By Lucy

The prairie isn’t what I thought it would be. I pictured lush grasslands or fields of wheat, waving gently in the breeze. The sun would be relentless in the day, yes, but it would be a nice even heat, and the morning and evening would be pleasantly cool.

The fields of wheat were slightly mistimed – it’s barely past planting season here. The fields are bare. The wind is harsh and constant, with nothing to block it, kicking up large gusts of dust. The climate is more like a desert – bitterly cold at night, searingly hot in the day.

Clouds come and go like city traffic, racing across the vast empty sky. I’m used to watching a storm roll in over two or three hours, but the storms here will show up on the horizon, arrive within 10 minutes, and be gone within half an hour.

I still haven’t seen a sunrise or sunset here. The sun is up ’til after I go to bed and rises before I do each morning.

We lost a brother.

At least, that’s what the Vagabond told me. They were passing around a card for the widow at Dryden. I’ve been holding off mentioning it until I can find an obituary, but with no success. It doesn’t feel real, but maybe that’s the denial portion of grief.

Supposedly, he killed himself.

He was a nice guy. We only really worked together for the shutdown last year, but I was fresh from the temp job and we used to race each other up and down the stairs at the digester. He always had a big smile on his face and tried to get everyone involved in the conversation in the lunch room. I was looking forward to seeing him again this year, but he wasn’t there. Everyone joked it’s because he had a cushier job, but I wonder if he was at home, wracked with despair, and those jokes have a cruel edge now.

I’ve been holding off mentioning it to people at work in case it somehow turns out to be a big misunderstanding and he is alive. The few people I mentioned it to said he always seemed way too positive and upbeat to be suicidally depressed, but the sad clown is unfortunately an effective mask. There, but for the grace of god, go I.

So, the job.

The job is scaffolding. Despite my bellyaching and saying I was going to do anything other that scaffolding, the pay was too seductive. The weekends are 10 hours, double time. Weekdays are 12s, 8 hours straight time, 2 hours time and a half, 2 hours double. That’s 30 hours of double, 40 hours straight, and 10 hours time and a half, plus travel and live-out.

That being said, I have no idea what my pay is. I asked the foreman and he said “the usual rate”. My collective agreement booklet just covers Ontario – no idea what the pay is in Saskatchewan. But more likely than not, he doesn’t even know – he just tells head office my hours and they sort it with the union.

Duff told me how he gets to the jobsite, but he has a motorcycle with off-roading wheels and just cuts across the fields, which I can’t do.

(I knew he had a bike, and I decided against bringing my helmet and going for a ride with him because the Vagabond was already too jealous. I am starting to second guess that.)

The drive actually isn’t too far from the hotel, which is nice. I pulled into the office parking lot, then noticed a lot of cars scooting down the road to a grain elevator.

Not where I wanted to go…

Grain elevators make me nervous ever since someone told me they could explode. But everything will be powered down the entire time we are here, so there isn’t logically anything to worry about.

I parked with the rest of the cars and hop out at the same time as the guy next to me. We walked halfway to the loading bay doors in silence.

“Oh, you must be Lucy.” He says. “I recognize you from Thunder Bay.”

“You do? Are you also from Thunder Bay?”

“No, I was just there for the shut down last year.”

And you recognized me how? I had a different name, haircut, and also I don’t recognize him at all, so we spent very little time together.

“You must know Adrianne too, then.”

“Who?”

Ouch. Poor Adrianne.

“Oh, yeah, the other girl! Yeah, I remember her. But, like, Duff has been talking about his sister – you – coming all week.”

I barely withheld the snicker. Duff has a habit of calling every woman on site “sister”, for some weird reason, although it does mean I won’t have to correct him for getting my name wrong, because he never uses it. This kid apparently took that literally. Not that I’m arguing – guys will be a lot less likely to try funny business if they think I’m Duff’s blood relative. We don’t really look alike, but we don’t not look alike either; we have the exact same piercing blue eyes. There’s also about 20 years age difference between us.

There were tables set up in the loading bay, some scaffolding gear arranged into a rack for our tools at the end of the day, a microwave… and that was it. No fridge, no changeroom. The guy I had been emailing wasn’t even here today. Several people joked he was at home sulking because the Oilers lost. I just sat down and waited for someone to notice the random blonde chick.

Eventually the other foreman noticed me, walked up and introduced himself.

The scope is extensive; they are washing the entire inside of the building by hand. We’re scaffolding the inside of the building so they can reach. This is emergency work, not scheduled, thus the frantic scramble to hire anyone they can ASAP, because most of their main guys are tied up on regular jobs.

