The Thursday Before Everything Changed

The lightning split the sky outside my office window, illuminating the empty cardboard boxes stacked in the corner. Forty-two years old and packing up my life into bankers boxes, while somewhere in this building, Marcus was probably still peddling his bullshit to anyone who'd listen.

My hair had started silvering at the temples last year—the same year Sarah left. Now, catching my reflection in the darkened monitor, I barely recognized the exhausted man staring back. The cat I'd adopted on impulse, a scrawny tabby named Mercutio, was waiting at home. He'd curl around my ankles tonight, oblivious that his dinner schedule was about to become precarious.

Marcus had been my friend once. Back when we were twenty-three and drunk on possibility, when we swore we'd never become the kind of men who prioritized quarterly reports over people. But ambition is a slow poison, and Marcus had been sipping it for decades while I gulped it down in desperate draughts, trying to keep pace.

That morning, I'd watched him tear into a junior analyst for missing targets—spearing the poor kid with sharpened words while I stood silent. The bull market had made us monstrous, and I'd been complicit.

'You're thinking too much,' Marcus had told me once, back when he still meant it kindly. 'That's your problem.'

Another flash of lightning. The storm would break soon. I sealed the final box with tape that ripped with a sound like a starting gun.

Tomorrow I'd explain to Mercutio why his premium kibble was replaced with store brand. Tomorrow I'd figure out what came after this. Tonight, in the dark of my apartment, I would finally stop running toward things that didn't matter.

The rain began as I walked out, and I didn't use my umbrella.