"The Curtains Are Just Blue" by Barsha S

 

So say you’re me and you’re 24 years old and clueless about everything and you’ve just gotten off of work late and it's 11 PM and you walk into the parking lot of a secluded but not really secluded gas station store a few blocks from the lab that you've been hibernating in for the past two months.

 

And you’re hungry so you stare blankly at the menu, and you’re usually too tired to make decisions but today you’re tired in a different kind of way, so you look at the menu again.

 

You decide to order the blue raspberry milkshake. You’ve never been great at making decisions but this one plummets you into a memory from when you were nine and for whatever reason plagued by the strong conviction that you were going to die.

 

You were nine and you and your childhood best friend had these blue raspberry milkshakes. They were amazing and that night you convinced yourself God would not kill you until you had another one, and maybe another few hours to spend time with your friend again. But you like to think of yourself as a little older and more experienced and you didn’t die then so you won’t die now. And you’ve always had quite the burning passion for not starving to death, most of the time. Which is why you took this job.

 

You lay your tote bag and your purse and your body onto the suspiciously sticky cushion on the seat closest to the exit and rest your head against the curtains, which happen to be blue. You stare at them some more and they ripple like waves.

 

Bored and unusually fidgety, you sweep away the blueish blue curtains to reveal the smudged glass, and in it you see your reflection and beyond it you see a city that snores without sleeping like a giant, who isn’t working itself to death, rather that the boundaries of life and death didn’t seem to apply it for its life’s work was beyond it. Its organs churned out waste and its brains split into parts which walked the streets calling for the taxi of why did it turn out this way.

 

And why? Who was to blame for the atomization of modern society? It was Satan, or Moloch, or the demiurge or whatever symbol which was corrupted with greed and selfishness, representing itself more than the suffering it was meant to mean. Or it was some poor group of people. Or it was the schismogenic forces of technocapital itself, so slick and slippery that giving it a name felt so powerful. Or maybe it was just those god forsaken blue curtains.

 

The nightness of it all begged you to ask the question, are things real because they are the same or are they real because they are different? And there was no answer, so you look at the glass again.

 

Then, when you look, you see your face reflected in the glass, and the ugly red blotch on your cheek tells you answers. It was whatever you were born with that made you different, not the world. It was what happened to your sister several years ago. It was the sudden terrifying realization that anything was possible. It was the trust you could put in the fact that the world was safe and predictable. It was your mother. Because your mother, she was in love with the rush hour traffic jam of whatever did I do to deserve this. And too much time passed and it turned into the every hour traffic humdrum of it was my fault. And a mother’s shame metastasizes into rage and she takes it out where she can. But now you have to leave and you have to board the taxi of its not your fault.

 

Instead you threw yourself into your studies and then into your work because it was one thing you could control. You wished you knew why but the only way to know why was to split the world into two identical versions where only one thing was different. Then, the control group would tell what would have happened. But the world is neither a perfectly constructed novel, nor is it capable of splitting, unlike populations and unlike people. Everything, both science and art was an attempt to assign meaning to your life, and just because the world is sometimes too endlessly complex for the replications of science, and too uniform for the symbolism in art, doesn’t mean that you couldn’t try to find the answers.

 

And now a quarter of the milkshake is gone, and when you take 19 steps on the checkered blue floor and exit out the doors you think you’ll be safe. You’ll call a taxi to take you back to your apartment because you are too sleep deprived to drive at the moment, and you’ll be safer for it.