Scaffolding is serious business out here, hence the warning to call myself a scaffolder and not a carpenter. Scaffolding is its own trade out west, separate from the carpentry ticket. They prefer tube and clamp over systems, and this job was no different.

They don’t provide coveralls, they don’t have any spare harnesses, they don’t even have small-sized gloves – just medium and up. Sacre bleu!

There were two other guys starting today, Scottie and Mikey, both journeymen. After everyone got ready and headed out, the foreman took the three of us around, sticking his head into random places. He finally got to a random ladder, pointed up it, and told us to help whoever with whatever before leaving.

Good start.

Ye gods.

The deck height is 5 feet, for some reason. That means my 5’6 frame is 6 inches too tall, plus the two or three inches the hard hat gives me. Almost everyone else is taller than me and suffering more. We start out trying to walk crouched, but by the end of the day everyone just crawls on hands and knees.

Someone points to a spot that’s been framed and asks us to put down planks and plywood. We work on that until it’s done, then are told to keep going. Who do we report to? No one knows. Just find places with no planks or plywood, and put planks and plywood there.

Since it’s Sunday, it’s a ten hour day. We have two breaks, half an hour each. On break almost everyone goes to their car to eat, but I sit with the kid who recognized me earlier, James. When Scottie comes back at the end of lunch, he hands me some spare kneepads he brought with him. My poor knees are still all scuffed and sore from the crawling I have done previously.

Mikey and Scottie are clearly old friends, but they make an effort to include me in conversation and planning. They’re kind, and it eases the pain a bit. They drove up here together in Scottie’s car.

There was also a hilarious incident when, walking around a spot that was just framed out, Mikey turned around and beaned himself on a ledger. He went flying backwards and landed on his back, hard hat flying off his head like it was a Three Stooges skit! He was none the worse for wear, so we had a good laugh about it.

There is a couple of bullies on the site, but they like Duff, so they leave me alone. I feel guilty as I watch them bully the other kids, like James. But the minute I speak up for them, I forfeit my protection. So far from everything I know, and still hurting from Friday, I don’t have the strength.

I forgot how to get back to the hotel when I was on the way home! I was so discombobulated by how strange things had been, I had jumped in my car and left without thinking about it. I took the first right off the highway and ended up in some uptown condo development. There was no way out but back onto the highway, but I noted the grocery store, gas station, drug store and various fast food places. This was quiet and out of the way – much better than the place along the main drag, which was sure to be busy, especially between 4 and 6 when we finish work.

Once back at the hotel, I showered and then changed into pajamas. Oh shoot – Dinner! I hadn’t had a chance to buy food – I brought leftover nachos for lunch today. Eh, I can’t be bothered to go out again. I ordered sushi, a little bit extra for work, and settled into the room that would be home for 3 weeks.

I was hoping for Duff’s oddball and upbeat demeanor to distract me, but now it’s the opposite – I feel abandoned in this strange place, feel his absence like the throb of a bruise.

I texted the Vagabond a lot when stopped on the drive. My usual modus operandi would be to give him space and wait for him to message me. I realized that if he’s terrified of being abandoned and the anger was a self-destructive attempt to express himself, leaving him to his own devices reinforces that, while attempting to reach out in the only way I can from half a continent away shows him that I still care and have him on my mind.

We had a few lo-o-ong texts back and forth. He always prefers to talk in person, and for this I can’t say I disagree. But there isn’t going to be an in-person conversation for a while. I can’t follow Hanuman’s advice not to hold on to his angry words – they repeat in my head constantly.

I think my hotel room is haunted. The drawer for the nightstand opens by itself. The phone rang, but when I answered it no one was there.

Monday was another day spent on my hands and knees. We’re back on the second floor planking and putting down plywood. We’re technically supposed to be wearing dust masks, but they bought some cheap ones and a lot of guys don’t bother to do more than have it hanging around their neck. I have a large nose and the cheap material cuts across it.

Do I have a large nose? I’m the only one complaining about my nose hurting from the mask.

We’re also around the pipes, vents and cable trays, with little to no light. Neither Mikey nor Scottie have a head lamp, so my job becomes lamp. I do cut and nail a bit. Scottie has more get up and go than Mikey, so at points we take over while he does not much of anything. I made one particularly convoluted cut and I am quite proud of it! I took a picture to show Duff later. In theory he should be back the next day.

