Prologue to a novel I will probably never write...

(Two in one day, thought I'd liven it up a bit. Wrote this many moons ago, as the prologue to a novella I was planning on writing, didn't happen but I kept hold of it 'cause I liked it...)

This is the beginning.

And the end.

It’s where my story culminates, being a high point I figured it’s as good a point as any to start, only problem is it’s also probably where it ends.

I’m twenty four, I’ve been living what a lot of people in my age group would consider the high life for going on a year now. And I got here quite by accident.

See, I was just a normal twenty three year old, I didn’t know I was normal, but I was. I didn’t have a fucking clue what I wanted to do with myself. Apparently I should have. I should have known where I was aiming, I should be training for something, I should know where I wanted to be ten years from now and I should be trying to get there. So I went along with the motions, I had a part time job to tide me over while I found a “career” that fit in with the “qualifications” I’d earned in school and college, which of course I’d decided on three or four years prior to me having any fucking clue on how the world actually works, not to mention what was actually going on in said world.

To me it felt like catch twenty-two, you needed to decide what you wanted to be, four years prior to actually deciding what you wanted to be. This may or may not have just been a product of the times, when I was ejected from the education system the whole country, nay, the whole world was in an economic downturn, there were five workers for two jobs, if you was lucky, and this was coming, seemingly, just after an economic and cultural boom where anyone could be anyone, or anything, the world was anyone and everyone’s oyster, companies were even training people for jobs that didn’t even exist yet. So people acted like the world was their oyster, they trained to be anything and everything, to do with the digital world mostly, me included, but when the analogue infrastructure that held the digital world up crumbled, they were left prospectless...

Not to mention the whole idea of “Being” irked me. Why couldn’t you just “Be”, you needed a tag, you needed to be a stock broker, or an IT consultant, or a trading standards officer, a cable joiner, plumber or electrician. Why couldn’t you just be someone? Why couldn’t you just be you and your job was a means to make that happen, instead of your job being a means of you happening...

C’est la vie I guess.