Mind the Gap is a collection of fiction short stories. They vary in style, themes, tone, characters and length. The aim is to provide a different lens colour to look to reality. It's also the sandbox where I tried different voices, where I experimen...
I was in a Meet-up about The future of the internet when the presenter had the audacity of showing, on the second slide of the power point, a representation of the next generation of tech masterminds as a line of big bearded caucasians, all dressed in wasted blue jeans and plaid shirts. Seven! He put seven! All of them the same annoying cliché. To make it worse, the presenter was indian! Of course, me, one of the three women among the fifty there, I raised my hand to have fun about it.
"I identify myself with the tall, big orange beard guy in the third position, starting from the left. Who do you feel identified with?" I asked using that bitch-pretending-innocence face we all have for these occasions.
He didn't answer.
I was surprised when, in the aftermath, drinking a beer on my own, outside the bar where we just have had the gathering, a guy approached me. The conversation was about his brilliant idea on writing a book on the topic of hacking happiness.
"How do you define happiness?" I asked after a while, with the same bitch-innocent face as earlier. He was starting to enumerate the characteristics when another guy joined our petit comité.
"But...that is not Hapiness" I said, "that is Joy, which is, in fact, the opposite. Both are obtained following very different paths" I finished.
"No, you don't understant..." the first guy said.
"Actually, she is right" the second guy interrupted, "Joy and Happiness are obtained by opposite practices and you have been describing Joy".
"Well, let me explain it in another way" said the first guy, trying to cover his mistake.
The truth is that, at the begining of the conversation, when that beautiful ethnic mix was still paying attention to me, I was thinking - Wow! Does he really like me? He is so handsome!-. But then, I realised he was only looking for admiration, the currency some people use to keep this type of guys around. He didn't care about me or what I thought, I was just a decoration in his personal reverie. Gosh! I bumped into a vamp again!
The other guy although less physically attractive and, by far, more intelligent, left in me the impression of a rare and sweet serenity. Being in his company I could close my eyes in silence and feel transported to a still lake surrounded by powerful mountains. Beautiful! If I believed in marriage that is the one I'd have chosen.
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