Yumi and the Imperceptable Road to Hell

“Most people in this world are happy to come home from work, eat, drink, watch television and they don’t care about anything else in life. Only about ten percent of people, maybe less care about personal freedom”

Something about what Pedro said, despite his broken English struck a chord in Yumi. Up until the age of 33 she was one of these people, albeit against her will. She was on a never-ending treadmill of living to work 60 to70 hours a week and her fuel was fear. She was an immigrant and felt she had to slave twice as hard to justify her existence.

Now many years later, a divorce and a nervous breakdown later she realised that for so many years she never took a holiday, never enjoyed life and settled in the wrong place. The boulder of Sisyphus had been chained to her neck by the corporate conglomerate to which she sold her youth, answering queries for the customer services department of Hell Incorporated.

“You’re being exploited,” said the voice at the other end of the line. She didn’t understand why a man ordering navy pants in 1999 would want to tell her this.

“You’re being exploited and you should leave this job.”

“Would you like to hear about our special offers?” Yumi implored with a vague sense of panic.

“You don’t understand the extent to which you are being controlled, every moment of your life. Your world is being manipulated in ways you cannot comprehend.”

“Do you have any queries about your account?” she desperately needed to get this man off the line before her supervisor told her off about conversing with dementia patients again. The previous week she had a half an hour chat with a man who thought he had invented radar.

“You may choose to ignore me now but one day you will realise the truth.”

“Well, Mr. Jones, thank you for shopping with us and your pants will be with you in eight to ten days. Goodbye.”

At that time in her life she felt the constant adrenaline of fear in every corner of my life. She felt as if something were chasing her but couldn’t define precisely what it was and she frequently had the sensation of losing vast amounts of time when only minutes had passed. Food was also an enemy to Yumi, something that felt almost as if it were a contaminant. She would buy endless containers of disinfectant to keep her empty kitchen cabinets germ free but rarely did she buy any goods to fill them.

Now that she was no longer bound to her monotonous job or a permanent home, her travels fulfilled her quest for personal freedom. Although she barely had the money to do so she managed to find menial jobs in each town she travelled to, enough to keep her fed but often not sufficient enough to find a roof over her head. She found that the safest alternative was to sleep at airports, which were far cleaner and safer than train stations or parks. Frequently she would stay at communes such as this and share the gardening and daily chores in exchange for a bed or floor surface. Pedro was a fellow commune dweller and world wanderer in search of his own possibly non-existent utopia that he might finally claim as home.

“Stop thinking about the past,” he whispered over Yumi’s shoulder as she dried the dishes. This broke her moment of reflection.

“How did you know what I was thinking?”

Pedro smiled in his all-knowing way and for a moment she thought she felt him answer without words but she reasoned this must be a figment of her overactive imagination.

“Universal consciousness,” Pedro chimed.

“Is that what it is? Or perhaps I’m too obviously running away from my past. Maybe my seams are starting to fray.”

Pedro was the free spirit type that Yumi had once despised. He had never held a real job in his life and did not understand what her quest was about, he had no context with which to measure personal growth or transformation because freedom was a luxury he took for granted.

In the evening Yumi took a solitary walk down to the field of windmills, the large metallic monoliths seemed to possess a life of their own in the night sky, their sharp blades slicing through the constellations emitted a low drone that seemed to come from the bowels of the earth. This field could provide energy for the three adjoining towns but harnessing the power of the wind made the landscape look as if it were taken over by an army of robotic triffids prepared to wreak havoc on all of nature. It was difficult to feel the sense of peace she sought out here alone.

Perhaps the truth was too painful to deal with and her wanderlust was a distraction from the world of aspiration and failure that she found after migrating so many miles to stay in one pointless place for so long. She was no longer sure what constituted happiness or whether she would even recognise it if she found it.

Under the night sky Yumi reflected to herself; we are living in the age of the sound byte, but the byte is getting smaller and smaller until one day it will be reduced to a quark and everything we have left of civilisation and consciousness will be deleted from this corner of the universal hard drive.

© Naomi C. Pattirane 2009