LJ Idol Week 5 topic: Fear is the heart of love
The room is crowded with girls in black hair. They are my Uruguayan friends and have invited me to their living room tonight. Some are watching TV, some sit on the floor and some on various sofa. I am sitting on the sofa as well braiding the hair of one of the girls. She offers me 5 Euros as a payment, which I politely refuse. “I will leave it here, in case you change your mind”, she says. The 5 Euro bill softly falls to the floor between our feet and remains there, unnoticed.
I am in a relaxed mood and have planned nothing but chilling out and relax with my friends, when the door opens silently but quickly and a man is standing in the door. I am surprised and startled - not because his appearance is frightening but probably because he looks like the exact opposite to the people in the room and to me. His hair is long enough to just gently touch his shoulders, it is softly curled and blonde. His face is as slim as the rest of his body, but he still makes an athletic impression. His clothes are a mixture of leather and fur in gold and grey colours. In his left hand, he holds something that looks like a very long shoebox.
His expression is serious but friendly, too. He asks me to come with him, which I agree to without further ado.
The headquarters he takes me too are deep down in the basement near the house where my parents live and where I grew up. The heart of the headquarter is a huge machine with copper casing and a lot of LEDs blinking in yellow and red. There are many other people here, young and old, all adults, I cannot see any children here. Then I hear about the plan. I am not here to be shown and around and getting to know the workplace of this man. He has not brought me or the others here for business or for pleasure. This man, the shoebox warrior (that is how I might refer to him since he has not even introduced himself to me, yet) has brought us here to connect us, one by one, to this machine, and gather and collect all the human energy we have and then leave us here, sucked dry and cannibalized, turned into empty human shells. I am truly scared and something inside me refuses to believe he could really do this to me and the other people here. That man does not seem harmless, but I do feel he must have a good core beneath that hard and chilly behaviour.
My various attempts for escape fail. They have built fences and walls nearly everywhere around the headquarter and they are too high to jump over them and I do not have enough strength to climb.
The desperation at the headquarters grow and I am preparing for my last day on earth, wondering why I even agreed to come with him.
That is when he suddenly tells me: “You are free to go!” Everyone starts to leave and I do not trust the situation until I step outside without anybody stopping me and see that the walls and fences have fallen.
Some time later, when I am quietly working again, someone knocks on the door. It is the man with the shoebox. I freeze, fearing he might capture me again. Apparently, however, he is just here to talk and sits down on the large table of the room. He says that he is sometimes tired of the “work” he does.
“Then leave”, I say in return “Come to the good side”.
He shakes his head, then looks down on the white surface of the table. “I can’t, I am too scared.”
That is when I know I will never see him again, because my world is never going to be anywhere near this dark business he is part of.
He gets up and hands me the shoebox.
Something inside me decides to be brave, walks slowly towards him and softly kisses his lips once. He does not move or protest, he just leaves then, as silently as he came.
Writer’s notice: This entry is inspired by a dream I had. I do not have any Uruguayan friends and the area under my parents house is a large parking garage. What was in that shoebox will never really be known.