What are we, but mice on a little running wheel, running without a destination in mind, only to realise that maybe we're trying to escape something we don't even know yet.
And in my mind's eye, I go back to the events of several weeks ago.
"It is unhealthy to live in the past."
Don't I know it. There are some whose lives move on, inevitably, and for others, time stops. Reminiscence takes on a different value here, an ethereal impermanence that is both unnatural and real, like the still air in an airlock, silent, stale, an unblinking gaze fixated upon its very edges. There is a strange quality to such memories, how they are all linked together illogically and out of sequence with time itself, almost as though a pin dropping in one would effect its sonorous ring throughout all of them, rippling into memories past and future as well.
And it comes back in snatches, like the flash going off on a camera. The setting is cozy, the time late afternoon, and the minutes take on a languorous quality, almost as though they are dragging their feet through time itself. I'm in a coffee joint amidst the bitter aroma of espressos and lattes, suffused in a dim reddish tint as light filters through the translucent glass windows, with comfortable red circular plush couches marking off one area from the next. It is on one of these couches I now find myself, engaged in the inevitable dilemma of our times, the post graduation job search.
In a mild dreamlike state, I press my fingers to the scalding hot cup of coffee before me, and I withdraw my hand immediately, chastened by the harsh jolt back into reality.
"What kind of job are you looking for?"
It is a question that has been on my mind the whole month. And I realise more than ever that I do not know. I know what I do not want, a job at a newspaper. Or a "writing" job, in all of its shapes and forms. It might seem strange, seeing how writing comes naturally to me, but I know now more than ever that it is not something I will want to make a career out of. My best writing is done when I don't have deadlines to meet and editors to please.
And right on cue, an SMS from the company arrives. I don't know if I should be flattered that the HR department which did not even entertain the emails or resumes of my peers actually bothered sending me a private SMS asking me to go back. I guess it is a form of recognition, and there is no shame in feeling a little trill that maybe, in these four years, you did do something right after all.
But I know that is not my place. My peers do not understand why I say that a place that has a job waiting for you should be the last place you apply to. It is the comfortable choice, the safe one, but it is not necessarily right. And having been a journalist, I know what really matters in the job. It is not your writing ability, or the ability to stay cool in a difficult situation, but really, it is about your people, or "soft" skills. Most of my days in the newsroom were not spent writing, they were spent pulling favours with people from all walks of life, to give me a catchphrase, a quote, to find the right contacts to point me in the right directions, name-dropping the company name to pressure people to give me exactly what I wanted.
Sometimes I wondered if the story was already written even before I'd put pen to paper. In a sense, it was a series of daily exercises in mental and emotional manipulation, and I guess I was more adept at it than I realised I ever was. But perhaps, that should have hardly been surprising.
And I catch her looking at me. I must have wandered off again, my mind does these things, all too quickly, going through months, years of memories in the time it takes for others to sip coffee. I mumble a series of job descriptions, but they are an account more of what I do not want, than what I plan to apply for.
"Maybe some management position. Something where you get to learn on the job you know?"
She gives me a blank look, with more than a little frustration slipping in, something I notice by how the edges of her lips start to pull sideways and downwards. Maybe there is a bit of biting on the lower lip as well, but that I'm not very privy to. I'm lost in my own world, as usual.
"Well, why don't I help you instead. Tell me what kind of job you want."
And so, a discourse begins. And my mind is in two places at once. Even as I run through her options and give suggestions, I'm already thinking about another chance meeting that took place two weeks before that on the streets. I'd run into yet an acquaintance from school. And it was strange. I'd never really spoken to her in all four years of school, but I greeted her like a warm friend.
Was it graduation goggles like they say on "How I met your mother?" You know, how everything seems so much more in the immediate month after graduation, where even people you detested become familial kin because you shared times together. In this case she wasn't someone I hated, just someone I should have spent more effort getting to know but never really did.
She asks if I have found a job, or whether I was going on a grad trip. I answer in the negative for both, and she smiles. It is a sheepish smile, one I have seen many times on her face, only that this may be the last time I'm seeing it. She seems relieved that she is not the only one, or perhaps that someone like me shares her predicament.
In her expression I read a certain self-consolation, that someone whom she perhaps sees as somehow academically superior is actually just as gutted at life as anyone else. But I've known that all along. On the rough ocean called life, mine is a ship that has never left the harbour, weighed down by an invisible anchor, chains I've strained to break free of my whole life but am now tiring of the effort. It's so easy to settle for those irrational fears, the neuroses of the afraid impinging upon your mental consciousness till they become real chains.
I am tired. Just yesterday, I quit. I left the family car stalling in the middle of a lane, threw down the keys, and walked off. I don't know who parked the car eventually, I only know it wasn't me. I've had the license for four years, and I was not even trusted to park the car. I could do nothing right, because being right was something nobody ever wanted me to be. I had to be wrong, so others had reason to be.
And I had just parked the car perfectly a few hours before in the afternoon, when nobody else was with me. It seems that the driving gets worse the more others are in the car with me. By myself I'd done everything right. All these four years all alone. But now, even with the license to show for it, I was not trusted to take over the reins. It's not me is it, it never was.
Maybe I don't really want a job, because I don't want to be wrong. Because it would prove them right. But, by not finding a job, I am proving them right anyway. The worst of catch-22s, when you cannot be right either way, because you are only around to be wrong, a mistake, so you can be the mistake you are needed to be. So you can be a vassal for fears, fears they have grown so used to so as to be comfortable with.
I never used to be this afraid. I thought it would all become right, once I did everything right. But perhaps I should have realised it sooner. The problem, it was never mine to begin with.
There is no right job. There is no right path.
Nothing, will ever be right.