— Do you ever feel this sort of hollowness inside? I feel it like right here below my sternum. Do you ever get that?

He stood behind her and motioned towards the center of his chest, but she didn't look away from the screens.

— Every other day, yeah. I feel mine I bit above the sternum, though. Never really defined the position of it, to be honest. — she said, moving her eyes between screens, the computer's light reflecting tiny squares in her eyes.

— Maybe everybody gets those, nowadays. Is it an actual hole, you think?

— Anatomically speaking, no. I think it has always been like that, though. Not just nowadays.

— Huh.

She pressed a few keys and moved her mouse around to position the picture on the screen, zooming in and out swiftly, making the whole screen flash for a few seconds. He leaned forward over her shoulder, placing one hand on the desk, squinting to try to understand what she was checking for as she zoomed in one more time and started carefully filling in one specific section of the picture. It was like watching a seasoned artist chisel away the finest details of their sculpture.

— That looks seriously dope.

— Thanks.

— How did you learn all this?

— By myself, mostly. And by mostly I mean completely, since no one actually taught me, I always went after learnings and teachings all on my own.

— Yeah, but, how? Where did you find the motivation or the need to learn this... "trade"?

She zoomed out once again, typed in a command to save her current work, and threw her hands up in a long stretch before leaning back on her chair and turning towards him.

— Maybe I did it to try to fill my hollowness. You know, the one we get around our sternum.

Jonatan Pie @ Unsplash

He turned his body away from her, leaning with his back to her desk, arms crossed, staring somewhere in the air between them, pensive.

— But you still feel it, don't you? Every other day, at that. Is it because even though you're amazing at what you do, it's not something people would praise you for, under average and casual circumstances? Hence, the hollowness remains?

She lifted her knees and hugged them to her chest, moving her shoulders up and down in another type of stretch.

— It's not that deep. It's not like I'm going to colossal lengths to fill this hollow feeling, sometimes I think it sort of pushes me further. And I don't really care about what the average and casual people expect from the things I do. Neither do you, I believe, about the "thing" we do. Also, shouldn't the hollowness be filled with something that matters to us and to us only, rather than to other people?

— I guess that depends on what kind of people we are. I imagine the average and casual feel very full.

— Do they, really? Or are they simply not aware of the hollowness?

— Is being aware of our own hollownesses a sign of us being better people?

— I think so. Maybe it's always gonna be there, so we might as well acknowledge it.

— Then what's the point? Wouldn't it be better to not be aware of it at all? If we're never gonna be able to fill it?

— Maybe there is no point. — she said, spinning her chair around before getting up and heading towards the open door to the balcony, on the opposite side of the room.

— Are we just aimlessly drifting through existence? — he asked, following her to the door, hands in his pockets. The soft night breeze blew in, and they stayed in silence for a moment, staring at the dark starry sky looming over the high trees in the park across the street.

— Yes. But what a goddamn vast and extraordinary existence this is, don't you think?

They glanced at each other from the corner of their eyes and smiled before turning around to see Stacy staring at them from the front door, holding a pizza box in one hand and a plastic bag — with a bottle of Coke, red plastic cups and a pack of napkins inside — in the other.

— How the hell did you end up in this weird exchange about the mechanics of existence? — Stacy asked.

— You were late with the pizza.

— An empty stomach is psychoanalysis fuel. Did you remember to get extra pepperoni?

I think this one is kind of a mix and match of two stories I've thought of but couldn't really get them going on their own. Not that I've made any progress, all I have are ideas floating around and this weird urge to have a character named Stacy. It feels like such a good name, I can picture other characters calling her out and everything, you know. "Oi, Stace! Stacy!" (in an exaggerated British accent, of course)

Can you hear it too?