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Reality Check?



Her eyes surveyed the burning cigarette, held in her right hand by brooding fingers that focused the frame right into her scarlet nails. Seeking the spotlight in this setting, her glowing brown hair quickly blurred into the background– wasn’t society’s drama of a tolerated suicide a guaranteed hit in the movie theatre?

“Smoking is the most coherent incoherence of the human species; the most rational cognitive dissonance of existence,” she thought to herself, “The absurd decision of consciously reducing one’s life, diluting the purest courage and accelerating the pace to the sublime. It is the most unexpected ritual of meditation - the process of inhaling toxins for assumed liberation.”

Whenever a cigarette paused her routine, she sought an explanation as to why she was condemning her own life. The endless and saturated questioning, however, became slightly more bearable when accompanied with her cigarette. The thought of suffering the impossibility of escaping the same old rationalization and its only solution – the pretense.

The pretense of perpetually embodying a character, like in the cinema or theatre. Of simulating love and friendship, triumph and failure, and even the happiness and pain of a doomed main actress cursed within an eternal play.

The image of her thoughts was mirrored in her scarlet nails, still holding the cigarette in her right hand. She pretended to not be a romantic, but a rational analyst or maybe even a moderate dreamer who spoke in third person.

She felt as much as a director, as she felt restrained by the leading actress’s role. Perhaps the solution would be to imitate Woody Allen, be the two-in-one in real life and conceive the drama alongside constantly acting in this vanity’s casting.


Author: Carlota Guedes

Degree: Communications

About the Author: Carlota Guedes grew up in Porto, Portugal for all of her life. During high school she studied Economics, even though humanities were always her passion. Since 2016 she was involved in several creative writing national competitions, but it was only in 2017 that she decided to make her personal blog public - Conversas Indiscretas - a collection of texts written in Portuguese, questioning the meaning of life, society, love and social interactions. In the same year she started studying Journalism in Porto, however IE university offered her a better opportunity to explore both her pragmatism and creativity in the same Bachelor - Communication and Digital Media.

Other Works: To find more of the writers work, go to http://conversasindiscretas.blogs.sapo.pt

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