Everyone he talked to said things would get better in time. If he just waited another day, another week, another month, maybe in a year. He held on. It was all he knew how to do.
He’d spent too much of his life dancing around his problems. Time wasn’t a renewable resource. That lesson had hit home in his 30s. He was done wasting it. Now he went through his challenges.
This was different. It wasn’t outside him. It was within. It was eating away at his insides. No one knew. He didn’t want anyone to feel bad. Pity would destroy the strength he kept calling upon.
Everyone who told him things would get better, thought he was just like them: unhappy with his work, disenchanted with the struggle to make ends meet or upset by the state of the world. He was all those things too, but what was consuming him made those problems pale in comparison.
He’d grown up in a family of hearty souls. They took what was before them, accepted it as what it was and made the best of it, carrying on.
In his 20s he’d moved away from that mindset. In truth, he’d never known he had it. Somewhere in that decade he’d thought he could avoid his problems. If he ignored them – or gave them a wide berth – he might avoid them.
One morning time slapped him in the face as he stared at the reflection in his mirror. The soft, sleep deprived face staring back at him showed patches of gray; the face of a stranger. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked closer. He didn’t recognize himself. He thought about his life. Wondered where the gray had come from, wondered if his life had had any meaning.
Over the course of the morning he looked back and saw how empty he was. How he’d thrown relationships away by running from their challenges. How little that had left him with. He felt like a shell. In that moment, he determined to change. To take life head on and do his best to live it, no matter what came his way. He’d done that. He’d changed. Life was better.
But now this.
Ever since that morning, he’d always looked for a way through; was always confident he’d get to the other side. Today, in his current state, he wasn’t so certain.
He sat upon the bridge, legs dangling into the nothing below. The river looked calm, inviting. He thought about peace.
The world was waking up. Cars rumbled by behind him. The sun was beginning to burn up the horizon. He’d need to decide soon: around or through.
