One Last Love

Diary lines of a factory worker…..

Date: 17.12.2084

“Just another day in this machine driven world where survival has become burdensome. Being able to afford even a smile from someone has become extravagant. Everything just seems hopeless for an indigent man.”

The next day Troy wakes up, refreshes himself, shuts down the air purifier in his room and sets off to his usual work routine.

On his pathway, he regularly notices children with pollution masks heading to school and neighbors going to their workstations and factories. It is a usual sight for him to see the crowded city as all of them could not afford the flying cars. Troy worked for an artificial food company that manufactured meal tablets.

Viola who lived next door was a janitor at a drug manufacturing unit. She too felt life was forlorn. As the day comes to an end both return back to their homes. As days pass by and life still remains the same, fate had something in store for them.

One fine day Viola reaches her workstation much sooner than usual and starts cleaning up the cabinets of the workstation when she stumbles upon something while sweeping. She finds a box which had a small sachet inside it. Though she was curious to know what it was, she didn’t want to open it right away at that place as she knew it was time the other workers would start coming by. She put it into her bag and worked for the rest of the day.

After she reached home, she refreshed herself and sat down to see what that sachet contained. Even before she could open it, she heard the doorbell ring. She quickly hid it under her bed and went to see who it was. It was Troy who lived next door. It was raining heavily outside and he came over to borrow some neon lights and blankets as it was cold. She let him in and went in to take what he wanted. But Troy didn’t just want to leave so soon. He lived all alone by himself and wanted to have a little conversation with Viola.

She was desperate to know what that sachet contained but at the same time she also wanted to sit around and have a chat with the guy next door. It felt hard choosing between the two she wanted at the same time. And then she decided to tell Troy about what she found in her workplace. They sat together and opened the sachet only to find the B+ pill. Troy had no idea what it was, but Viola seemed to know. While at work, she heard the research interns talking about this pill, which was yet to be released in the market. It was a pill that bloomed love between people as by then humans would have lost their ability to love.

Love was something they read about only in books. But their ability to feel what love was like was lost completely. The human population was decreasing rapidly and the robot count increased. But the drawback was that one pill taken can last for only a day’s time. Viola explained him what it was used for. Both Viola’s and Troy’s intrusiveness elevated up and they decided to take a shot at it. But considering the fact that there was only one, they broke it into half and each took a piece of it. And then within a minute as the lighting flashed outside the window and winds blew the curtains, love blossomed between the two like never before. They smiled at each other and made love. They felt every moment was worth it. It was the best night of their lives they ever had. They knew this wasn’t gonna happen again. Some things were better when it was only momentary. There was no matter of betrayal, heartbreaks or honesty issues where love no longer existed in the world.

The next day when he woke up he found an old book fallen down from the dusty bookshelf. A paper was pointing out from one of its pages which was a note written by his grandmother. It read — “ When you wish for something, you value it so much that you convince yourself it is something you love the most in this world and you would be the happiest person if you ever get it. But then when God grants you what you wanted, you slowly realize how much of interest you have lost over it and stopped valuing it the same way when you didn’t have it. In simple words, we realize the value of something only when we lose it.”