The rumor mill has been producing, as it usually does. There’s a kid here who is supposedly related to the boss. He informs me that the rumor has it I am Duff’s daughter. I grin and give him a few answers that could be interpreted as confirming or denying depending on which way you are already leaning. My biggest concern was that people would assume me and Duff were lovers, but being mistaken for his daughter is a compliment as far as I am concerned. Being his lover implies I am not qualified for the job and was only hired due to nepotism, or that I’ll sleep with anyone and everyone on the jobsite. Being his child could still be nepotism, but it could also imply I’ll grow up to be some sort of scaffolding wiz like him. In any case, it is at least original. Who is sleeping with who is such a high school vanilla kind of rumor.

This kid is such a space cadet. I’ve seen worse examples of “the boss’s kid”, though. He carries around 2 Bluetooth speakers, and apparently his taste in music so matches mine that I actually checked a few times to make sure they hadn’t somehow connected to my phone.

He also tells everyone, with enthusiasm, that he got Duff fired from another job for being mean. Which is a pretty stupid, silly and rude thing to brag about, regardless of if it’s true, especially to someone he believes to be Duff’s daughter. I mean, some days Duff has the demeanor of a kid who has shotgunned several Redbulls, but he’s quite capable of being calm and collected. He is also more than willing to sit down and have a heart-to-heart with someone struggling – he’s already asked me to look after two other apprentices when he isn’t around.

The borrowed knee-pads are a godsend. I barely feel two days spent on my hands and knees. I’ve started acquiring the usual variety of bruises on my shins, but some extra on my forearms as well.

After work, I went to the store and bought some work lunches for the day, and canned soup for night-time. Then I got back to my room. Know what I forgot? My can opener! Hanuman cheekily suggested I use my hammer to open it, but I ordered delivery pizza before hopping into the shower.

The pizza said it was delivered when I got out, but the pizza was nowhere to be seen! I called the pizza guy and he said back a room number that doesn’t exist in this hotel. He came back and knocked on the door of the room he mistakenly left it for. That room is strange – the door is always propped open with club music pumping out and the sound of people talking. They gave him the pizza back, apparently untouched. Who just accepts a pizza they didn’t order? Or were they so high they weren’t sure if they ordered it?

The cleaning lady is strange. She doesn’t clean my room every day, which is fine – I don’t expect or need her to. But regardless of the fact I haven’t touched any of the free soaps because I brought me own, she keeps restocking them. So I’ve just been stacking them into a neat little pile for my own amusement. Maybe she has an overstock and is trying to get rid of them.

The next morning, Duff’s truck is at the work parking lot. I walked up to the open window, and he yelled “stay back!”. He’s got bedbugs. So logically, he drove to work to tell the boss, instead of calling in. At least he was gracious enough to sleep in his truck instead of tracking them into the hotel!

Another day of planking and plywood.

Something fuckey is going on here. We ran out of nails. That’s more odd for me than them, since I am a carpenter masquerading as a scaffolder, who don’t usually use nails. Nonetheless, if the plan was to plank and plywood every deck, we should have been drowning in nails, but instead they sent a single bucket for 40-odd guys. When we tell the general foreman, he says we’ll be out for a couple of days, as they need to be sent from head office in British Columbia for some reason! We also only have 6 skillsaws, 8 batteries, and 2 chargers. Do that math, it’s fun!

Shortly before first break, I cut myself with the nail puller on my hammer. It’s easier to do than you think. We use our hammers for so many things – I specifically got this hammer because it has a longer handle, because scaffolders often use their hammer like a climbing axe. Or to reach and knock over a wedge just beyond my fingertips. We also use the nail puller to mark cuts by etching it into the surface, or to cut a piece of wood that’s just hanging on by a thread. Sometimes we even split planks with the end like a proper axe! So the end is sharp and often by my elbow, and with all the wriggling around tight corners I got myself with it. I asked at the lunchroom if I should put a bandaid on it, and everyone said no because then I’d have to file an incident report, so I didn’t.

Me and the Vagabond were texting like usual in the evening, when he mentions he got a new job and is leaving town again.

I called him in a rage – such hypocrisy! Accepting a job out of town without mentioning it to me, the very thing that upset him less than a week ago! He talked me down – the job is only two weeks on, two weeks off, which is small potatoes. And he might possibly just do the first two weeks while I am out of town. Grumble grumble. Admittedly, part of my anger was self interest. I had been somewhat hoping I’d get laid off after a week, but if that did happen he’d be gone as soon as got back, so I was no longer hoping for that.

I’m awoken at 1 AM by an absolute rager of a thunderstorm. I watch it from my window for half an hour before going back to bed.

The next day, Duff asks for a ride to work. He’s been deloused and the only bedbugs left are confined to his truck. The exterminator told him not to use it for 10 days, but his bike gear had to be cleaned as well. He complains about how noisy my car is the entire ride to work.

