World War F

Hello!

How are you? Yes, yes, I’m talking to you, you the reader of these lines.

Why?! Well, how else am I supposed to talk to you? I’m not telepathic. My name is Daniel, by the way. Why Daniel? Why not? A name is just a name in the end. What’s your name?

Why?

See what I mean?

I’ll call you… Logan. Yeah, just like the Wolverine. You know who the Wolverine is, right? See? You like me already.

OK, Logan. Let’s talk. Let’s talk about introverts and extroverts. Which one are you? Or maybe you’re an ambivert, one of those people that’s neither but both? Have you ever thought that we’re all ambiverts?

“What’s wrong with you, Daniel?” you’ll say. “I’ve been an introvert/extrovert all my life.” Have you thought?

Have you ever thought that being an introvert or an extrovert are two sides of the same coin, you being the coin? I’m crazy, right? Maybe not.

Humans have always had a fascination with duality, it’s what gets our kink on. Good and bad, white and black, light and dark and ultimately introvert and extrovert. Why is that? Why not? It’s a simple system for understanding the environment, it’s been with us since before our ancestors discovered fire, and the saying goes: if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Would we even be able to notice when something as rooted in our subconscious as this system, affect the way we perceive this world? Unlikely.

Introverts are shy, reticent people while extroverts are outgoing, socially confident. I didn’t say this, google did. Try it if you don’t believe me. Now, are you just shy and reticent, or outgoing and confident? Yeah, didn’t think so. You’re basically a biological wonder of over 200.000 years of evolution, your psyche is amazing. You are the pinnacle of human evolution, how can anybody say that you ‘re either this or that. No!

No!

You’re amazing.

Introverts, maybe they’re just wonderful, cocky extroverts who’ve had the luck of growing up in a crappy environment, psychologically castrated, beaten down, starved of love. Their introversion is not a type, it’s a survival mechanism.

Extroverts, on the other hand, could just be delicate souls, as fragile as a piece of porcelain, deprived of nurture and hope of a better tomorrow, who’ve learned that if you want to live, you have to take it. How do you take it? By faking it until you make it. Faking being a little narcissist, choosing yourself over and over again until they know nothing else but to be someone other people want to be with.

Get my point, Logan?

By the way, do you have friends?

Let me tell you about a friend of mine: Mircea, we’ll call him M for short. Easier on the tongue. No, I’m not joking, it’s an actual name. Look it up if you don’t believe me. It’s a sort of Miroslav. I’m sure you’ve heard about that one.

M is rather shy. He went to work from Monday to Friday, hating every second of it, dreaming the dream of sweet escape. A somber, eloquent dance rehearsed to utter perfection: tick, click, scroll, tap, tock, tap, tap, tap, click, scroll, tick, click, tock, tick, click, scroll… day in, day out, Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 6 PM. A soft ballet of endless rimes, a gentle cut oozing with the fruit of the Universe: time, M’s life slowly seeping away one second at a time. Him, a happy merchant drunk on his own hubris, a puppet master always planning for his freedom: the weekend.

But, oh, dear Logan. How blind is man to fate’s own strings for when the weekend came, M wanted nothing more than to sit at home and bathe in his snug introversion. Nuzzling it close to his heart, like a child would cradle its favorite blanket, whispering softly, begging for it to hold the night terrors at bay.

Is it me or do you know M as well? Hmm, strange, he never told me about you.

It so happened that another of these weekends came, only this one was different, it was the weekend of the pre-pre-release of the game: Space Zombies Supreme, Brainpocalipse. M had just gotten home and was fixing up a salad, waiting for the game to download.

He sat down in his favorite chair and pulled the bowl in his lap. The blue screen of dreams was showing the download bar as one third full, the lag was dreadful tonight. It didn’t matter; he was alone the whole weekend, alone with his game.

Wolfing down on his salad, he thought he heard a scratching coming from the bathroom wall. Nothing sane ever happened when going over to check a weird sound coming from a wall, so he paid it no mind. The scratching continued.

The download bar was showing two-thirds full now, just a little bit more, he thought to himself. The scratching continued.

Although M wasn’t what you would call a foodie, he did indulge in whatever the local groceries store offered on their exotic sales. Right now he was finishing up his goat cheese crumbles, red onion, cherry tomatoes, dried cranberries, fresh blueberries, pine nuts with just a couple of ounces of arugula salad just as the game download had hit 99%.

Setting the bowl down to his left, he picked up the controller, excitement reaching a healthy climax. Come on! he thought.

Suddenly, the scratching stopped, and as it did, it left an inexplicable void in the room.

Ding, dong! the doorbell rang.

‘Oh, come on!’ M yelled in frustration.

Ding, dong, ding, dong! it rang again.

The download bar was holding its ground still at the 99% mark and M’s hands were getting sweaty from gripping the controller too hard.

Ding, dong! followed by a loud pounding on the door.

M dropped the controller angrily and made his way to the door, making sure the latches felt how irritated he felt.

Opening the door, a wide smile surrounded by a shower of brownish curls looked back at him with hazel eyes.

‘It’s you,’ M says. By this all encapsulating “you”, this paradigm of an antiphonal remark, marking the passage of one versus the other, M tried barbarically to limit the existence of Jordan.

Now, who’s Jordan, you’ll ask. Jordan is what you would call eye candy. Not too tall, not too short, fit but not in an exaggerated manner, not that you could understand anything of what was going on underneath her baggy T-shirt and trousers, she had a way of catching your eye. Permanently.

