and depend on him for the rest of her days.

She hadn’t managed to grow up yet. Not in the way her parents wanted, at least.

She would of course still scribble up some short stories and chaotic chapters of books she began and never quite finished. She was still dreaming of one day completing them all. Sometimes, she would file them amidst the folders of new ideas that their contract authors would submit. And her heart would break every time she saw her boss, standing by the shredder, mercilessly destroying them page by page, angrily muttering something about “those darned interns, thinking they could write like real authors.”

Yes…

Her life was at best boring and mediocre, and at worst - a tedious succession of agonising days, eating more and more away at her optimism and her frail belief that her existence actually had some meaning.

And today was by far the shittiest day in her life.

Around lunch, her landlord had called to inform her that he was selling her apartment and thus was giving her a week’s eviction notice. Furious, she had thrown her phone on her desk with such force, that its screen cracked in a million pieces. As she was cursing desperately and trying to put the damned thing back together again, her boss had burst in through the door like a sudden tornado and had started screaming at her that his coffee had turned cold.

Normally she was able to take on the editor-in-chief’s hysterical outbursts without so much as a flinch, but today was definitely a bad day to test her nerves. She lifted her eyes from her hands, where she was still holding her ruined phone, and she was to some extent aware of the fact that she was most likely looking like a wild beast which had just finished tearing up its prey and was now looking for seconds. The more she stared at her boss with his repulsive pig face, ginormous belly and disgusting American accent, the more she felt her rage bubbling up inside.

And for the first time since she started working here, she couldn’t keep it down. It was stronger than her - all the frustration and anger she felt for this horrible, nauseating man, who had less literary insight than a mud worm, all of that spilled from her mouth after she opened it. That was pretty much the only conscious action she managed, really - to let her jaw gape open - everything else she was spewing was beyond her control - all the insults, she had been keeping inside, all her hatred for her work and for himself…

His small eyes nearly doubled in size. Although he was indeed gifted with the emotional intelligence of a raging rhino, deep down he had long ago figured out most of the things Linda was screaming at him. Yet somehow everything becomes more real, once said.

Firing someone was one of those things too…

Still carried on the fiery wings of her anger, she flew through the impossibly tight space between her boss and the doorframe and ran down the stairs with lightning speed. A small voice inside her head kept insisting, that when you’ve just lost your home, it was an especially bad idea to loose your job too. She chose to ignore it, not because it wasn’t right, but because the feelings of relief and inner peace that washed over her when she finished screaming at her boss, were just too powerful.

She was so high on these emotions, while running toward the exit, that she didn’t see the man trying to get in, and crashed into his chest with all the inertia she had gathered. She saw him reel back and instinctively reached out a hand to steady him. Only once he was stable on his feet again, did she recognise him.

“Geoff?”, she exclaimed.

“Uuuh…”, he faltered a moment, apparently, just like her, he had been deep inside his head up until now and wasn’t really expecting to see her. He jumped back into gear though and after a second’s hesitation, his lips twitched upward in a smile. “Hi there, kitten, let’s find us a nice little place to grab a bite, what’d you say?”

Linda couldn’t quite suppress her grimace. Little pet names in her opinion should be reserved for small children and actual pets, but unfortunately she never quite manage to convince her boyfriend to see things her way on the matter. Today, however, along with the all-too-familiar awkward feeling she got every time Geoff decided to call her “kitten, kitty” and such like, an extra layer of worry bubbled up inside her. Was she overanalysing or was there actually something less than genuine about his smile? Hypocritical even?

He grabbed her hand and pulled her back to the exit and she shook her head - now wasn’t the time to get paranoid. Her boyfriend had come to her in her moment of need - surely it was to support her and make her feel better. Wasn’t this a sign that everything was going to be ok somehow?

She let him drag her behind him toward some diner, because the fire, which made her blow up a moment ago and was giving her energy, was now suddenly gone. She felt as though someone had just pulled the rug beneath her feet. At this particular moment, all she really wanted, was to sit somewhere and have a bite with her boyfriend.

Geoff… He was five years her senior, but unfortunately they hadn’t quite left a mark where he most needed them.

He had blue eyes and dark blond hair, which looked like it hadn’t seen a comb or brush its entire life. Not that he was ugly per se - he was tall and relatively well-built, but you couldn’t exactly call him good looking either. Linda’s superego was constantly torturing her with sharp pangs of guilt every time she thought about that. It whispered to her that she was shallow and arrogant and that she should be grateful that she ever found someone, willing to put up with her.

Unfortunately, she was being pestered by another little voice, still quite frail, but just as insistent, which kept repeating that she shouldn’t settle, that she deserved better.

But today, right in this moment, she once again managed to suppress this second thought, to suffocate it with the desperate need to have someone who was on her side. Even if they weren’t as perfect as she would’ve liked.

When she figured out how big of a mistake this was, they had unfortunately already ordered. He was looking at her with his dull cow stare and was saying things, she was sure, brainless, meaningless excuses and retarded phrases like “I still care about you as a person” and “I’d very much like for us to remain friends”. The social norm, that her parents had drilled into her since she was little, demanded she agree and take things rationally in stride - relationships began and ended, people had differences, they didn’t quite fit as partners, but did this actually mean that they should suddenly start hating each other, simply because they couldn’t still love and grow old with each other? Any other day of her life, Linda Pearce, ex-assistant editor and currently mad and very dangerous person, would’ve kept her mouth shut, smiled and accepted to be a friend to this man, who was leaving her in her time of greatest need.

