Touch of doubt

Pressure

Day one.

We all have our darker days in which you feel like doing nothing, going nowhere. You start to rethink your whole life and wonder what is your real purpose in that world governed by selfishness and money, a world in which you are forced to wear a mask and play your role like every other person. In other order of words, you have to be normal. We take everything for granted; we do not have to be forced into our costumes anymore, we embrace them ourselves.

A drop of water falls on my forehead and wakes me up from my beautiful dream. I cannot remember what the dream was about and, to be honest I do not want to. I think it would rather ruin it; knowing that something exist or knowing how it looks kills the only attractive thing about it: the mystery.

There is a small puddle on the ceiling, probably from the snow that started to melt already even though it is the 14th of December. We are now in the second week in which the small and cold butterflies were replaced by a giant disc of fire that had begun killing the white kingdom. While it's not very hot, the difference is noticeable. Of course, the lately nice weather is not an excuse for the water that now invaded my private space.

I live in a house at the periphery of town X. I am not the owner, I only have one room and a bathroom at the second floor of that house. The other two rooms are rented by two artists, an actor and a painter, that wanted to live very cheap, just like me. As far as I am concerned this is the cheapest place in town. The owner of this house lives in the center, where he has a nice and quite big apartment. His name is Balthazar. He is not very friendly when I don't pay the rent in time, otherwise I consider him a nice person; he is the type of man which looks like he just came out from an other era. He is fat and small, wears a neat mustache and uses pomade to keep his hair in place. I have never saw him wearing anything else besides his formal suit and topper and sometimes he even adds in a beautifully crafted wooden walking stick. His eyes on the other hand are cold and you can see that behind this smiling face there is more.

I jump into a pair of jeans and I put on a plain white T-shirt. I turn on the computer and I check my e-mail, but there is nothing new. There are five days now in which I didn't go to work; I took a little time off to put my thoughts in order. My job is to make sure that no one is able to get past the security system of the central bank, network security is that. In other words I am a software engineer; I made and now I maintain all the security related software, of course all with the help of a great team of engineers.

I turn off the computer and run outside of the room. The actor, Michael, was drinking his coffee in the living room while reading some scripts, I guess.

"Good morning Andrew!", he looks at me as I was putting my shoes on.

" Where is the fire?"

"I need to talk to Balthazar. It seems like the water found its way through the roof", I said while rushing outside. I do not like talking to him. There is something about Michael that makes me feel uneasy.

He always tries to get inside my bubble I've created around me. A bubble that separates me from the outside world. It represents the border between what I think and what I say. Sometimes I feel like going mad from all of this duality. For example I got my job by saying I love to work in a team or that I have a positive attitude and I am ambitious and motivated, a lot like every normal human being would say. I have a different self for different situations.

Working for a bank has its perks. I don't get quite a lot of money, but to be honest this never bothered me. The best thing is that they give me a car of my choice. I slammed the front door behind me and I quickly got in my car, a Tesla Model S. I always loved beautiful electric cars, but I never imagined myself driving one. I know that being attracted to things is not good, but I am human after all and along with the human nature I also gained the ability to value things in favor of people, or some people at least.

I usually make half an hour from here to the center of the town, yet today the snow pressed too hard on the concrete and the sky turned gray again and came closer to the earth.

A crow cawed somewhere in the distance.

/* New chapter! Yay! I made it! Question: Should the chapters be longer or shorter?
I personally feel like this is a bit too short, but I was concerned that no one would read it until the end if it was longer.*/