The rain flooded work. One of the sewers back up into the loading bay we call home. Such a lovely smell.

Scottie and Mikey allow me to take the lead. At one point after lunch, they both disappeared without a word. Well, whatever! I continue cutting and hammering by myself – no one told me to stop. I want to be good at this. The Vagabond needs a new deck and I really, really want to help him with it! I want to show him how much I have improved.

I’ve reached the end of the kneepads helping my poor knees and I’m starting to feel it again. Poor Mikey has been crawling on his knuckles and they’re all cut up.

Eventually I run out of places to plywood and wander down to the main floor. These gloves are far, far too big for me. I can’t use my hammer properly with them on, as the hammer slips in my grasp. I’ve just been taking my right glove off to use my hammer. Mikey suggested I try to keep my wrist rigid when I swing, and I noticed that I can feel an underdeveloped muscle in my upper arm engage when I do. So I grab a pile of cleats and my secret stash of nails and find a place to practice. They use plywood cleats here instead of 2×6, which is harder to nail. One, because the two layers of plywood slip and slide each time you swing, but also because it means you have to hammer them twice, to break through the virgin wood of the second layer. It’s a harder workout.

After work, I show Duff my secret shopping centre. He approves. I was intending to go to Popeyes for dinner, but he points to a place across the way – Prairie Donair.

Donair? DONAIR?! Do my eyes deceive me? No, it’s real!

Donairs are interesting. Ostensibly, they are from Nova Scotia, and indeed they were invented in Halifax. However, they were invented by a Greek, and they speak more to the Greek spice palette and cuisine than either the French Canadian or Scottish roots of Nova Scotia. Nonetheless, they are unique and people love them.

Duff smiled while I tore around the store like a kid in a candy shop, clapping my hands and excitedly commenting on everything. Apparently they are so popular in Winnipeg there is more of them than there are Timmies. I had half a hope they might have rappie pie, but they do not. I ended up ordering plain gyros – I actually don’t really like Donairs.

Next I went to the liquor store. I was reminded that only Ontario is so puritanical with liquor – I could have grabbed whisky from the grocery store, but I’m not used to it. I also probably shouldn’t have brought Duff to the liquor store, but we all make mistakes. We had fun commenting on the odd things on the shelf again.

I have gone back to drinking myself to sleep. I’m terribly torn by my choices. Did I throw away love to chase the dollar? But the dollar is certain, and love is not. At the same time, I think taking this job only makes sense. What is a month’s separation, if in that month I can earn enough money to pay all my bills for the next six, and we need not be separated again? Every day I daydream that he’ll be waiting for me at the hotel when I get back. The moment I throw my arms around his neck and he murmurs in my ear “I missed you, too”. The roar of every motorcycle is an icy stab at my heart.

The next day Duff asks for a ride again. He also comments that he checked out the undercarriage of my car after I went inside, which made me laugh because that’s exactly the sort of thing my dad would do. He says there’s something off with the suspension, and my tires are cupping, which I dismiss. The shop said my tires were good enough to last two years when I had them put on, and no one commented when I got the tire patched a few weeks ago. I think it’s just these dreadful Saskatchewan roads. They are not flat! Somehow.

Duff grabs me from the breakroom/loading bay before anyone else can be bothered to put their gear on. We’re making a laydown closer to the other end of the building, the one they are building towards. Instead of walking gear down a crowded hallway, they can just grab it from this doorway. We’re joined by Rob, an older guy I have enjoyed chatting with.

Rob likes the jokes and rumors about me being Duff’s daughter and keeps elaborating on them. He’s decided to designate himself my step-father, and joked with Duff that they have to keep me away from bad boys. Duff informs him that my current boyfriend is also a scaffolder, and Rob pretends to be heartbroken.

I feel more free here. Besides Duff, no one knows that I wasn’t born and raised in Thunder Bay, or that I changed my name. I can mention the Vagabond by name and no one knows who he is, so no one judges me. I can bitch about him in the lunchroom like the rest of the guys complaining about their old ladies. I also have a newfound appreciation that I shared it with Duff – it means so much more to have someone who knows the Vagabond, who understands what he’s like, to talk to. Me and Duff share a knowing smile at Rob’s fake lamentations; that’s only the tip of the iceberg!

I’m not the farthest traveler, but next to it. There’s a couple of guys here from Sarnia. All the teenagers and twenty-something’s think I’m so cool and brave for travelling this far for work – most of them are locals. The older guys appreciate my hard-working nature; one of the supervisors for the cleaners stopped me and told me he’s impressed by how much I kick ass!

