The Premises of an Ideal Life and Additional Poetry

Chapter 8

Success is failure turned inside out,
The silver tint of clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems afar,
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit,
It's when things seem worst that you mustn't quit.

Aria always recollected this rhyme when she felt like quitting or “a fish among the sharks”. She once saw this stanza in a gossip magazine, which made a shameful use of it to criticize a soccer player who was fed up from striding footballs around the courts. Nonetheless, years flew by and she never had enough interest to look for the whole piece and its author. Until she finally got her cheap and burning-hot cell phone to search for it.
The young woman gets stunned by the level of ignorance she could have avoided if she’d just looked at it before. Aria has spent years in a role blindly professing a poem. She had no idea it was a stanza from “Don’t Quit”, apparently written by a famous English poet: Edgar A. Guess. It made the stanza somewhat less special, for to think she is not the only one acquainted with it, made her secret baby naked and not for her exclusive pleasure anymore. 
One month has passed since Aria’s exchanged screams, cries, and watery kisses with her mother. Having gained the doctors’ yellow card of departure- although a cascade of warnings was put on the patient’s knees- she is now moving towards Quinn’s house, her mansion actually.  
Claire instantly declined her daughter’s request to see her ex-best friend. However, she slightly blackmailed her daughter, saying that, to pay Quinn a visit, it had to be the last one, along with a fatty swear on her name. Aria agreed to it wearing a broad smile, not because she was in favor of some drama though, only because she knew her stubborn mother would crash on her if she denied the offer-not-offer.
So the nineteen-year-old girl is now five minutes away from where Quinn must already be standing, near the white gutter on the left of her house, cell phone in one hand and a whip in the other. The girl shivers just by painting such a cinematic scene.
Even though she has to put up with the driver’s smoking habits, as soon as Aria saw a taxi man in a beetle car standing outside the hospital’s back entrance, it was love at first sight.
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The vehicle was visibly new, with metallic and glimmering suspensions matching with the butterscotch yellow color of the automobile. The wheels were OK, the aluminum and rub had been trampling the asphalt for many a time though, interfering with their paint. From leaning in to where the driver was sitting, she could fully admire the car’s white steering with a polished brand emblem in the middle. Aria’s facial features were brightened by the sun, which caused her reflection on the symbol.
What a car.
It reminded her of Marilyn Monroe and the movies she used to watch with her mother when she was five. Claire had no sense of what was an appropriate movie for a kid, so watching one of the biggest sex symbols in action was the usual Fun Friday for them. The sleeveless yellow dress the young actress once wore gave Aria a faint desire to be back in her living room and watch the old DVD of Some Like It Hot.
Lucidness gave way to imagination, envisioning in how many years’ time she would be able to hand in her own money from her own wallet to a garage salesman and come back home with such a vehicle. The taxi driver interrupted her invisible world from getting any farther with an unceremonious question, almost like throwing a rock at her head.
“Ma’am, are you looking for something? You liked my car, didn’t you? I told my pals it would get the girls’ attention. May I ask whether you’re here for the drive or something else?”
The tone of beckoning and discrepancy to the driver-and-client relationship was undeniable as Aria could almost imagine him being rude enough to invite her to sit on his lap. Despite feeling an urge to slap her hand on the very centre of the man’s forehead, she said with clenched teeth:
“Hello. Would you be so kind as to drive me to this address? I’d appreciate it if you could tell the price in advance also”
“No problems, um...”
“Aria. Aria Miller.”
“Aria. I know the place, it’s not far from here, maybe 15, 20 minutes away depending on the traffic. The cost will probably be on the average of $15 though if you really want to know that much.” The sincere and harmless face could barely erase what had just taken place; the girl flipped the dollar notes in the middle of her fingers as a way to count them down and gave a nod before getting inside the car.
The young woman made a loud noise out of closing the stiff, unoiled ancient door, followed by her attempt to rearrange herself in the backseat. Aria still had the man’s words strangling her voice when she decided to pay him back with the same dirty coin. The girl looked outside of the window, made a scene of cleaning her throat to call for the attention of the vertiginous prelude she would be invoking with the statement:
“About the girls and the car… I guess it would be more advantageous to change it. I mean, don’t take it personally, but who would notice the driver if such a nice-looking beetle was in front of them? Just the word of a woman.”
The vociferous cat smirked at the man in the steer, and she realised it was the first time she had called herself a woman.
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After this twist of the knife, the nasty man hasn’t said anything regarding Aria’s comment, although the angst was visible when he dipped the cigarette in an ashen box with the force of a brutal leopard, almost tearing it into pieces. Nevertheless, what is done is done; and happily so.
The road to her ex-friend’s house is turbulent, as the many uneven rocks creating the street haven’t been turned into asphalt yet. Perhaps this rich community desires to have a kind of vintage look to their piece of land, similarly to babies sulking their thumbs and when their parents try to snatch it off, the culprits win with their vanity.
What has society turned into?, Aria thinks.
Glimmering window panes, housemaids caring children on both arms, limping. Up and down, the copper gates protect their jovial buildings from the deserted street, as if they are at the summit of the Badain Jaran desert; safe from no real danger.
Aria attempts to avert her eyes from the toxic sculptures of perfect households, taking a glimpse at her left, to the hard-working women walking with their children and their houses in tatters behind. Their poor house’s garage is almost non-existent, only to be used as a sales place or a filthy art studio, maybe, in the means of earning whatever cash they can.
The whole distorted scene, the façades and terrible corrosive smell of indifference from the people, or better yet, inhuman people on the right. The rawest example of society’s discrepancy, Aria gathers.
In complete silence and in a multitude of trespassing thoughts, the one house Aria has expected to see is finally in front of her, Quinn waiting on a bench, smoking a vape pod and ignoring her arrival. The girl can ignore me as much as she likes, but she doesn’t have sealant ears, the late coma patient surmises.
“Thanks for the ride. 15 dollars, right?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll take it, thank you.”
As Aria turns away from the man, he cries out to her with a stammering voice and, to the girl’s surprise, he says:
“Oh, and before you go, I’d just like to apologize for what I told you. About the girls and stuff, I see now that I was a total bastard and my comment was definitely stupid. Won’t say I liked what you said, it lowered my self-esteem in a way… Okay, okay, I’m getting to the point. I just wanted to say that it was an inappropriate thing to say, especially for a fifteen year-old like you.”
“Nineteen.”
“Nineteen? Really? Anyway, I’m glad you took the ride and I’ll try to fight against my inadequate posture in regards to women.”
The taxi driver straightens his beret, takes his cigarette out of his dry mouth, and points toward Quinn’s direction, mere 10 meters from them:
“I hope you can solve whatever problems you may have with that one. Have a good day.”
The beetle is halfway to turn the next road when Aria finds her words under her astonishment. She mumbles a scream:
“I’m happy I helped, I guess? Bye!”