A comfortable death

comfort is where dreams go to die

It’s sunny out. The wind is blowing. The breeze feels nice. This is a great break from usual bleak, cold and grey winter that swallows up over the half the year around here. I can hear my coworker talking, but its not registering in my brain. Its muffled background noise. I don’t care. I probably should, considering I am part of the management team here, but this is meeting number 3 today. It’s not even lunch time yet, and I have achieved absolutely fuck all so far.

I look up. There’s about 150 people in front of us. All of the subcontractors and our own carpenters and labourers. The superintendent to my left is still talking. It’s still not registering. Overhead power line safety? Something like that. I look down at my tattered up steel toe boots on the asphalt of the parking lot. I’m standing in a puddle, with some snow and ice slowly melting on the side of it.

The boots are off. My feet are in the sand. The breeze is different. It’s humid now, that tropical air and smell. The puddle is replaced by ocean water, being pulled back and forth through my legs and over my feet by the tide. I look forward and the office trailers are gone. All I can see on the horizon is the endless ocean. The soothing sound of waves crashing. It does something for my soul. Something that the drugs and dealing came close to but could never touch. The ocean is calming. Peaceful. Emotions washed away, instead of amplified. I dont want to leave this place, ever. I must have lived by the ocean in a previous life or the universe has been dropping hints my whole life.

And I snap back. Like a slingshot, my mind is ripped away from the beach and shot back into my fucking skull in the parking lot. Fuck sakes. Its been a long journey but I’m still so far away. But god damn, I dont know how much more of this my soul can take. Not my mind. I can deal with this grind. My body can take the abuse of near daily training and redlining caffeine and cortisol while sleep deprived.

But my soul.

My soul feels like its coming to die here. Ironically, death was something I was trying hard to escape. From a burning building to what appeared safe and comfortable. The safety and comfort were a trap that I couldn’t recognize at the time. I had to make a move. A decade of dealing had worn me down. It had worn my fiancé down. I was tired. The world was shutting down. Drug benders had left me broken. The end of every bender felt like it had stolen a small piece of my soul. Piece by piece, and I still dont know if I ever got them back. I couldn’t walk away from the money I was making into minimum wage bullshit. The business we bought with the drug money turned into a casualty of COVID lockdowns.

I dont know what I was expecting. I guess it was anything but the current situation. Could be worse. Could be better. This was yet another pivot while I hung on for literal life. Keep moving, hold on, no complaining. Just grind it out, and get somewhere else. Anywhere else. Before it swallows you whole and leaves your fiancé and family organizing your funeral.

The meeting is over. My coworkers thank everyone for coming to the meeting. Good job, no incidents, we’re all in this together, lets set good example… same old generic shit.

In the puke green cubicle again. The blue light from the dual monitors is slowly cooking my eyes and my motivation. My email inbox is an infinite to do list. No matter how many I open, more seem to appear. No matter how clearly I try to communicate, the message just doesn’t get across to some of these people.

I can feel my eyes rolling into the back of my head. We’re just going in circles on these email chains. The lead time on some of these procurement items is too tight for my liking already. I’m dealing with engineers that have never worked an actual day in their lives because they got too accustomed to “consulting”. Whatever the fuck that means. Must be nice.

I can smell the tropical air again. The monitors are gone. My computer chair is now a beach chair. I look around. It’s just me. On an empty beach. The sand is white. The ocean is bright blue. So blue it doesn’t even look real. Ice cold drink in my hand. I made it back. I dont want to leave this place. The office and construction site is so far away. The back up alarms have been replaced with seagull noises and waves crashing. My soul has been pulled towards places like these for my entire life. My mission has always been to escape.

“We have the owners meeting in a half hour, can you please review the meeting minutes from last time and lead this one?”

I am violently snapped back into my office wage cage.

Fuck.

“Absolutely. I have a list of outstanding items they still need to address as well” I say back to my boss.

Back in the deceptive cage of comfort. I was so close. These daydreams get vivid sometimes.

I have a lot of work to do to get there.

I give up my soul for more dollars. And eventually I’ll be giving those dollars up for the beach.

Either that, or I die in the process.