Breaking Point

Breaking Point

He paced up and down the roof of the office building. Forty stories high. It was cold, and he wore only his T-Shirt and a pair of slacks. His dress shirt and tie were carefully folded and put on one of the random pipes canvassing the roof surface.

He was fine, and that was the problem.

Working a 9-to-7 job. Good money. Good Benefits. Respectable position as VP. Good Company. Bragging rights.

He was married. His wife had found him while he was still in undergrad at the local community college. Her parents lived a few blocks away from the office building. He and her lived a couple blocks away in a nice two-story house that was great for company.

When he came home, his wife was excited. Every night. She was a volunteer for a couple charity organizations. One of them made sure that children in poor neighborhoods got tutoring. Another sheltered and provided free counseling to battered women. She felt fulfilled, needed, kind, and adventurous. Her life was very exciting. She thought so, and most everyone else thought so, too.

She was a tall, beautiful lady with an anxious face of fragile determination. She was good at having watery eyes and asking for tissues. Never over the top, with just the right introduction of deep, sincere emotion that never failed to make her audience swoon. Passionate about the poor and about suffering women. She had a lot of friends.

And he was her husband. VP of an accounting firm.

He used to like numbers. The connection between black and white sheets and peoples’ lives had been interesting once. The figures and forms that piled on his desk were the the basic foundation, the cog that allowed the world to operate. They helped his wife do her work. They gave him bragging rights about his title.

But it was hard to get other people to understand what he actually did. It would take a lot of skill to make people sentimental about accounting, and he wasn’t very good at looking sincere and sentimental. He couldn’t even do it here, on top of the roof alone.

He ordered around employees. He took orders from his boss. But there wasn’t really a place to tell his story. Because there wasn’t a place to tell his story, he began to doubt that he had one.

That didn’t mean he didn’t want one.

He stopped pacing and paused, leaning his back against the iron rampart. Then, he turned and looked down.

He contemplated, then changed his mind. He didn’t want his story to be a tragedy. It was a triumph. Success.

Right?

He closed his eyes and tried to picture his work as triumph. It was hard going and he didn’t really feel changed when he opened his eyes.

He went in his pocket for his penknife and sat down on the cement rooftop. Calmly, composedly he lifted his left pants leg, cut a slit, and watched his blood escape. He began to feel more alive. For several minutes he sat there, looking at the dripping pain and thinking about feeling more alive.

After 20 minutes the bleeding began to slow.

Still calm, composed, and collected he stood up. He dusted off his pants, put back on his dress shirt, adjusted his tie, opened the stairwell door, and returned from his break.