Who: Zack (Monologue) What: Reality/Fantasy Where: At home, lying in bed (His house in San Fran) When: Early morning before work Rating: PG (Language? Maybe zombie stuff?) Status: Complete
There were points in a man's life that changed everything. Turning points, new beginnings, whatever you wanted to call them. At this point in his life Zack could recall a few previous to his current state, the new split in the path before him.
The first point was a few months after he had turned twenty-three. At that point he'd been out of school for over a year. Zack had obtained his Bachelor's in business from a mid-range university. The campus housed around ten thousand students but wasn't a university of particularly high recognition even though it wasn't a bad school. He'd done all right in university and thanks to his combination of being in a Fraternity - Delta Sigma Pi and always being sort of generally well liked he had managed to land a job even before getting out of school. However, a little more than a year later, that turning point came. That turning point however was a realization that he hated his job. With a passion.
He'd managed to land a pretty decent position with a larger organization in NYC which was great since it was close to his parents and the company was pretty good to it's employees. Not great, but good. Not much to complain about at least but it didn't change the fact that every morning he woke up groaning and not wanting to go to work. Every morning he was miserable and grouchy. His girlfriend at the time, Molly, really didn't like sleeping over if she knew she was going to have to get up at the same time he was. So even though they had been together for a while she normally would only stay over on the weekends.
It was around twenty-three when he realized he hated his job. Though the problem with hating your job when your not far out of university? You don't really know what to do with your self. So Zack had stuck with it. Figured maybe he didn't like it just because he hadn't gotten far enough up the ladder yet to like where he stood in the company. So while he hated his job, hated going to work, he worked harder.
Though he still lived for 5pm and the weekend. This of course lead to disliking his life more. So in order to try to compromise, an attempt to be happy, he started jetting on the weekends to foreign surfing hot spots, dedicating several nights a week to volunteering and just as many nights to drinking.
A year after he had shortly turned 23, he was now 24 and miserable, irritable, frustrated and aimless. Lost really. Zack had climbed up the ladder at work to a position two levels higher than he had been a year before. He had gotten engaged to Molly even.
Though that engagement was what would break under the strain of Zack trying to force him self to be happy with his life and not being so. Him and Molly had been together since University. Together for four years and between the age of 23 and 24 she had finally moved in with him, after the engagement. Molly, unfortunately, learned the life Zack lived when he was left by him self. Which was one filled with anger, self-loathing and constant frustration. Hindsight was 20/20 and looking back on those years he now realized just how badly he had treated her. There were times she'd done nothing but ask a simple question because she didn't know something he did and he'd start a fight with her, yelling about how stupid would someone have to be in order to not know something so simple... Really, how could she have known where he left the keys? He normally left them on the hook near the front door, but sometimes he didn't. One fight he could remember particularly he'd raged at her so badly for 'such a stupid question' she'd left crying. It wasn't until she had left that he realized that the keys were, in fact, not on the hook but still in his pocket.
Zack had been so caught up in his own head without a way to deal with it that he took it out indirectly on her. If he had been able to see what he was doing... If he hadn't bottled up his feelings because that's what a man did... If he hadn't kept trying to make him self like his job... If he could have talked, expressed what was going on with him self, his emotions, in his head... If he hadn't tried to make all his pain better with sex... If, if, if. Stupid hindsight.
Not long before Zack turned 25, Molly broke off the engagement and left him. She did it through a note because, as she explained in the note, she was afraid how he would react since he reacted with anger to so much else. Molly had been right, Zack had broken into an almost uncontrollable rage. Flinging things across the apartment, knocking shit over, putting his fist through the wall. There was so much anger and pain that didn't belong to her that he had, but at the time... Of course it was all that 'stupid bitch's' fault.
It took months of wallowing and randomly angry out bursts before another turning point had come. One night, after finishing off a bottle of tequila and smashing the bottle by throwing it across his apartment, a knock came at the door. Of course the first thought that came to his mind was 'who the fuck' was bothering him now. He'd stomped over to the door and whipped it open ready to tear whoever the fuck dared bother him a new one when before him was revealed the quiet but kind looking old lady from the apartment next door. The lady, Ms Bauer a german widow, was older than his mother, probably not by a whole lot, but enough.
She had held a plate of Berliner, a german doughnut like pastry with filling. In her old broken English she explained that she was worried about him before offering the plate. Blinking he had been struck into shock and pausing a moment invited her in low and rough toned manner. Ms. Bauer had paused a moment before nodding and following him in to the apartment which he muttered an apology about what a mess the place was.
