Serendipity

A short story inspired by reality.

SERENDIPITY

It was stone cold. The airy winter breeze was filling the silent night with uneven whistles that hit every canopy. Ashley thought it was the appropriate moment to end her life.

Someone once told me that we, people, are the most oblivious creatures on Earth. I’ve came to realise that they’ve spoken the truth, indeed. We always run from A to B as if our lives depended on it. For seconds, minutes, days, months, sometimes, even years we think that B is our final point, our target, the place we definitely need to reach. However, there comes that split of a second in which we brush everything up as if it was written with chalk on a small blackboard. We come to ask ourselves: ‘What am I doing?’, and more important, ‘Why am I doing it?’

At that moment in time we think there is no way we can reach happiness because we just lost the meaning of our B point. Therefore, next to obliviousness we can add stubbornness to the list. 

Ashley is an aspiring architect. She is in her 1st year of University and in the middle of having a mental breakdown, figuratively speaking. She was successfully admitted to this university after four years of continuous sketches and many sleepless nights. Yesterday, Ashley failed one of her most important exams. She blames herself for ‘not being good enough’, but also for the sleepless nights that kept going on. Those sleepless nights spent at the one of the two jobs she has. She also blames it on the mountain of diapers, the countless cries, the mistakes she made. ‘Maybe if things were different I could do it’, ‘maybe I thought too high of myself and I can’t do it’.

Aside of being a student, Ashley is also a mom. She is the mom of a one year old toddler. For anyone it’s hard to take care of a baby, but it is even harder for a person that still needs to grow up herself. Of course that she has always been judged because of it, starting with her parents that forced her to give up on the baby and ending it with her friends that suddenly avoided her and stopped answering her calls. It is hard to wake up at 22-years old alone and with two mouths to feed. 

She managed to rent an apartment and to go on with her life, yet she never got used to it. She refused to think that the B point suddenly became foggy, she refused to accept that maybe that B point is no longer her finish line.

Now, she is feeling the urge to mark a finish point herself because we people find it easier to give up than going on. We like to be turtles instead of humans. We want to hide instead of keeping our head up and face it all. When there’s a thing that goes wrong in our lives we think that everything else is going wrong. We realise how big of a charade we make of our lives. When we reach that point, there are two alternatives: we end the play or we start playing it real.

Ashley is ready. She is ready to end it all up. Everything flashes before her eyes as if it is obvious that the ending is close. Or as it is obvious that a new start is closer than ever. Things that flash before her eyes are not the moments spent drawing inside her old room at home in preparation for the big exam, neither the moments in which she realised that a new life squeezed inside hers, not even the big moment in which she realised that she had miserably failed her important exam. The moments that flash before her eyes are full of warm and curious eyes, of two small and wandering hands, of a soft and cute babbling. She remembers the first time that she held Matthew, his first bath, his first uneven steps.

She unconsciously smiles.

She wipes away her tears and with a spring in her feet goes home where Matthew is waiting for her.

We all felt lost at a certain point in time. We all felt that our life has no meaning, that there’s no purpose. We get angry when things don’t go our way. We keep biting our nails regretting our mistakes and never realise that mistakes are also experiences and experiences define what we are. Change is terrifying, but what we should avoid is not change, but fear: the fear of living our life the way it is and embracing every opportunity we have.

Dear friends, maybe your point B became C, D, F, or even Z. Probably, everything you’ve ever wanted turned to be nothing of what you expected it to be. Still, don’t forget the most important thing: you still have the A. 

Author's Note

Any advice is well-welcomed.

Reviews

[Philip Muls]

Hi Madalina, well done. You manage to capture the despair we humans feel when our struggles seem to lead from A to nowhere at all. But - as they say- the obstacle is the way or the impediment to action actually advances the action.

[Madalina Coman]

Thank you very much! I think that all of us went through a stage like that and I feel good that I managed to capture some of those feelings that catch me up sometimes as well. Thank you again for reading and for your encouraging words.

-Madalina

[Philip Muls]

My pleasure. I would appreciate your opinion on some of my writing on the same topic.

[Kyle Wynn]

I honestly thought that was quite amazing. It's this kind of story that makes people sit back and think about their 'A' and inspire people to want to keep going because it also answers the question that some people may have when they feel like they fail, "Where do I go now that I lost my B?" My answer for that now is simply, move on to the next letter. Thank you for sharing this!

[Madalina Coman]

Thank you for reading and for these beautiful words ♥ Have a nice day ♥

-Madalina

[Kyle Wynn]

It was my pleasure. I wish the same to you as well!