Typists

1963

After years of reading endless piles of fictional literature, I decided to come up with a single conclusion.

Everything was so predictable. Too predictable, to the point where I could tell what would happen next in a series of events.

I came across plot twists, heavy emotions of guilt and regret felt by the nonexistent characters. But somehow I always knew, considering the fact that in every single fictional book I read, the plots and the direction of the stories were alike, or rather completely identical to each other.

The main character in the end gets what they want, the quiet one catches the crowd's attention, and the popular sees it as a threat and tries to bring them down. It all felt the same, or at least that was how I saw the incredibly diverse world of literature in which I turned out to be wrong.

Therefore, like many readers such as me, there would always be a time when I misinterpreted. A time where a story would be so different that I would find myself at the edge of my seat, and could never guess what comes next.

With that, I found my life to be somewhat associable with the mindless demeanor of the usually identical storylines. It was all routinary- days went by with very little meaning, where just like fiction, my life remained the same every single day.

That would be the case when you're a 26-year-old woman in 1963 who works for the daily newspaper.

Sure, a few years ago, I wouldn't have been so skeptical about this particular career. I would've taken it without any hesitation. Because from the absolute beginning, all I wanted was to write. Travel- explore the vast majority of the world, and learn a thing or two from the stories of strangers I might never have a chance of seeing again.

I wanted to breathe in the autumn breeze in the middle of France with a fountain pen in my arm and a piece of paper in the other. I wanted to be one of those people who would tell the tales of overlooked places and bring them to light.

I knew what I desperately wanted to fulfill. So while my older sisters went to much more urbanized cities and settled there with the most ambitious careers in their hands, I strolled freely along the stone pavements of a quiet village hundreds of miles away. We only kept in touch through hand-written letters which took multiple long and painful weeks for the other person to receive.

Thus, when my sisters and I stopped writing to each other after almost a decade, it didn't come to me as a surprise.

Unlike the usual benevolent aspect I always had, this time I decided to live life in the absence of my sisters' advice in letters. It felt as if I moved on from a life in the suburbs, where I lived until the day I turned 18. Work was a slight help in making me forget, as my mind was constantly flooded with ideas I wanted to move to a piece of paper using an old typewriter I used for work.

For the last three years, instead of travelling around, doing the work of a journalist who would constantly be in different locations to find something to feature in the French city's newspaper, I stayed in one single place. At one point, I even decided to call myself a typist for the paper, instead. Like the life of dreams that I originally pictured as an eighteen-year-old was forgotten- thrown away.

So naturally, when an opportunity arrived at my doorstep, I had to take it.

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It was mornings such as this that numbed the constant isolating feeling in my heart. Autumn leaves sprawled out onto the warm ambiance of the early Thursday hour. This was the time of the year that I longed for the most. Red and orange leaves were found in every single corner where I stood. Cold days and nights where I would have a thick, heavy trench coat around my body. Dark pants, and possibly a pair of wedge boots.