She was repeating the same tasks over and over again, like a robotic puppet. She was enslaved to her routine. She had perfected this routine for years and it was now absolutely flawless. Everything was perfectly oiled and engineered, just like factory work. She planned it by the minute, and she was never late. She only felt good while she was on the schedule. Anything outside of the schedule made her lose her senses and composure, and left her feeling utterly lost. Anything outside of the schedule was scary and unknown; a black hole that would swallow her whole if she made any mistake. In the event that something unexpected would happen, she would do everything to get the schedule back on track, as if her life depended on it. Her meals were timed as well, down to the second. She would choose the fastest, most efficient recipes to maximize her time. Why maximize the time? She didn’t really know, she never stopped to ask herself. She simply believed that to have a good life, you needed an organized and productive life. If there was no organization, there was no order, no control. And she couldn’t imagine living in a world without control. What she wanted was an endless, identical loop of days repeating themselves over and over again, with no end in sight. All she wanted was the system itself, the process. She could only live inside a system.
One night, as another perfectly executed day came to an end, she sat down to read the daily newspaper for 30 minutes precisely. She then got up and turned off the lights in the house, one by one, the last one being the little lamp next to her bed. Climbing into bed, she checked the time on her watch: 10 pm. Right on time as usual, without a glitch. She closed her eyes, waiting for sleep to come. But that night, something felt different, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Had she forgotten something? She went over the list of tasks in her head. No, everything had gone according to plan. She opened her eyes and looked around. Suddenly she realized what was bothering her; outside her window, there was something unusually bright. She squinted her eyes and looked into the distance; in the depth of the night, she could see a bright light she had never seen there before. She paced back and forth in her room, debating whether she should go and check what it was. Her schedule would be thrown off, she would sleep later, wake up later and everything would be ruined. A shiver ran down her spine at the thought of ruining the next day’s schedule. She could see the hours mixing into each other with no clear direction, turning her day into a chaotic mess. But for some reason, the thought of the light outside couldn’t leave her - it held a strange fascination over her. She needed to know what it was. She ran downstairs and threw a bathrobe over her pajamas, determined to find out and run back to bed as fast as possible. ‘10 minutes, it won’t take more than 10 minutes', she promised herself.
She stepped out onto her lawn, into the warm and inviting summer night. It dawned on her that she hadn’t been out at night for so long. She looked in the distance. From there, she could see it more clearly. The beam of light shined bright over the city, refracting in multiple directions. It was like a diamond captivating her eyes, making it impossible to look away. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she knew this light was something special. It fueled in her a type of excitement she had forgotten, that she hadn’t felt for days, perhaps even months.
She started to follow the light as if hypnotized. She threw the schedule as far back in her mind as possible, she couldn’t think about it now. ‘The schedule won’t be a problem’, she thought, ‘the schedule will be back on track tomorrow’. She walked down the little cobblestone streets, towards the center of the city where people were walking around and drinking. She wasn’t scared; she focused solely on the light.
As she delved deeper into the city, it became incredibly vivid, piercing through the night sky and pointing towards the moon as a spaceship transmitting a signal back to its planet of origin. She was almost there, she was so close to it. Soon, she will find the source of the light, and then she could go back to sleep. She crossed a street, and then another. The light was now so close and bright, that it had to be a few feet away from her. She turned the corner, adrenaline pumping in her chest. But suddenly, nothing. The light had vanished in a split second, just as she was about to find it. She looked around, but nothing seemed unusual; a few people sitting at bars, and empty stores closed for the night. ‘Go home’, she told herself, ‘you checked’. Yet something deeper within her refused to let it go, she had come all this way and she couldn’t leave empty-ended. She went on a wild goose chase, roaming the streets, asking people left and right. No one seemed to know what she was talking about. She walked until she was dizzy, looking through storefront windows, dark alleys, gazing up at the sky. She didn’t know where she was going or what she was doing, but she knew there was a purpose to all of this. She knew she needed to find the source of the light.
She suddenly remembered her regimented routine; the alarm that would ring tomorrow morning at 7:00 AM, her 22-minute scheduled breakfast, the laundry, the mail, the gardening. But all of this didn’t seem so important anymore. She had a higher purpose. The routine had been broken; she could see all of her dumb repetitive movements now and for once she didn’t want to repeat them. All this time sleeping away in the form of lists, tasks, and productivity, she wanted to throw it all away, and simply follow the light in the sky.
Two hours passed by, and still nothing. She decided to sit down in the middle of the street and wait until it came back. It would come back, she knew it. She wasn’t scared of waiting minutes, or hours, she would be there as long as she needed to. And so she laid down on the town square, staring into the sky, unaware of the clock ticking closer and closer towards 7:00 AM. By now, another version of herself would have been fast asleep in her bed, subconsciously getting ready to hear the alarm. But this version of herself, like the beam of light, had disappeared.