Chapter 4: Envy
He met her at a bar that night; he always met her at a bar. The her would change, and largely, the who wasn’t all that important. She was a palette, much like a painter uses. She was a rainbow of colors: eyes, lips, and hair. Red lips and brown eyes if it was raining outside. Blond hair and blue eyes if he was feeling uncreative. Dark hair and hazel eyes if he wanted something exotic. If he closed his eyes, she would dance before him, a dizzying array of combinations, but the dress was almost always the same. It was the kind of dress that said “I’m available- tonight.” That was important. Sometimes she had a name, sometimes she didn’t, and her scent was always a combination of perfume, musk, and anonymity. Journey’s soul ached every time he met her, but yet, he still couldn’t get enough.
During the day, he envisioned work as being a conveyor belt for time. It was as if, from the moment he sat down at his desk, his job ushered him through the hours on fast forward, pausing briefly for coffee breaks and mid day lunches. When he went back to his desk, someone would press the fast forward button again until 5:00 p.m. rolled around, at which point everything would stop, and Journey would be left sitting at his desk as lights went out around him, still some what bewildered by the events of the day. It wasn’t that he didn’t like his job, he didn’t really have an opinion either way, it was more that it left him feeling like something was missing, like the feeling one gets when they’re heading out the door but they suspect they’ve forgotten their keys. Journey would stand up at his desk and rummage through drawers and stacks of papers attempting to divine what he might be leaving behind, but the answer never came to him. “I’ll figure it out when I get home,” he would tell himself, but he would always forget by the time he got to his car.
If time spent at work was like life on fast forward, time spent with her was the exact opposite. Any her, really. Time slowed into a smoky spiral off the tip of a lit cigarette and collected in a pool of water that had coalesced on the ceiling. The colors of the day would blur and blend, as if he were viewing out of focus. Often he would take his hands, and smear those colors into tie dyed fantasies before blinking his eyes and clearing them. Contrary to the rhythm of his actions with her at the time, his reality slowed, until it almost stood still. He called it his event horizon, and then, on release, everything would return to normal. This ritual was his refuge, and he buried himself in it as deep as he could, but overtime, he began to notice that the rabbit hole was getting more and more shallow, and he was finding it harder and harder to hide from the outside.
The first time he met Linda, she stared at him from across the bar with desperate green eyes. He recognized those eyes though he had never actually seen them before. If he had been paying attention, he would have seen them for the mistake that they were, but perhaps that’s why he approached them. There was something about her, about the way that she didn’t feel the need to fit in, or they way that she didn’t seem to care about what anyone thought of her that intrigued him. She was at the same time both bold and self conscious. She was absolutely confident and on the verge of breaking down. She was wholly independent, and in need of rescue. She existed in his mind like a concept, like an idea that one marches for and makes signs promoting. Journey looked into her eyes and recognized something he wanted desperately: freedom.
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