Ms. Bauer had worriedly looked at the broken glass of the tequila bottle and Zack dismissed it as an accident before beginning to look for something to clean it up with. While he looked she quietly had set the sweets down on the kitchen living room coffee table and waited until he entered the room again. Giving a moment for him to start cleaning she then had started to talk, saying that she hadn't seen the pretty girl come around any more, expressing that apparently she had liked Molly and that Molly had apparently gone out of her way to assist Ms. Bauer a few times. Zack repressed his anger and explained that him and Molly were no longer together. Something seemed to click in Ms. Bauer's head for a moment and she had fallen quiet while he kneeled down to sweep the glass shards into a dust pan.
Just as he thought this bullshit was probably going to be over Ms. Bauer took a seat on his couch and after a moment began in her broken English that she was worried about him, because he reminded her of her former husband a long long time ago. That her husband had been a good man but had gone through a rough time and had pushed most of his friends and family away because he didn't know how to cope. Mr. Bauer hadn't met Mrs. Bauer until he was coming out of that time in his life but it had left a sadness in him, had left a piece of him broken until the day he had died and Ms. Bauer had always wished she could have helped, could have done something to change her husbands life. Though that was a silly wish because no one could travel back in time.
However, from Mr. Bauer's stories, she remembered what he had explained and she was worried that perhaps Zack was going through a time like her late husband had since over the past few years he had gone from an open smiling university student that always smiled and waved at her to one who never talked and rarely smiled. That if he was, she wasn't sure there was anything she could do for him, but he seemed like such a good boy, that she wished she could help him in some way, unlike how she had never been able to help her husband. That if he ever needed someone to listen to him, even if she may not understand some of the things he might be going through since the times were different and women could never completely understand the things men went through because the their worlds could be so different, or... Well, just because of some language differences, she was there to listen, just one apartment door over.
With that she had left, leaving her plate with the pastries on it, on his living room coffee table.
He'd been struck dumb by the sudden story and offer for help from a virtual stranger. Sure they'd lived together for a few years now and he'd helped her with getting her groceries or other things up the stairs from time to time since the apartment building was old but... She was a virtual stranger still...
Through a series of interactions with her, enrolling him self in anger management and figuring out that if he hated his job so much he had to leave... Life slowly got better. He wasn't as angry any more. He learned how to talk about the shit that bothered him and he... Got calmer. Got happier again.
At the age of 27 he'd banked all his schooling hours and had all ready even logged some time with his apprenticeship. Due to all ready having a bachelors degree some of the previous requirements that normally accompanied getting through being a plumber were cut back for him, which put him on a fast track. In January of 2009 Zack had quit his job at the corporation and started his first job as a plumber.
Changes happened. Life happened.
But now he was mature, a man, the man he hadn't been previously and a man that he could be proud of. One his father and mother and Ms Bauer were all proud of and happy to have in their lives.
Things got easier, Zack made new friends, some of his old friends started coming around again even. Life was getting good, was good.
Though they say the only constant in life is change and change did indeed happen again. Ms. Bauer passed away about a year ago at this point. Her funeral had been one of the saddest days of his life and her funeral, her end of life was what had spurred his desire to reach out and help others even further. She had made a change in his life, set him on a whole new track with cookies and a story. He didn't have many stories and couldn't bake to save his life but he had found that old NG business card. And thus his decision to join the NG had seemed only logical. In respect and honor of Ms. Bauer's memory. She wanted to help him and the very least he could do was pass it forward.
This time though. This crossroad felt different even though it had all the similarities of the ones before it. Uncertainty, discomfort, a driving urge to grunt, drunk beer and not think about it... This was different. Now wasn't a time for choices and career changes, now was a time to try to sort out how he felt about life it self. Living as a concept, reality as a feature of his current being.
Since coming back from the dead he had felt different, his brain kept feeling like he was still there instead of here. Like a piece of him that belonged in that different desolated world, that should have stayed back with it's death in another place, had instead crossed over the boarders of worlds and come back here with him. That piece however made him startle at strange groans, made him wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweats, had him reliving what had happened in flashes... Even though he couldn't label it, anyone with a bit more knowledge might have said Zack was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, and honestly, they would be... Mostly right. His reactions, the feelings, were commonly associated with the disorder however, it wasn't that he was re-living the situations (though he kinda was) it was as if his current life was a dream and that was the reality he was escaping from.
It all felt like blurred lines between which of the things he was living was reality and which was a dream he was supposed to be waking up from. Was this a dream? Was that a dream? Was this perhaps what his after life was like and he was completely unaware that yes, he was in fact dead and this was as close to 'heaven' as his soul could get? Did he maybe have a whole life that he just couldn't remember in that zombie apocalypse of a wasteland because it was so horrific that his mind couldn't comprehend all of it? When your reality felt like fantasy and a 'bad dream' felt more like reality then what you thought reality probably was, it fucked with your head.
If this was heaven though, what he had lived through... The zombies... That had to be hell, right?