After the internet and some light drinking left me in a stupor on Sunday night, on Monday morning as per usual I lumbered glumly out of bed. Just like so many other men and women the working world over, I took a shower and tried to pull myself together, which ahead of an arduous week always means a couple of slices of toast.
What respite man can find in a piquant jam and melting butter! After eating my toast and placing my plate in the sink and kissing my wife I was more than set. With Monday’s socks on and my stomach doughily satiated, a newfound glow hung over the workaday and humdrum. Far from fearing my job and the inane patter of my colleagues, I would even say that I left the house feeling inspired.
So how is it that just a few hours later, in the amber glow of the early evening before dinner was usually served, I found myself lying in the curb and itching, my wife betrayed and my job permanently done? I had been sacked from my place of work and bedded down with a seductive other, in a state of strange euphoria which soon left me utterly numb.
Wouldn’t you know it, turns out the toast was to blame, my morning succour begetting my plight. As far as bread goes I’m happy with white and crustless, but in a departure from our usual fare, my wife from an artisanal street vendor’s market had procured a poppy seed loaf. The doctor would later tell me that I might as well have mainlined 80 milligrams of morphine.
Apparently – even then I could scarcely remember – I fell asleep and had vivid dreams at my desk. When I awoke I sat nodding and quietly weeping, barely communicative but my smile at least suggested I was serene. When my boss hauled me off to the bathroom I don’t know how I kept my temper, but so I’m told we stood for an hour right by the bowl with nary a stream.
They kicked me out of the office anyway, into the arms of some temptress. And as I sit here now hurriedly typing, in the clapped-out car that has become my makeshift home and bed, taking a break from repeated cracked window entreaties but still making use of my wife’s fiber optic high speed, I wish I could remember her face or shape or something about her manner, my warm-blooded no doubt bosomy onetime opiate queen.
