My stepdaughter’s birthday is today. I am doing my best to do the work and be there and present for it, but it is incredibly tough today.

I’m starting to think about a story, where the man is so utterly disenchanted with his work life, with his future potentials, that when he goes to some job retraining thing to try and find a different job, something non-IT, which he hates, and is told that he has no options, he’s left bereft.

He asks the girl “helping” him what he’s supposed to do? Walk out of the building and straight into traffic? She shrugs. She has no answer for that. You’re on your own.

He turns around does exactly what he threatened, having completely succumbed to hopelessness. Walks right in front of a bus.

But the story isn’t about him. It’s about the girl, the one who, though not responsible for how his life had gone, put the last nail in the coffin. How does she feel? How does she reconcile what happened? She’ll question her behaviour, but does she try to explain it away? Does she take responsibility for her lack of compassion?

Is it her fault?

How responsible is she for a man she just met?

It would be a meditation on the nature of responsibility versus compassion toward others, and where that line exactly is drawn.

Target: 300 words
Written: 1168 words, hip little story: Get Back Again