- Wealthy,
- healthy,
- wise,
- happy,
- loved,
- successful,
- kind,
- important.
The fridge list was getting longer. He wasn’t sure where she was finding these aspirational goals, but it seemed that every day a new one appeared. Today’s one seemed to suggest that if you acted wealthy, you would become wealthy. Laws of attraction, or somesuch.
Or maybe he was interpreting it wrong. She would say he was too cynical, and it was just a protective mechanism to avoid risking failure. But he was pretty sure that spending money on a new suit, watch, shoes and a fountain pen! For goodness sake, who had fountain pens anymore? He was pretty sure that spending that money was making someone wealthy, it was just not him.
But he tried. And in all fairness, the watch told him the time impeccably. But he felt no richer. And by now there was a new aspirational goal on the fridge door. And he was getting up two hours earlier to do the work required to become successful.
But the next goal prioritised his health, and he had put those hours back into sleep and sell the watch to buy a fancy gym membership. Which was a shame as he had become attached to the watch in the short time they had spent together. It had reliably told him what time to get up, what time to go to work, what time to go to sleep and what time to show up to collect her from her job.
It was in the car on the way home, that she told him. She told him, that she had packed her bags that morning, and would be leaving that day to head to an ashram in India. She had tried to work things out with him, but the way he had kept flitting from fixation to fixation, had made him too hard to be with.
He had tried, he had tried to be everything.
Written to a prompt (He gave up everything to be…) to a timer (15 minutes), I was most intrigued with the part the watch played in this story. Truly, more people should have watches.
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Ursula Hoult 