Work Story

I was nineteen and pretentious. It was the summer of 2011, and I had been spending my summer away from university in my hometown. Campbellton was dying, filled with millworkers, junkies, and the occasional vagabond panhandling outside of the Tim Horton’s downtown. I lived 15 minutes away, so on the weekends I would go into town to drink, get high, and then sleep on the floor of a friend’s basement. We were textbook hypocrites. We would sit and bitch all night about the deadbeats roaming our streets while sentencing ourselves to a life of loafing.
But I, you see, I was different. I would be successful because I was a well-to-do university student who had read everything from Aristotle to Atwood. I knew that “Plato” wasn’t a misspelling of a brand of children’s modeling clay, never mind that I couldn’t understand three quarters of The Republic. And I had found the perfect job (or, the best one Campbellton could offer) for a nineteen year old know it all.
Peter Choy, a Chinese immigrant, had a meager dentist office that shared a building with the city’s closest thing to a gay bar. Peter had studied medicine at McGill before moving to Campbellton and setting up shop. Dentistry not being enough to occupy him, Peter had decided to write a book on Taoism and ancient Chinese medicine. The problem was that he insisted on writing it in English. Taoism is complicated enough, even when translated into perfect English, and Peter’s English was anything but perfect. So, he decided to hire a couple of copy writers to weed through his near unintelligible work in progress. I brought in a resume, and was hired on the spot.
The first few weeks went by without incident. The computers were in a cramped makeshift office near the back of the building...

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...pped into my stomach so quickly and with such force it was a wonder she didn’t feel it. I went back to university for my second year soon afterward, and we gradually drifted apart. The sex was all we had. She was a lot of fun, and I liked her, but I hadn’t bothered to make a connection beyond that. Whether that was because I was scared, stupid, or both isn’t important now.
In the time afterward I made up a lot of excuses for why she must have come up with this sudden desire for abstinence. Maybe she was getting too attached. Maybe she was aware we would have to part ways soon, and this was an easier way of ending things. As I aged I came to the conclusion that it was probably just because I was a holier-than-thou asshole who wanted her for her body and not much else. It took her calling things off for me to realize that I needed her far more than she ever needed me.