But not today…

Today she got up from her chair and, surprising herself a second time in the span of a few hours, opened her mouth and let her truth roam free, without so much as a care as to who was listening or taking offence. His jaw dropped, as he was staring at her and his panicking brain was desperately trying to figure out what was going on. Who was this woman, sitting in front of him, with hate-filled any eyes, screaming at him that he’s a bloody low-life, who had no idea what he was missing? Was this that same naive, head-in-the-clouds girl, who had come over from England with her big dreams and who he had met at the signing of his favourite crime novel?

Before he knew it, she wasn’t in front of him anymore. The door of the restaurant slammed shut with terrifying force and he was surprised the glass didn’t shatter. Slowly and with great uncertainty, as though afraid that his head might tear off his shoulders with the remainder of the force with which the entrance had been spun on its hinges, he turned his eyes to the street. And he saw her… Her and the car…

Linda’s heart was, for the second time today, beating as though it really wanted to fly out of her chest. Not from regret or fear, she curiously remarked, but with glee. That dark, black, bitter glee that takes over the doomed people, who were certain they had nothing more to loose and weren’t ashamed to drag others down with them as well.

Fuck those shitty people, anyways, she thought, as she was angrily striding toward the crossing. These fucking idiots, who had no idea about life, the world, the human soul… These dumb, fucking… men.

Yeah, that’s right! These horrid, disgusting, self-absorbed, egomaniacal, weak-minded men, who had conspired it seemed to destroy her life, break her spirit and bring her to their own level - turning her into an empty shell in their own image. Oh, how she despised them!

All of them. All of them. Are. The. Same. Every single one! Nasty parasites, latched onto herself and other women around the world, like repulsive ticks and sucking the power out of her and others like her to the last drop of blood. Of course she was never going to make it in a world, infested by parasites! These critters support each other, after all, they swarm their victims and attack - every time with more ferocity than before.

Everything is men’s fault. This simple thought etched itself into her brain, stronger than the talons of a predator. If there was at all any chance for things to be different, for society to be constructed in some other way… IF only there was a way to put these bastards in their place - on their knees, in the background, like she had felt her entire life… See how they like it!

She stopped for a moment and laughed - an eery, nasty little sound as though she were a shitty Hollywood movie villain. And exactly after that, with a bit of delay, she heard the honking. Of the car horn and the screech of tyres and breaks, desperately howling in their futile attempt to make the huge black beast of steel stop at a safe distance from the crazy young woman on the crossing.

Less than a second later, none of that mattered anymore. The world was enshrined in darkness, spotted here and there with dark red drops of blood.

“Fuck ‘em…”, Linda’s inner voice began again, with its last breath. “Fuck them shitty men…”

*************

She was pretty sure her eyes were closed. That’s why she was so surprised to find herself staring down what seemed to be a huge tube. Or was it a tunnel? Oh, how trivial, she laughed inwardly, so it was true what everyone was saying people saw when they died - you see yourself moving down a long tunnel, at the end of which something’s flashing bright lights like a motherfucker and you’re attracted to it like a moth to a flame. All of a sudden however, the floor beneath her legs gave out and she started falling down, if souls even had feet, and she flew off somewhere in complete darkness.

She was even more surprise to find herself feeling paralysing fear. She had always thought that once you die, you obviously have nothing more to loose, therefore fear in and of itself became obsolete. Boy, was she ever wrong! How mistaken was she, and what she wouldn’t give to have just a little something to grab onto - a small branch, an edge, a ladder, something… anything… Her inner monologue was once again interrupted, this time by a blinding white light, which replaced the darkness around her so suddenly and so completely, it was as though it had always been there. Her falling too stopped just as suddenly, and she hung there, as if kept up by invisible strings. The light was too intense and she was sure, that it could have blinded her, if she still had eyes which could be affected. But seeing as she was just a soul, after a brief few moments, she kind of got used to it. Not that there was much to see, mind - everything was white. White, endless and quiet.

“Hello?”, she tried carefully, and nearly jumped from the sound of her own voice. It was like small chimes, rustled by the wind and the word was barely intelligible. Was this how spirits talked?

She was bracing herself to try and say something else, when she felt something that she could only qualify as an earthquake. The lack of earth however somehow hindered her belief in her own diagnosis. What the…

“WHAT IS BALANCE?”, a quire of what sounded like a thousand voices erupted from the blinding light, so different, and somehow all in perfect harmony with each other. An eery, all-encompassing, mesmerising harmony.

“P-pardon…”, she muttered, or rather, chimed, with her new bell voice.

“WHAT IS BALANCE?”, the voices repeated, louder and more insistent this time.

“Scales, balance sheets? Justice?”

She felt some movement and realised, that light, just like darkness, could hide presences, beings, souls, or whatever the hell these creatures who spoke to her were. She wanted to ask them who they were and what they wanted from her. She wanted to ask if this was all there was to the afterlife. She wanted so badly to be able to move or speak, but she found out in horror, that she was completely helpless. The light seemed to be suffocating her with its invisible shining fingers. She felt another movement, but this time it was her - she was spinning round and round like a toy and was falling again. Down and down she went…