Now, you would ask, if Jordan was all that and a bag of chips, what was up with M. This girl had definitely insisted on being here, so what was wrong with this guy?! Well, Space Zombies Supreme, Brainpocalipse was wrong with this guy. A follow-up of the highly acclaimed Space Zombies franchise, it brought ten new playable characters, over a dozen new spaceships and… you get the point.

M is too cowardly to think about Jordan like that, he’d rather give her the cold shoulder and tell himself that an outgoing girl such as her would never fall for a cramped up guy like him, and in the end who cares. Brainpocalipse, right?

‘Sup, dude?!’ she asks, walking past him and throwing herself in his chair.

‘Nothing…’

‘Uh, what’s this? Brainpocalipse… Is this another one of those shitty space zombie games?’ and picks up the bowl he had discarded sniffing at it ostentatiously.

‘It’s not shitty.’

‘Right, got any more of this salad?’

‘No.’

And at that moment the void shattered once more, crumbling into little rivulets of scarlet as the scratching picked up again.

‘What the… what’s that?’ Jordan asked. The noise had startled her mid lift and as she lay there with her hands gripping the chair arms, the T-shirt pressed tightly against her body.

M stared at her longingly, going scarlet one hue at a time. ‘I don’t know, I’ve seen too many weird movies to check it out.’

Sensing his reluctance to drop his gaze, Jordan arched lazily, pushing herself deliberately next to him, T-shirt swaying with the motion of her glide. ‘Are you scared, M?’

‘Screw you.’

‘What if there are zombies back there, Mr. Supreme Zombie Killer?’ twisting one of her curls playfully. ‘What if the big bad zombies come out to get me, Mr. Zombie Killer, Sir. Don’t you want to protect me,’ and pushed herself closer to him.

M had gone crimson red at this point and as Jordan engaged him, he unconsciously lifted his hand to stop her.

The scratching continued louder still.

Now, Logan, I assume you’re familiar with the second law of thermodynamics, yes, that one. The one that states that heat does not just pass from a cold body to a warmer body. Well, M’s hand was burning at this point, and his ears felt like two sparklers in full frenzy.

Jordan picked up his hand by the hand and discarded it briskly, stepped passed him and went into the kitchen. ‘I’ll make myself a salad if you don’t mind.’

‘Yyeaah, sure.’

‘Cool, where did you put the pine nuts?’

‘Ah, in the cupboard, where I keep the cereal.’ M was looking at his hand, flexing his fingers tenderly, he had felt something squishy and by cupping the air based on the memory he tried to sear it into his brain for later. Who knew when he would get this lucky again.

If heat passes from hot to cold, you could say that more passes into less, until equilibrium is established. We could say that courage is more while shyness is less. Then, if this is so, how come Jordan’s hand was trembling as she was reaching for the pine nuts while in her eyes a little flake of light was jumping around chaotically?

‘Can you come and help me, dude? Last time I checked I was still a guest in your house, not the help.’

M snapped out of his revelry and made his way to her side, fingers still flexing uncontrollably. ‘Guests don’t know where I keep the cereal.’

‘They do when your kitchen’s made for hobbits.’ While M took over the crafting process, she leaned back on the wall behind him, crossed her fingers and squeezed.

‘Do you want a dressing?’

‘Whaat?’ nails digging deep within her alabaster skin.

‘I asked if you want me you want a dressing on your salad.’

‘Yeah, what do you have?’

Logan, remember the part about the scratching inside the walls. Have you ever thought about what you would do if suddenly, out of nowhere, a scratching noise would start behind one of the walls in your house. You would think it was a mouse, right? Maybe a cockroach? But what would you actually do? I for one would ignore it. I mean, why shouldn’t I ignore it. If it’s a mouse, I wouldn’t know what to do, can’t go around pulling down your walls to catch a mouse, now can you. But what if it was something bigger, 90 kg of bigger, ripping through those magenta tiles you carefully picked out to match that one shower towel you love so much? Rotting flesh, crooked teeth, blood dripping from its nailless fingers, skin hanging loose, marching through your bathroom and into your lobby, and it would stare at you with dark blank eyes, craning its neck, measuring you from ear to ear and ask:

‘Mind if eat your brains there, luv?’

What?! Zombies are people too, just because they’re dead doesn’t mean they’re brain dead. Or disrespectful.

Z was lurching towards the two lumpishly, growling under his breath. Jordan let out a squeak and threw the closest thing to her, a ripe avocado, which shattered Z’s nose and staggered him.

M’s training took hold of him and gripping the knife, which he had been using to chop the red onions with, hit Z right in his temple, shattering his skull and logging it deep.

Z took one awkward step and, with a look of abandonment, collapsed to the floor.

M was trembling, adrenaline rushing through his veins, making his hairs stand on ends. He turned around and looked at Jordan, who had bitten the knuckle of her index finger in fright. He stared at her, air rushing heavily in and out of his lungs. Hazel eyes trembled and her left knee was bent as if to run.

He rushed her, and as he did, Jordan opened her arms and ran them through his hair. Wet lips met while hungry arms were searching to deepen their bond of flesh. M pinned her to the wall as she pressed her calf to his thigh. Heat flowed from one to the other freely…

So much for thermodynamics, right? No, sorry, my bad, there’s that first law.

My point is, don’t hide behind who you are. Be who you need to be!

Peace.