She saw the shoes hanging from the power lines. Who threw them there? she wondered. As a kid, she always wanted to do it, but she always liked her shoes. She never wanted to get rid of them.

The art class ended with nothing spectacular. The mysterious K never looked at her. His words rang in her head. Who was this Camus figure that K read? Who would seek eternal life through whores and drinking? How would one even attain eternal life through these things? Finite pleasures. That was all they were. Nothing else. How could something finite lead to infinite life? How could the constant search for another high and another high and another high ever lead to eternity? An eternity of struggles.

She walked away from the shoes and left them hanging like the thoughts about eternal life and Camus. But the mysteriousness surrounding the K figure did not leave. Who was he? The cliche questions ran through her mind. But the mystery lingered. But why?

She opened the door of her apartment and walked inside to find the place still being in the same messy state.

She opened a new bottle of white wine. It was still morning; 11 am. She poured it into her glass and walked outside. She threw the wine down her throat and looked up at the sky as if the shoes were still hanging there, as if there might be answers written betwixt the clouds, as if Camus might be still writing about eternal life. But all she found was the confusion that was instilled into her mind by the mysterious K figure.

She picked up the bottle and emptied it into her glass. She walked through her apartment aimlessly. The wine made her limbs lose. She decided to walk back to the shoes.

The shoes could not answer her pressing questions. God was not hidden behind the clouds as she hoped. Camus was not writing in the eternal chair that she thought he would be sitting in. It was merely the shoes hanging from the power lines. Nothing more, nothing less. She jumped and tried to grab them, the drunken state numbed her logical brain. But the gesture symbolized the grasp on these philosophical questions that she never thought she might ask herself and the situation she found herself in. The shoes did not answer her, neither did the eternal clouds provide any answers.

Postscriptum

Slowly, I write the story that I thought I would never write.

Copious amounts of whisky just to write a measly 500 words or so. Writing is not easy. Especially after marking essays. But I am forcing myself to write the words of this story!

I hope you enjoyed it, even though it was so short.

Happy writing/reading. Stay well.

All of the writing is my own. The photographs were kindly taken by Hive account@urban.scout. She declined all of the payments I offered.