A bzzt or a breeze?

*bzzt bzzt*, rang the phone for the 100th time today and it was only 2 pm. 

P looked over at her phone hoping it would be an email from the latest place she had applied to for a job. It had been 2 weeks since she heard from them and, even a rejection at that point would have put her at ease. It’s never ‘no news means good news’ for the anxious. It’s always, please make me happy or disappoint me, but do not make me wait. 

A few swipes were made to find out that it was just a notification from this dating app she had been using. Someone had liked her. Yay (?). She lingered on the app for a few seconds and was quickly disappointed because the guy who liked her had all selfies, and no information on his profile except that he likes dogs and watching the TV show Friends. She still to this day does not understand how that says anything about a person. 

*bzzt bzzt*, an aggressive language learning reminder from a language learning app.

She then went on to refresh her inbox. Nothing but a few emails from the government, from some abandoned shopping carts, and from her lonesome facebook account reminding her of some birthdays. 

*bzzt bzzt*, false alarm. It was her mother’s phone that *bzzt*ed.

*bzzt bzzt*, this was now driving her crazy. She angrily flipped her phone hiding her screen, let out a loud sigh attracting eyeballs from her mother and promised to look one last time. 

An email. It was them. They rejected her application. 

She quietly put down her phone, not wanting to seem like a sore reject and looked outside the window feeling this huge wave of disappointment silently engulfing her. These waves came more often than not to her shores these days, she realised. 

“It’s not fair”, her mother said looking at her phone screen.

“What’s not?” 

“How hard it is for you to feel proud of yourself and so easy for you to feel so lowly about yourself”, her mother remarked.

P knew what her mother was getting at. 

P knew that her mother was the only one who could see through the self-deprecating jokes about being single and jobless she had made earlier during lunch which made everyone else laugh. Not her mother. 

But honestly, P didn’t know how to label how she felt. For 2 years now, life hadn’t felt real to her. The whole world gave up on the normal as no one knew how to define what is normal anymore. She tried comparing the virus to a God-like all-encompassing entity to make sense of its stubborn omnipotence. The new lifeways that the world had to create on a spooky, invisible network galaxy called the internet became the truth. But what P struggled with was that nothing felt real. A couple of months into this pandemic, she had realised that during these times disappointment is going to be very easy to find and happiness very hard. Her dependence on the pixelated screens in front of her horrified her. The fact that the internet and her germ-ridden phone had become the primary channel to try to get all the things that she wanted, be it love or a job, disgusted her. She even felt petty reiterating all of these complaints to her friends because what she said was all painfully obvious and colossally unhelpful to anyone listening. 

“ But Amma (mother), is this it? My whole life now consists of me waiting around my phone to ring. Will we ever go back to a time when I could meet people, find something I like doing, or find someone I like without the internet and all its opinions always meddling in? Is anything I do real, if it’s not something that cannot be glorified on the internet?” 

“ Hey, the internet’s not all that bad!” said the boomer to the Gen Z imposter in the house. 

After getting through all the ‘you don’t get it’s and ‘you don’t understand’s with my mother, she told her to go get some baking powder and onions from the market. P complained why she didn’t just buy it earlier when she bought everything else from Amazon earlier only to be met with a shrug and a ‘please’. 

She walked to the store and waved back at her smiling mother who was standing at the window. She tripped on a rock, bought what was needed and also ice cream, and nodded at the old grocer she has always known. She felt a breeze on her face as she walked back home and smiled behind her mask. 

I am real and so is all of this, she thought. 

A breeze, a walk, and some ice cream are all it takes apparently.