Short Story: Shit Nowadays
Summary: An editor is being a 'thinker' just after she read a draft by someone named Summer who she thought would write a sunny story..
"We are free, yet full of shit."
It is raining outside while I am trying to finish my job--reading an abundant of draft and choose only the best, whether it is the story with the strong character or the great tale. It is such a perfect weather for my best job. Besides it, it is midnight here and I feel so tired. I need a break for a while so I went to the kitchen to make a mug of coffee, hoping that my eyes still open until the dawn comes, for there are a lot of drafts which I haven't read.
In addition, the number of draft which I have to read is increasing since the publisher held a writing competition. I absolutely get the task to select the best works.I love my job, really, but sometimes I'm so tired of reading. I feel queasy and my focus is lost. If that happened, all I want is a one-day-vacation to refresh my mind and my body and unfortunately, I couldn’t get it.
Besides those unpleasant things, I think I have a great job that allow me to know so much perspective and ideas of others. I also can read various style of writing, get new knowledge because everybody writes different story with different theme, plot, setting, and culture. Last week I read an interesting draft about the life in another world, with several myth creature like vampire, werewolf, amethyst, white witch, black witch, and something that its writer called falks. It such a great fantasy story.
But it is not that story that interest me the most. It is something entitled Shit Nowadays. Not a great story but similar to its title, it is a piece of shit. Written by someone named Summer, I thought she would write a sunny moment or something like that, but you know reality doesn't work that way; different with our expectation. She wrote something that looks like a heaven while in fact, it is just the darkness, of her generation--millenial. Here I bring you some pieces of her writing:
We are a free generation, yet full of shit. Our freedom are guaranteed by something named Human Rights so that we can do whatever that pleases us, including love anyone without boundary, like doing something inappropriate in their own culture and like lyrics in one of Taylor Swift Song, boys and boys and girls and girl. It is not suprising when people in East act like Western-lovers. As far as I know, their culture is different, aren’t they?
Saila is one of that people who keep their freedom high. Different to her, I am not that full-freedom human. It is true that I was born free, but I actually am a slave. My God’s slave. I can’t dye my hair in pink, blue, white, or anything. But even though it is not permitted, I am okay with that. I love my dark hair. But sometimes I get jealous to Saila for she can dye her hair anytime she likes to. She can wear ripped-jeans while I can’t do that. She is full of freedom.
Also, Saila can love anyone. But I think it looks like a game instead of love. They just hurt each other most of the time. Behind that freedom of loving anyone, people only use it like it is a game, not something sacred, or something like that.
Read that part and I became a philosopher in a minute. Thinking about how true the narrator’s idea is. In a time like this, where freedom is everybody’s property, the true value of something is losing for there is no boundary exists.
Sometimes I don’t get it why people post everything to their social media. Like the photo of their school, their food, their pets, their stuffs, their clothes, and the place that they visited. Saila said that it is a trend. We should follow the trend, she said. Saila wastes her money to go to beautiful places just for a photo to be uploaded to her instagram account. She took like a hundred photos of herself and demanded me to took her until my hand get stiff. Sometimes she forced me to buy the food I didn’t like. She took the photo of it, then.
I also post the photo to my instagram account, kind of picture when sun rise, leaves fell, and my drawing of anime character. My aim is to tell the world how beautiful and how I love it. I never get what kind of purpose which Saila seek. But Siva told me once what Saila seek, she said it was fame and praise. I think Saila is a famous person. Everybody already knows her since her first day at school.
Overall, Summer’s writing shows me how people in her generation do and get, an unlimited freedom, but they use it exaggeratedly so that they make new shits exist in this cruel world. I bet those shit that make the narrator itself changing from a pure girl into mouth-poisoned girl. Talking about cruel world, I think I’m cruel to myself. It is two a.m. and I’m still here trying to finish my work. I don’t care to my body, my health. Ah perhaps Summer can write this crime in a short-story. Perhaps, her generation often work until midnight, too. Wait, I’m a millennial too, aren’t I? I was born in 1989.
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References:
- Personal opinion
Inspired by Letters from The Death by Alice Haibara
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