The Queue
There is this long queue outside in the street.
It's cold.
October can be unbearably cold, especially after sunset when the Siberian winds blow steady.
Northeastern European weather does not offer any clemency to anyone wandering the streets, let alone when you are queuing, immobile, and the “Ostwind” filters through the layers of clothing to hit your chest head-on.
As an idiotic way to make time pass faster, people chat while balancing their weight from one foot to the other, as if the movement would make the cold more bearable.
The sun is long gone — long as in many weeks ago — and nowadays only its light, coming from far away, and not its rays, filters dimly through the gray clouds.
It drizzles. It always drizzles in the city at this time of the year. Not for long, but in a constant, invasive, merciless short repetition of that medium-soft spraying of holy water that is not painful enough to anger you, and not subtle enough to be unnoticeable.
It is just fun-crushing, smile-robbing, depressing and borderline madness-inducing.
At first you start by being slightly annoyed, but then that negative, bitter feeling starts growing inside you.
You first hate the weather, but the weather is not just the weather. It is not only the drizzle in the unbearable cold that you hate.
You hate the city. The city that stages this weather.
And you think — and I think — why would any group of people in their right mind choose to build this city here?
Then you start hating the people too.
You hate that guy who always arrives to work happy, even when he is all wet and barely well-shoed for the weather; still, he comes in smiling and shouting good morning to everyone across the office from the moment he steps in.
And you hate the office manager, that old, bitter, seemingly single-forever woman who yells at you if you would — God forbid — drop a milliliter of drizzle water onto the coconut mat when you step in. Aren't coconut mats made for that?
And you hate your boss, who insists you come to the office despite whatsoever may come down from the skies. Have we already forgotten that Covid taught us it is possible to work from home and be as efficient? Surely my boss was born after Covid and never knew about it — or simply forgot, or didn't learn his lesson.
But it is not just them that you hate. You also hate everybody in the queue, and everybody responsible for that queue to happen. And everybody in the city.
And you hate yourself.
You hate the fact that despite questioning why people would build a city in such a climate, you have chosen to populate that same city.
Yes, chosen.
Because one can choose to leave. But you don’t. I don’t. Because you and I — we — don’t have the guts.
The guts to break the mould. The guts to confront the pain of change, and instead, we choose to sit on the status quo and on the pain of remaining the same.
Because we are all cowards.
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Because we prefer to live with that tiny, constant, enervating toothache than to take the rotten tooth out. We prefer to live under this miserable drizzle because we fear we will not find a new job, a new flat, new friends, a new life.
We prefer to slowly die, in a queue, under the Ostwind, than to walk away southwest.
So you wait. I wait. In that queue, for whatever thing we are hoping for, that is as irrelevant as our thoughts are, because we do nothing about it.
So why whinge?
As we are not Kafka nor Camus, our purpose in life is not to debate the intricacies of being.
Our purpose is much simpler, and it is, as Kundera has said, unbearable in its own lightness.
But we miss the purpose and keep waiting in that queue as we wait in life for things to happen.
For we are incapable of making them happen.
But that's you — you who don't think any further, who is incapable of making things happen. That's not me.
Because I, I can.
I can make things happen.
I can change the status quo.
I can decide how I want to live.
Even in that queue.
On that absurd queue of lined-up, system-programmed people who wait for irrelevant things to happen to them, so that at least something happens to them.
But I am not like that. Not like them.
I decide for myself.
Decisions involve responsibility. I must be responsible, I say to myself.
And, looking at the queue, I see the gendarme queuing like everyone else. His gaze fixed nowhere, thinking — who knows about which never-to-happen dreams.
I walk up to him, but he barely notices my presence. So much so that he doesn’t see me when, in one movement, I take his gun from its holster and lift it up to my head.
And shoot.
— — —
Daniel G. During writes fiction exploring the absurdities of modern life. The above is a work of fiction inspired by the many cities he has lived in, and bears no relation to reality or to the author.
In addition to fiction, his work includes biographical narratives, essays on contemporary social issues and prejudice, and explorations of the thresholds between reason and the uncanny.
Founder of Thomas Klein International, he has spent over two decades creating hospitality concepts across four continents. He lives between Berlin, Dubai, and Bruno (Italy)
