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An Epilogue

October 18, 2008 4:27 AM

ost days start earlier than I'd like. I wake up, groggily shower and shave, get dressed, and go to work. Most days, I spend a lot of time thinking about my clients and our business and about the law. Most days, I get something to eat from one of the restaurants around our office. Or I eat something at home. And then, I go back to work. Or to court. Or to jail.

Most days, I wrap things up at around 4 or 5. On most days, I feel like I didn't get as much done as I should have.

Most days, I get home, change my clothes, and goof around on the internet. Or watch DVDs. Or play guitar. Or play video games. Or read. Sometimes I go out with my friends. On most days, I spend hours alone in my apartment until the world outside grows dark and I grow weary and I go to sleep. On most days, I go to sleep way too late.

Most days, most of the time, I don't even think about how fucking lonely and pathetic my life is. It's really easy to overlook and forget about that most of the time.

Sometimes something happens that makes it hard to ignore the state of affairs, though. Sometimes you get caught up in excitement and anticipation. There's this palpable feeling of electricity in the air. It's the same sort of feeling that permeates the world during fall. It's the feeling that anything could happen at any moment. The feeling that things are changing. It's exhilarating.

Sometimes things happen that shake up your boring old routine. Your phone rings in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday and you think "All of my friends are doing something with their significant others. Who the fuck is calling me?" And you answer and you're pleased with who's calling. Sometimes you go out to a fancy dinner with someone you haven't known for years and years in the middle of the week.

And then, sometimes, all of that ends abruptly. And you're forced to go back to the routine you had. Your friends are still busy or lazy or just not interested in hanging out during the week. You still have a forty-minute drive home every day. You still come home to an apartment where you know you will only have your thoughts and your cats as company. And the whole thing doesn't feel familiar or comforting. It feels stifling. It feels like a thousand pounds of disappointment.

It feels like failure.

So you look around your little apartment and everything reminds you of the fact that you're the only person there. And it's not just the fact that some person decided that they were going to actively deceive you and then disappear. It's that it's happened before, and it will happen again, and you didn't deserved any of it.

It's that you feel like the whole fucking universe is actively working against you.



4 Comments


Valerie said:

You are not a failure. And neither is your life. At least you have a productive life to distract you from the less pleasant aspects of life, whatever those may be. I wish I had a job that could keep me busy enough....

October 22, 2008 3:06 PM



Kathreen said:

What a neat artcile. I had no inkling.

July 11, 2011 10:22 AM









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