Total pages in book: 171
Estimated words: 162003 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 810(@200wpm)___ 648(@250wpm)___ 540(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 162003 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 810(@200wpm)___ 648(@250wpm)___ 540(@300wpm)
Time to brush your teeth. Comb your hair. Should probably feed yourself something between shots. Gym? Meh…
How about jacking off in the shower instead? Nada. Not even energy for that. Ladies, we had a crisis on our hands.
The last thirty something days of my life had been a perpetual merry-go-round of this bullshit. People moved and spoke around me. Even to me, probably. Couldn’t say for certain. The silence in my ears was deafening. The colors in my world had evaporated into a haze of gray. Nothing made a lick of sense anymore.
My company. My life. My purpose.
For me, success wasn’t measured by the sum in my bank accounts. It was a welcome side effect, sure. But I had the drive and ambition to succeed in any chosen field. It wasn’t cocky, just fact. When you want gravely enough, you make it happen.
I had wanted more than anyone.
Now that my ruthless plotting had bled away, only scabs remained. I’d never given it much thought, what success meant to me. Many people believed my father to be successful. I still recall how cruelly I’d laughed at the mockery of the word after tragedy befell him. A tragedy of his own making, nonetheless.
If you’d asked me six months ago, I would have stood by that arrogant proclamation. I was too attached to the notion to let it go. My father had not been successful in his business. That was sorely obvious. But as I watched the clouds swirl and disintegrate outside of my high-rise window, unsettling clarity descended upon me.
He had everything he ever wanted. Two ostentatiously beautiful houses, boats, cars, family holidays in Europe. Plenty of materialistic things. But it was family. The thought was so simplistic, and yet it struck me down with the weight of its importance. My father had everything that couldn’t be measured with gold. The most exceptional wife and mother a man could hope for. The perfect children he’d always boasted of. When I pictured his face- before his financial troubles- I remembered how blissfully fucking happy he was. A fool’s paradise, as they say.
Only now did I grasp that the successes I’d thought mattered amounted to jack shit.
I swiveled around in my chair and edged closer to the window, pressing my palm against the glass. The sky was overcast and foggy, pouring down big fat tears of misery on the city of San Francisco. I fixated my attention on the tiny people milling about on the streets below, wondering if any of them could relate to how I felt at this moment.
Probably not.
The Jane and John Doe’s down there lived in another existence. By all outward appearances, they seemed content, but were they really? Husbands worked their fingers to the bone and whisked their mistresses off to hotels for afternoon trysts. Trophy wives racked up credit card bills in the hunt for the next best item that would fill their vacuous lives. Children splashed in puddles with their Wellies while their nannies scolded them and smiled. I couldn’t actually see these things of course, but it was how I imagined it in my head. Let me run with it, will you?
This was not the way I was raised. My parents were legitimately and freakishly happy. But there were times when I’d caught a glimpse of my father’s worried face as he hunched over his desk with a glass of bourbon late at night. There were signs. We’d all just chosen not to see them. He'd taken the weight of the world on his shoulders, as that’s what fathers do, right? And we were all happy to let it continue on without a hiccup.
Perhaps if I’d done something, said something. Things could have been different. It was a quandary I’d faced many times in my head. I’d picked it apart and dissected the remnants so many times nothing but bone dust remained.
It was easier to hate my father for what he’d done than to acknowledge I’d failed him. To admit I should’ve stepped up to the plate and showed him what I was capable of back then. It’s funny how these little blips in life can change everything. How now, six years later, I questioned everything I thought I knew about my parents. The utterly terrifying news of being a father would do that to a man.
My child was inside her.
A tangible and very real slap in the face.
Why, you may ask? Did you take me for one of those men who wouldn’t own up to his responsibilities? Because I may have been many things, but I wasn’t a goddamn scoundrel. If you must tar me with any particular brush, don’t let it be that one.
Brighton did.
She’d given me no choice in the matter. Deemed me unfit the moment she found out, from the gist of it. Slapped me with the sperm donor label and sentenced me to a cardboard box, only to rot in a storage unit somewhere for the next eighteen years.