For as long as I could remember, I had always been too curious for my own good. For instance, I wondered why people grew hair on their heads or why the sun was yellow when I was five. Then I wondered more complex things why cats had thin pupils or why humans need water when I was a teenager. Now I wondered why, as a 25 year old man in Mentopia, just what exactly was in the city Womentropolis where all the women lived.
The thing about it all was, people were never able to answer my questions. Not my Mom, not my friends, not even my colleagues at work, who seemed to have an opinion about literally anything and everything else.
I was just too curious. ‘Too curious for my own good’ They would say. And usually, I got myself into trouble when I asked too much, especially about why society was the way it was now. I learned to just keep the questions in my head to myself. I learned to live with the bloated feeling of an unanswered question laying inside me. I learned to be ‘normal’. To accept that men and women, girls and boys were meant to be separated, kept apart since age six. That life was about working hard and not making social connections or having fun. That happiness was temporary and stress is natural.
But every once in a while, no matter how hard I tried to keep it in, a question slipped out.
“Annnnd, why do we have to where sunglasses in doors again?” I asked Jeremy while bending a paperclip out of shape.
Jeremy huffed. “You know why.”
“You say that about everything,” I told him.
“Well, if you didn’t ask so many darn stupid questions and acted functional for once, I wouldn’t have to tell you the same thing,” Jeremy ranted, like always. He was one of the guys with a whole truckload of Stress.
“You never really answered me though,” I told him.
“It’s mandatory,” he said as if that solved all problems in life.
“Yeah, but why is it mandatory?” I asked him.
“Because the Man says it is,” Jeremy's voice rose.
“Woah, dude, don’t get so upset, you gonna make ‘The Vein’ appear again,” I said. ‘The Vein’ was a big, bulgy bolt that appeared on the left of Jeremy’s forehead when he was really angry.
Of course, if you had seen The Vein as much as me or the other employees at our job, you would give it a name too.