Alphabet soup

She sat in front of the T.V, switching channel after channel in the hope of finding something that will relax her mind. God knew she needed it todayShe’d had a long day at work. Being a copy editor was no mean feat...having to skim through a torrent of bad articles at work and screen out the average ones was an arduous task, more heart wrenching to her than anyone else. 

She was cut out for bigger things. Being a copyeditor for a fashion magazine was not one of them. 

But circumstances make demands from all of us. They make us narrate to them our dreams and desires, then right in front of our very eyes, make an air plane out of them and blow them away. She too had seen her dreams of being a writer fly out the window.

Paying bills were a priority over book writing. And so the half-complete manuscript of her dreams sat on her writing desk, collecting dust, as she went day after day, editing, copy writing, polishing, turning sub-average articles written by mediocre writers into print worthy matter. 

Tonight, however, she was in no mood to do the usual. Popping her dinner into the microwave, she sat staring at the idiot box, a flurry of thoughts running incessantly in her tired head. 

Was she doing the right thing? Should she quit her job and pursue her dream instead? One half of her wanted her to dare, to break out of the cookie-cutter nine to five job. The other half warned her she’d starve if she did that.

Pic source: Unsplash

Her chain of thoughts were interrupted by a commercial on the screen. Knorr’s soup, it said. And that sent her memories rolling back to several years ago. 

As a child, she had always hated soup. She’d turn up her nose at it, find new ways of disposing it stealthily, and always have an excuse ready...all until her mother started adding those tiny noodle alphabets to it. It was love at first sight. Being fascinated by words even then, she had been thrilled on finding those tiny letters waiting to be strung into words before the soup turned cold. It was her mother’s way of ensuring she would eat her dinner without a fuss. 

And how it had worked! 

Every meal thence was spent looking forward to the alphabet soup and finishing it without a fuss so that she could have it again the next day. 

Today, sitting with her microwave dinner, she reminisced about the good old days.

And a realisation dawned upon her—wasn’t life like that too? You had to deal with something you didn’t necessarily like in order to reach someplace you wanted to be. 

The pile of half-edited files from work lay in front of her. 

However, her dreams, she told herself, those lay inside her. And nothing in the whole wide world could change that.

The job was perhaps just a means to the much desired end. And even though she didn’t enjoy it all that much, it nourished her just like the hot soup she once hated. While her dreams, like the alphabets, were always there, floating around, waiting to be picked up.

It made her smile. Soon it would become a way of life.
In order to find her alphabets, she would have to deal with the soup...