A man has achieved everything he has ever wanted to achieve. He has gone to business school, bought a house, and started a family. He has a successful job at an analytics firm and commutes 30 minutes through the city every day once at 8:30, once at 5:00. He lives in a two-story townhouse with a luscious window garden neatly framing his maroon, mahogany front door with a family waiting behind for him to return home, usually at the dinner table with a lovely meal prepared by his beautiful wife. The man is content. As he lies in bed, relishing the full stomach the delicious lasagna his wife had made gave him, he smiles. He puts his head on his pillow and falls right asleep with no trouble at all.
He wakes up one minute before his alarm at 7:59 in the morning and slips out of bed over to his walk-in closet to find an outfit for the day. He finds a perfectly matching black suit in the middle of the rack, not to be mistaken with the perfectly matching black suits on either side of the one he picked. He gently kisses his wife on the head and makes his way out the door.
He starts his engine at precisely 8:30 and reverses out of his driveway, checking each mirror and direction at least twice, this morning, it was twice. He cruises along at 25mph in the neighborhood, waving at his elderly neighbor walking her tiny chihuahua. He makes his way to the exit to enter the freeway where he sees the homeless man who has set up a temporary home on the busiest corner in the city. Like usual, he makes brief awkward eye contact and continues driving along. At work, he analyzes and eats with his coworkers, catching up on the latest wall street and NFL news. 5:30 pm, a beautiful wife and children gather around a meatloaf, waiting. It was delicious.
Routine carried on its sentence, the man content with the steadiness of his life. He had everything and nothing bothered him…except the homeless man. He wasn’t without a heart for he smiled at the homeless man with a welcoming, but pitiful smile. The homeless man wasn’t content so the man, being human, wasn’t either.
Slowly, the man laughed less at work and meals tasted sour. He sat in his car for a minute before starting the engine at 8:31. The man couldn’t take it. On his way to work, he pulls out four 100 dollar bills, rolls down his window, and sticks his long arm out the window, motioning for the homeless man to take it. Eyes wide, the homeless man inches closer to the car and grabs the money and nods at the man.
The man laughed harder than he ever did before and filled his stomach with the best food in his life. Now, surely, he was content.
One day, as he was driving home, he noticed empty streets. His neighbor was not walking her dog for their evening walk. Cars were parked in their garages rather than the carports and all porch lights were off. He turned around the last corner before his house and flashing red and blue lights blinded him. For a solid minute, he crept down the street at 10 mph sweating from anticipation.
Three body bags on his front porch and the homeless man in handcuffs, drugs and AR-15 confiscated and in evidence bags. The man didn’t sleep well that night.
Comments