Sole-Purveyor

Ireena was alone in her apartment, and she was trying to sleep. It was just after 11, and usually she would have already fallen asleep by this point, but tonight she found herself unable to focus. There were sketchy details she could remember—she had to wake up at 6:30, she had to shower, she had to eat breakfast, she had to commute to work. And there were other things she didn’t want to think about—did she really want to be with someone like Rory, what was she going to dress up as for Halloween, was her job really what she wanted to be doing for the rest of her life? All she needed was a sense of closure to get the final burst of sleepiness to descend upon her. Her dreams might be overloaded with sensory detail, but her last waking thoughts of the day weren’t as soothing.
In the past, she would imagine a great task she could one day complete. She would imagine a perfect set of circumstances, and how she in turn would react perfectly to them. She imagined no barriers to her success. While performing the high jump in high school, she used to imagine winning the gold medal at the Olympics. She had never heard of a girl younger than her who could jump higher, and far too many people told her that she should follow her dreams. By the end of her first year of high jumping, she realized she might have been the best in her school, but she was not the best in her state, or even her region. Harsh reality had set in. Her late night fantasies of achieving greatness alluded her, and she was forced to consider real life circumstances as they might actually occur, realizing that perfection had no place in reality.
The second she would come to a comforting thought, another thought would knock itself out of her head, and remind her that things were just not so that way. Occasionally (we might call this self-doubt), these combative thoughts of reason made sense, and sometimes she saw no proof that they made sense. She was pulled between idealism and reason, and somewhere in between she found truth. Truth did not necessarily need to make sense, whereas idealism made too much sense, and reason was sense manifest. She preferred to think that things would just happen to her. That she wouldn’t have to make things happen for herself. This made sense to her. Instead of being the mover or the pusher, she could be the purveyor. She would sit on her bed and she would purvey the ground below. There would be nothing there which surprised her. Everything on the floor could be accounted for. Then she could move to her window, and she could open it and sit inside it, and look down on the street, and she could see everyone walking, and she could be the purveyor there as well. Nothing would exactly surprise her, but she would not have been able to account for anything.
What did surprise her was when she saw a man on fire running amok down the street. One would presume that he would be looking for water to put himself out, but he ran down the street with no discernible purpose or goal. Perhaps he was showing off his ability to withstand extremely high temperatures. Ireena was perplexed. But she was also drawn to this image, and moved, she went beneath her kitchen sink and grabbed a bucket. She filled it with water and ran down her apartment stairwell and out to the street in the hopes of extinguishing the fire on the man, but she found the area empty. It was totally empty. She put the bucket down and then Rory walked around the corner.
“What are you doing with that bucket?” he asked.
“I saw a man on fire. He was running down the street, and I wanted to save him,” she said.
“Are you sure you just saw that?”
“Of course I did. I know what I saw.”
“I didn’t see it, and I was just out here.”
“He must have gone down a different alleyway,” Ireena decided.
They looked down the street and saw three different avenues the man could have chosen for his fiery fleet.
“I still think that means we should kiss.” Rory said.
Ireena did not protest.