With whom could he share these innermost horrors, that he was living someone else’s life and that his dreams had become a nightmare?
His friends would think he was an ungrateful jerk, and he certainly couldn’t share these feelings with Anne.
He felt he had been duped by an evil wish-granting genie that took his fantasy of a happy life and trapped him in some endless maze of boring sameness.
The shininess of the illusion of love and happiness had worn off and left him with a feeling of dread at the seeming meaninglessness of his existence and guilt for feeling this way about his life.
After all, he couldn’t just walk away from a wife and children who loved him, could he?
He awoke the following day feeling hardly more rested than when he had gone to sleep. He went to the washroom and then staggered into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee.
“One of the few joys I have left,” Paul said to himself.
He walked past the kids’ rooms and peeked at them sleeping.
He felt like a fortunate man, and he was. A beautiful “millionaire’s family” — a son and a daughter both at an age still cute and hopeful before adolescence.
He sincerely loved his children and wife —, but couldn’t help feeling a tinge of resentment. As well as he was doing in life, he couldn’t help but wonder “what if” his life had taken a different direction.
These were the things that haunted Paul.
He boiled water and ground the beans fresh for his preferred method of caffeine ingestion: the French press.
“Good coffee should be drunk black, and if you don’t like black coffee, you don’t like coffee. Either that or it’s shit coffee,” he’d often muse, usually more for his entertainment than for others.
As he stood and waited for the coffee grounds to cook, he thought, “So she wants to drag me to yoga camp — fine. At least the day looks nice to take in some bald monks in saffron robes.”
These were his favourite moments, being by himself in perfect peace.
No phone ringing or time commitments, no kids bickering or wife chattering. Just an understimulated caffeine junkie, his boiled beans, and the dismal anticipation that his day would be downhill after that first glorious sip.
He was at an age where most of his friends were just like him, fully committed to their families and careers.
Most of his friends now were friends because of this, he had realized.
This was also an age where he still had some single friends, which gave him a depth gauge to plumb just how far their respective lives had diverged.
On the one hand, it was fun to live vicariously through their exploits and dream of his wild days. On the contrary, most single ones wished for what he had. Or, at the very least, used him to gauge what they were hoping to avoid.
The “what if” game was fun but ultimately dissatisfying.
Paul was here now and trying his damnedest to make it work.
Sometimes, he wished for quiet and secretly hoped for a freer, less responsible life. A life where he could be creative instead of productive. To live off the artistic expression he knew he had buried deep within himself but forsaken in pursuing more material reality.
He had planned to get into real estate sales because he thought it would be a way to make a good income while leaving free time for him to work on his passion — writing novels. That became a joke that he found increasingly unfunny.
While the intention was good, he liked to muse that “the road to hell is paved” with just such intentions.
The reality of raising a family and the financial merry-go-round left little to no time for him to do anything of his “true calling.” He loved his children and wouldn’t trade them for the world, but deep down, he wished his life was different.
For all that he had, he felt as though something was missing.
