When he came home to the apartment, he sighed, lay his messenger bag on the couch and proceeded to collapse onto the other couch with the oddly stained cushion. The cold air was blowing in through the thin windows that had given this place a beautiful summer breeze from the bay when he first moved in, but now were simply the source of an inflated heating bill and several down comforters. At first he reached for the purple comforter near his feet, but thought better of it and turned on the TV. As he flipped through the channel guide, he realized that it didn’t matter what was on, just that something was on.
As his ears numbed and he drifted to sleep, he wondered how she would take it. His nap was fitful, either due to the zero degree weather drifting into his apartment or to the burden that had been lifted then re-set upon his shoulders earlier in the day. See, the problem was this: he had had to make a decision. The problem was that either way he went with said decision gave him pause because of the consequences. There was no win-win situation this time. He had to either make the financially responsible choice or the romantically desirable choice. So he chose, it was set, and now he had to deal with the fallout.
The problem hadn’t been that he was lazy, inept, or some other such word that meant he was bad at his job. In fact, he had been damned good at it. He got a special assignment, he got tons of praise, and was treated fairly well. But he just hadn’t been happy. Sure, there were worse things that he could have been doing, but it didn’t matter at the time. He was becoming bitter and angry about doing something that he loved so much, and just couldn’t take it. This is where the problem came in.
Had he been doing something that payed him large amounts of money, like the others that had graduated from his private school in the eastern midwest, he could have been secure for a while, during the search for a new vocation. Or he could have afforded to take a poorly paying job doing menial tasks while he looked for a new bright and shiny job to love. But he had long ago decided that he wasn’t going to be paid large amounts of the root of all evil. Well, he hadn’t said “I hate money, I’m not going to make any”, it had been more of a “I have to do something I believe in, not something that satiates my greed.” That decision, while serving his conscience well, was destined to serve his bank account poorly, something that Wachovia never ceased to remind him of, and was ultimately destined to drive him from his newly adopted home.
As he pondered all of this, between odd dreams of playing at the ocean and walking on the boardwalk, she was getting done with her shift at work and was readying to call him. She knew something bad had happened today when he was responding in single word responses to her text messages, but wasn’t sure what. As she pulled out of the parking lot of the nondescript store where she spent her days she dialed his number and let it ring.
justinª