The phone call

I remember it vividly. Even now.

It was sometime around in the afternoon - when stomachs are generally full and when the tidings of the day are already established. When you already know what kind of day it is going to be.  When you simply stop fighting against the tide and get amalgamated in whatever fabric the people around you have already knit for you.

I did not want it to happen. I did not want to hear that voice , which would burst the momentary bubble of happiness that I had somehow managed to concoct around me. The bubble which had stopped the tremendous revulsion that my heart launches into every now and then just by thinking of the sheer implausibility of the task in front of me.

I did not want the albeit thin nearly non-existent thread that I was desperately clinging to for my happiness cut. But somehow, somewhere perhaps by chance or a sheer mathematical union of two improbable permutations I knew it won’t work out. It was too good, too simple, too comfortable to last for long.

I was looking at my phone hoping against hope that it would choose to be silent as our learned PM and simply refuse to stand up to whatever occasion it might be put to task.

And then, just when the share market indexes started to begin yet another whimsical descent, just when some part of my grey cells began to contemplate that both of us might have actually worked it out, just when the cells in my body started to hope against despair, the damn phone  just worked.

The jarring ringtone slashed through my world of calm, like a loud, noisy serial that your apartment neighbors feel very vital to watch just when you put on some floyd.

I let it ring for some five seconds. Knowing, that eventually I had to spark of a voluntary movement to stop that unstoppable ring. Knowing, that all the elaborate gothic castles that I had built would now simply crumble and turn to useless rumble. Knowing, that a single uttering of two of the letters in the english alphabet could burn away my happiness.

In some weird, severed from my consciousness version of events, my hand moved across the entire mass of dense molecules which were resisting it’s movement towards the phone and lifted it.

I could hear her voice at the other end. Every tissue in my body was vibrating to some random frequency that entropy had spurned and every tissue was listening.

And all she said was ‘No’.
That was all she said.

And then added ‘It still shows the same error, sir.’

It was yet another normal day at technical support. And then with a grimace, I again started my search for an answer. Knowing, that I cannot give up. Knowing, that I will not give up.

Ipse Dixit
*I have spoken.*

Photo Courtesy: Kira Sams