Jack drove through the crowded
city streets, back out towards the country and all the way to the middle of nowhere.
Everything felt somehow different. His birthday meal was a disaster, his
relationships were crumbling, and all he wanted was to go home to a house in Nashville,
Tennessee where a loving smile would be there to greet him, not this ghastly
place on the outskirts of Chicago. He pulled into the drive and got out at the
gate where the code was changed weekly. Fortunately it wasn’t snowing at the
moment. Still, the cold chilled him and he was glad to slip back into the
heated seat of his Mercedes as the looming black iron gates swung slowly aside.
The whole night had been an exhaustion. He thought back ten years to his twenty
second birthday. How different everything had been then.
He’d been a medical student at Vanderbilt,
letting his studies slip and getting caught up in the life that he’d always
wanted, rather than the life that others had planned for him. He’d considered
dropping out of the medical field and going to study art or music or a thousand
other things he’d always wanted to try. But helping others was his calling.
Everybody said so. He could still see his old room, in that little campus apartment
complex that he had shared with three other guys and a pet rabbit. He
remembered it so clearly.
That night, ten years ago exactly,
the apartment had been empty, except for the two of them.
“Happy Birthday, my love,” She’d
said, like she meant it. And nothing else mattered besides the sound of her
voice. He remembered the way everything else faded when she talked, all his
worries would vanish and the world would somehow seem like a good, wholesome, beautiful
place just waiting for someone to make it even better than it was. She’d
believed that, that someone was him. And she’d made him believe the same.
It had been a different world, and
a different life. And now it seemed like a different man looking in the mirror.
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