A Letter to My Mom
His mother sent him a joke about office life. She had finally found a job again, and the joke was her attempt to re-acclimate herself to the workforce. It was 1 am in the morning, and he was lying alone in bed answering text messages from his mother.
"I just woke up," he texted.
"Can't sleep?"
"No," he texted. "I'm trying to get back to waking up early. I guess I overshot it a little bit."
He rolled over and drank his sparking water straight from the bottle.
"A civilized man drinks from a glass," he thought. He forgave himself. One of his girls had recently left him, and he was still smarting and vulnerable.
"I was dreaming," he texted to his madre. "I was on a train near Pittsburgh. I was traveling with all these American children. Perhaps it was a school trip? I was a school teacher. One of my colleagues from my former firm was there too."
He sipped his sparking water.
"Suddenly, we hit turbulence. Was it a derailment? The passengers were thrown from side to side. The children were all right, except for a little blonde girl with a pink backpack. She broke her foot and started to cry. I sprang into action. I took her in my arms. I told my colleague to look after my other children and my belongings. I jumped off the train with the girl, so I could take her to a doctor."
The sparkling water was crisp and cool. It was a beautiful night in San Francisco.
"What do you think it means?" his mother texted from across an ocean.
"I think," he texted, "the train represents my old firm, the colleague was indeed my trusted lieutenant and mentee, and the act of jumping off the train and pleading with the colleague to look after the children - my recent departure from the old firm."
"Who was the little girl? Your innocence? Your emotions?"
He stared at his phone. He laughed. It was amusing to see that people still deemed a part of him to be innocent. He had lost so much in these past few months.
"At first," he texted, "I thought the little girl was my ex-girlfriend. She was tiny, short, and blonde too. But now I believe that she was the symbolic representation of my hopes and dreams. You see, when I was a young man, I dreamed of adopting a little blonde American girl, and of sending her to Oxford."
"Makes sense," his madre texted back.
The dark room felt crisp and cool, and was lit only by the light from phone's screen.
"Well, it's almost 3 am," he texted. "I should start working on this brief."
"Have a good day," she texted him back.
He rolled out of bed naked and opened his mini-bar. It was light on the sparkling water, but heavy on the champagne bottles. He rarely drank anymore, but the oldest bottle had been there to celebrate the upcoming anniversary with his departed lover.
"Little girls," he mumbled, and then he popped open the champagne bottle.
He looked below his naked torso: For the first time in days, his hard morning erection was gone. The craving was finally gone. The intensity of her memory stung less, and so he smiled.
For a man, friends and family come and go, but lovers are forever. Lovers bring men the only pleasure worth writing home about. Even their hopes, dreams, and ambition come a distant second to being sucked and satiated.
He poured himself a glass like a civilized man. He sat naked on his red chair.
He would begin the morning, he thought, by writing a beautiful corporate brief.