Wordsmith

1. Conception

She was born in Greece. If you had met her, you wouldn’t have known. There was certainly something... exotic about her if you looked carefully - that was what people would say anyways. But it didn’t really matter anyways. She spoke no Greek and acted, in every sense, Australian. At the age of one she left Greece after her parent’s murders to live with her lone aunt in Australia. Her family had objected, of course - the aunties and uncles and cousins and elders who were somehow related if anyone ever bothered to figure it out - protesting that it was unjust to tear a child from their roots.

Growing up, she could recognise the filial division, isolated by it. Aunt Helen became a figurehead for petty teen angst and a lack of self, which wasn’t helped by her aunt’s pressure for academic success. So she dropped out of school to become a writer. ‘You’re really good’, people used to say, and she would believe them. They didn’t say that now, with a useless UNI degree and repeated rejections from all the publishing houses.

In a few words (184 to be exact), Sophia Drakos’ history could be defined. It was more than that - she was, of course a perfectly average complex human being. But perhaps these facts - the identity of one person out of billions - are irrelevant. Life is fleeting; an endless chase for meaning until you realise that you are insignificant and unmemorable. History eventually forgets who you are - a ‘pleb’, an animal who existed, reproduced, and died. So who she is, or was, was not really relevant to anything, but certainly important for her own sense of importance and plot.

Sophia encountered this epiphany at two in the morning, lying on her living room floor. Drunk. Again. It was certainly depressing, and her mind kept on replaying it as if it would abate. She wondered if there was a god, who cared. He was doing a shit job, but the idea was nice. The television was mutely flickering in the background - the usual seedy soft-porn that would circulate the channels in the early morning. She couldn’t even be bothered to masturbate to it, which was unusual considering her teen hormones had stuck around all through adulthood.

Caught up in theories - selfhood and such, she lay there, unmoving eyes staring into the off-white ceiling as if it would provide her with answers.

***                                                        

Monday morning held back little mercy; sunlight pervasively streaming into the room. The day was perfectly average - a shower, Advil, coffee and a bus ride to work. This pattern repeated for the next two weeks. However, that drunken epiphany, conceived somewhere in between Sunday night and Monday morning, stayed with her, repeating over and over in her head like some sick joke.

She was insignificant.

And it wasn’t like she hadn’t realised this before. It was more so that she hadn’t acknowledged it, as if it was entirely plausible that she would break the chain and become famous all of a sudden. Because writers are totally known for being rich, famous and successful. She was so unique, so different from every other wannabe on this planet. Perhaps that was also the reason why she worked full time in waitressing and part time at the local cinema. Money.

When she was younger, the world was her oyster. She talked in clichés - but they were beautiful; they gave her comfort and let her see the world in her own way. The future had been exciting, addictive and promising. School was just an oppressing institution - another ubiquitous symbol of capitalism.

She was conceptual like that.

She had wanted to change the world through literature; a verbal symphony of metaphors and cultural allusions. She was talented and her ideas were grand. More than anything, she missed this naivety. Now, she would come home to an empty house - adulthood (unlike the paradise filled with independence imagined in her childhood). In the silence, she would listen, think, observe - seeing alternate realities form within her head.