The Animal Inside

The market had been a bear all morning, red numbers bleeding across Thomas's screens like digital wounds. At 47, he'd spent two decades watching other people's money grow and shrink, a professional gambler who never placed his own bets. His reflection in the darkened monitor showed what he'd become—a hollow-eyed zombie, haunting this glass tower, feeding on coffee and regret.

'You're running on fumes, Thomas,' Sarah had said three months ago, when she finally stopped waiting for him to choose between her and this career. The irony was, he couldn't remember making the choice at all. He'd just kept showing up, kept chasing the bull markets that promised everything and delivered nothing.

His phone buzzed—his mother. Again. 'Your brother's in trouble with gambling debts, Tommy. He needs someone to talk sense into him.'

Thomas laughed bitterly, the sound startling in his corner office. Talk sense? He was the worst person to give advice. At least his brother's addiction was honest. Thomas had convinced himself that watching numbers scroll across a screen was work, that the adrenaline spike when a stock rallied was purpose.

He remembered camping with his father in the Smokies, age twelve. 'If you ever see a bear in the wild, son,' his dad had said, 'you don't run. You stand your ground. You make yourself big.' His father had died with dignity— pancreatic cancer, no tears, just a quiet acceptance Thomas had never mastered.

The market rallied. Green numbers replaced red. The floor erupted in cheers. Thomas felt nothing—no joy, no relief, no anything. Just the familiar numbness that had become his baseline existence.

He stood up, grabbed his coat. 'Where you going, Tommy?' asked Jackson, the twenty-something associate who looked at Thomas with uneasy recognition, like viewing his future in a funhouse mirror.

'For a run,' Thomas said. 'Before I forget how.'

Outside, the city air hit him—exhaust, ambition, desperation. He began to move, each step a rebellion against the seduction of stillness. He wasn't running toward anything anymore. Just running, finally, from the lie that safety could be found in numbers that changed every six seconds.

His phone buzzed again. Sarah. He kept running.