Main Character Vibes

Life was elsewhere

At the same time as Tilly was walking to work, Elias walked four blocks in the opposite direction. As he plodded, he observed the people as they scurried past him along the sidewalk. Their anxious faces were glued to their phones and watches. It seemed as if there was a widespread tic, itching them every other minute, to validate that they were going to make it to work on time. And in doing so, Elias ironically thought, punctuality had become a thief of time...one moment of distraction at a time.

Their fear of falling behind schedule was robbing their presence of mind. Until the accumulation of moments, they had missed transforms the entirety of their lives into a perpetual pregnant pause. They were running in the same place as if on a treadmill, chasing an abstract goalpost that would never be attained. "White rabbits," Elias murmured to himself with a cynical smirk before noticing that he was casting stones from a house made of glass.

Nonetheless, the sight of people depressed him. No one was the main character in their own lives; not the ones doing the living but being lived by it. Their faces were bereft of any and all romantic possibilities that were supplanted by some single-minded pursuit of elusive ambitions. Ambitions that although were material, were becoming less real until they were no longer able to touch what was no longer tangible.

Every morning of every day, Elias found himself unable to shake the feeling that somehow life was always happening elsewhere. His only link to a time rife with possibilities, with hope, was three years ago.

There was so much he had wanted to do, so many places he had wanted to visit when he had graduated three years ago; secretly he wanted to travel the world and write. But back then, he was in his final year of undergrad, on the cusp of graduating. And he was overwhelmed with the anxiety and dread of the chaotic possibilities looming 'out there in the real world.' That fretful rite of passage which undergrads invariably experience when they are about to graduate; when a structure of life that they have grown accustomed to, and by which they had defined their reality, is rattled by the impending disarray of sudden change. These were the circumstances under which he had first met Tilly. It was poor timing to fall in love, but that is why they call it falling. Elias had tripped into a relationship with a beautiful young woman who had two years left of law school.

Tilly's father had abandoned her and her mom when she was only a little girl of five. When Elias began dating Tilly, he did not give her history any second thoughts. But as their relationship progressed, it became evident to him that she depended on him in more ways than one. To Elias, it seemed as if Tilly was subconsciously searching for the existential security of a father figure in a romantic partner...in him.

This was a red flag that should have deterred him. But Elias was unseasoned and inexperienced; he had never been in a long-term relationship. So, when for the first time, he was seized by the crazed grasp of love, he was all too eager to fill that role...come what may.

Upon graduating, he indeterminately put his ambitions and passions on hold and took a job at a software company to support both himself and Tilly until she graduated from law school. And in a blink of an eye, by the passage of time and the swing of the pendulum, three years had gone by...as moments imperceptibly became memories and so much of himself became repetition, routines, and to-do lists.

His routine showed him that it was possible for the living to become ghosts long before they perished. Like a sad apparition on the sidewalk, with every morning journey to work, he was walking away from recovering a lost version of himself, buried beneath rigid layers of roiling fears, postponements, and compromises that had calcified over the years; and tolerated under the guise of growth and adult provisions...urban imperatives and other absurdities. There was no money in writing and traveling.