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Two noodles lay curled in a shallow puddle of sauce, the steam rising like a golden fog above them.
“Do you ever… wonder why we exist?” asked the first noodle, slightly twisting to his side. “I mean, really… Are we meant to end up in a pot? To become Pasta? Is that our only purpose?”
The second noodle yawned and stretched lazy across the sauce. “You always think too much. Of course we’re meant to be pasta. That's what noodles are made for. That's what happens, that's… our thing.”
“But- dont you feel there’s something more? Something beyond the boiling shimmering cool water on a hot day, something beyond the knife on the ivory forte chopping table, Something beyond the salt and sauce?” The first noodle shivered at the thought of its inevitable immersion. “Maybe… you know… the pot is just the beginning, not the end, maybe I'm meant to do something else…”
The second noodle rolled a little closer, its curve brushing the first noodle’s edge. “Look, you’re imagining things. You end up in the pot. You get dressed in sauce. You are pasta. That's it. That's Good. You'll see. You don't need to worry about it.”
“I don't know if I want that” said the first noodle quietly, almost as if he was talking only for him to hear it. “I don't know if I want to be boiled, to be eaten. What if being pasta is not what I would like to be? What if being pasta isn't me? What if it's… just what everyone expects?”
The second noodle hummed, as if that explained everything “Well… maybe. But… isn't that why we exist, why we were made? I mean what else would we do? Roll around the counter forever? Sit in the sauce and think? You're thinking too hard. We’re noodles. It's simple.”
The first noodle stared into the glistening pool of marinara, feeling the heat rise from the sides. The steam curled around the curves of the bowl, carrying whispers of flavor and inevitability. The kitchen around them looked ordinary, like any ordinary kitchen would look like, what else would an ordinary kitchen really look like? In the vicinity there was a man. He was tall, with a great beard, wore a singular monocle, a pair of white gloves with a golden embroidery on the back of the hand depicting the Flying Monster Spaghetti and its tallarinesque appendices and dressed in priest robes that looked out of the ordinary compared to everything around him, they were white with gold embroidery reminiscent of old hieroglyphics depicting the FSM and its religious imagery. He was reading a book with the calm of someone who believed the kitchen would eventually heat itself. The book depicted the story of two forks in a sauna asking questions to each other, with all the calm of the world- no, the wait of the world to answer their questions. Outside of the sauna an old man dressed only with a white robe was waiting for the sauna to finish heating while reading a book…
Wait, where was I? Oh yeah… the noodles, let me refresh my mind, maybe reading this part might help me to continue, let's see… “I suppose… maybe you are right. Maybe this is all there is to it. But-”
“Exactly”, said the second noodle, curling contentedly. “You’ll see. Being pasta isn’t bad. It’s what we’re here for, Trust me.”
Somewhere in the kitchen, the lid of the pottle rattled, and the noodles shivered as one. The first noodle blinked, unsure if it was fear, awe, contempt, or resignation. But his friend beside it rolled on, serene, whimsical even. For a moment, the first noodle thought that it might… be almost enough.