Draft of a life - Episode II

What possessed him to upend a life so abruptly, on a whim! Certainly, his life was a masterpiece of suppressed chaos, he managed this chaos though. He even used it as a source of inspiration. Thoughts and ideas were constantly dancing inside his head, awe-inspiring life plans. What lunatic impulse made him cling to routine while secretly daydreaming of setting his spreadsheet on fire and slow-dancing in the ashes? Oh, he’d considered it—briefly, between sips of lukewarm office coffee. But responsibility, that droll little jailer, always won. His mind’s back window remained a revolving door for escaped daydreams, each fleeing into the night with middle fingers raised.

Why, he had no shortage of such thoughts—grandiose, sky-high ideas. Yet he did not always rush to build an inspired solid reality heedless of the consequences. He would weigh the possibilities for a moment, envision their side effects on his daily life, and then—swiftly, deftly—before they could claim permanence, he’d shoo them out through the back windows of his mind. And he’d return, deeply grateful and ravenous, to the sturdy object of his work, which offered him a full-bodied present and a standart of certainty for the future.

For this reason, whenever his thoughts threatened to “derail,” he reminded himself to tread carefully, “not to undermine his own interests” over some eccentric fancy. A habit that cloaked his actions that morning in increasingly strange hues.

He begins the day at the office with the usual routines, in their accustomed order. Brew coffee in the small kitchen’s pot, for himself and the others in his department, since he was the first to start work. Exchange a few polite words with the cleaner, discreetly covering the steaming cup with his palm to shield it from the whirlwind of her feather duster’s dust—a storm she absentmindedly dragged across his bookshelf as she spoke. Cast a fleeting glance at the newspaper’s front page and then, likewise fleetingly, skim the obituaries and stock market updates. Finally, open the folder with the current work, sip by sip of coffee, to recapitulate the previous day’s results and, before the phones ring and colleagues arrive, draft a plan for an eight-hour stretch brimming with promise.

By 10:07 AM, his eight-hour plan was unfolding with all the thrilling predictability of a tax audit. Then—click—the sound of the office’s ancient HVAC system coughing its last breath. Silence fell. Sweat pooled in ironic places. Colleagues erupted into a chorus of “Have you tried turning it off and on again? He remained stoic, sipping his now-tepid coffee like a Victorian widow at a séance. This too shall pass, he lied to himself, just as the fire alarm began shrieking. Turns out that somebody from Accounting departement had tried “turning it off and on again”—using a blowtorch...

As smoke curled around his ergonomic chair, he realized with grim delight: today’s spreadsheet column would forever read “11:15 AM: PERISHED IN AVOIDABLE BLAZE.” The universe, it seemed, had finally approved his time-off request.

“A shame,” the fire investigator would later remark, “he died as he lived—clinging to a thermos full of mediocre coffee.”