Ordinary Lives

Andromeda

The sky today is a bit cloudy, so it's hard to spot the stars she has been tracking lately, but there's a patch of clear sky just above the horizon in the north-east. And there through a thin vail of mist is visible, Andromeda - the chained maiden, a princess put up for sacrifice, a damsel in distress waiting for a prince to come save her.

But no one was here on the roof today to save our protagonist. Is it even a protagonist, if she is the one who needs saving? If she is just an uninteresting princess stuck in a not-so-grand tower? If she never had a story worth telling? No cruel stepmother? No father who disowned her? No evil sibling in the west, or any other direction for that matter? No ginormous amount of property to inherit? And no hint of super powers. She thinks to herself as her eyes devoured the sight of the woman Zeus forever immortalized in the sky, but shackled for eternity for the sins she didn't commit.

Is it worth being immortal if it meant being confined to the same place, around the same people? Do people who are stuck together for eons grow closer or drift apart? She could not even imagine what being stuck with her family, for any more years, would have felt like.

She wanted to stop thinking further, to stop herself from going down that rabbit hole of unanswered questions. But she loved that place too, full of uncertainties, probably the only place where she could risk letting herself loose.

She didn't drink, so she worked overtime to get high, to forget, to feel numb. And maybe to be forgotten too.

But once she is done, she always makes it to the roof, however tired.

Looking at the night sky was her favorite thing to do. And on that rooftop, under the bare sky, was her favorite place to be.
She could spend hours looking at the studded sky, wondering about the possibilities of other universes while trying to connect the dots into patterns other than the constellations she was so well-versed with.

She'd wonder how the stars would look different from some other planet set in some other galaxy on some other distant part of the universe, of how huge the universe might be, and of how little we humans, who claim to know everything, actually know.

She'd imagine herself flying through the space, no, floating through the space, at incredulous speeds. Floating past the stars that actually make the constellations, and finally figuring it out whether the alphas are bigger or just more closer than the betas and the deltas.

But she loved looking at the sky because the vastness of it would make her problems seem insignificant. It would make her feel insignificant.

And so it immediately made her forget that tomorrow was going to be her last day at work. The company had decided to cost-cut and hence she must leave the place she so loyally worked at for three years.

Summer was her favorite time, because ice-creams and because it reminded her of the first constellation she had ever learnt to spot, the big bear, Ursa Major. But at this time of the month, she can barely make out the tail, the rest of the body lost into the city lights that met the horizon. Proof that the summer is almost over.

She was 8 then, vainly looking at the stars when her father told her the story of the bear.

"And that's where God put that bear", he had said.

"There's a bear in the sky?" She had asked incredulously.

"Yes. There is. Just look more carefully", he laughed. As if looking closely could even make a beast appear out of thin air.

He extended his thin hand towards the far north, and her eyes followed his lanky finger swiftly tracing unintelligible lines.

"Those three dots you see, they are the tail, and the box over there, that makes but the body of the bear. The one over there, that makes the bear's snout. And I can't see them now," adjusting his glasses he added, " but there are these two pairs of legs too?"