Of course, the flipside is the gender divide, like usual. There is one other woman – she’s the wife of one of the other scaffolders. They keep to themselves; heading out together for lunch, taking jobs that the two of them can do on their own. It’s a good gig if you can swing it – double your money, LOA, etc. She has not attempted to speak to me once and I get the feeling she isn’t really interested in the trades at all, she’s just a glorified labourer helping her man.

Which leaves me alone with the other guys, most of whom are redneck hillbillies in the worst way. I’m used to thoughtlessly mysogynistic talk and jokes. I’m also pretty good at being the ladette, just one of the boys. These guys take it even farther, although no one has been insulting to my face. It’s wearing me down. I hate hiding in anyone’s shadow, but sometimes I just hang around Duff so I don’t have to deal with it. He’s not like them, but he has limited power to make them stop.

After work, the Vagabond calls me again. He says a short call, but we don’t do short calls, and he’s drunk and high. His pain is palpable, and so is mine, I hope. I mentioned that I felt the job had been a gift of fate, and he takes it the negative way – to separate us. I see the other side – we have never talked so much. This constant calling, texting and drinking is his attempt to deal with emotions so thick you could cut them with a knife, which, while never is a strong word, probably wouldn’t have come to the surface if it wasn’t for this separation. This is a gift, to me.

“What are we going to do, girl? In a few years I’ll be in a wheelchair. What will you do then?”

I smile – that line is right out of Legion; Amfortas and his girlfriend. “I’ll push your wheelchair.” I reply, as she did.

That’s not what he means and we both know it. My mind flashes to the letters on his kitchen table, telling him how his benefits will change when he turns 65 later this year. The oft-repeated statement that I would be a widow sooner rather than later, as if he thinks I am unaware of it.

And yet, Amfortas’ girl died before him, and his good health in his elder years became a curse that kept him from joining her, instead of a gift of many years of love.

What’s better, a lonely heart, or a broken one?

There’s no real reason to be lonely.
Be yourself,
Give your free will a chance,
You’ve got to want to succeed!

I’d take five years of happiness with him and twenty years of pain, over a lifetime spent wondering what might have happened on the road not travelled. I decided that in August and it’s still true.

The next day during break, I looked up couple counsellors in Thunder Bay. Couples counselling is often demonized in media. Part of that is because people tend to go only after the relationship is already dead, in a Hail Mary attempt to revive it. The spiteful, shrewish wife, humiliating her soon-to-be-ex husband in front of a therapist who inevitable takes her side. You should go early on, as soon as the cracks show themselves. I found one for 125 an hour, but dismissed the idea. Would he even go?

The weather is cold and wet. Is this usual June weather in Saskatchewan? I wear a jacket and a long-sleeved shirt most days because it is so chilly, and I have the heat turned on in my hotel room. There’s lot of thunderstorms, flash in the pan kind of storms.

The wind is also wicked. I stand behind the silos for shelter, and it vibrates the empty silos like guitar strings. Is it tornado season here? I make a mental list of places to take shelter if there is a tornado. At one point, the wind is so bad it threatens to knock me over every time I venture from the building. A large chunk of equipment falls off one of the grain belts in front of me, and they rope it off.

There is no part of me that isn’t bruised – shins, thighs, forearms, back. The cut from my hammer heals slowly. I developed another cut on a knuckle that is rubbed raw by the inside of the gloves. The bridge of my nose is so raw from the cheap masks that I resort to putting a bandage across it during work.

Saturday and Sunday are slow and quiet at work. I tend to the laydown, restocking gear and walking out to the yard for other things.

Saturday I do laundry. The hotel’s laundry is just a washer and dryer shoved in a space the size of a closet. The washer is coin operated, 2 dollars for a load. The dryer is just your standard residential dryer, and they rely on the honour system, for you to go to the front desk and pay 2 dollars for the dry. Personally, 4 dollars for a load of laundry is a steal compared to 12 dollars in Thunder Bay, but I am nervous of people touching my unattended laundry, since the laundry room is unlocked.

Sunday was a quiet day – obviously, as it follows Saturday, a fair number of people had been drunk the night before, and were either hung over or hadn’t gone in at all. The 19 year olds in particular had a story (relayed later) about going to a bar that was supposed to be closed for an investigation into a stabbing, or something, and then got confuse and drove into a construction zone and broke the car. They finally wandered home around 3AM, slept in ’til 6:30, and then tried to go in anyway despite the fact they were most likely still drunk.

Monday broke me. The job had become such a gong show that the branch manager drove down to whip us into shape. Anyone caught without a mask on properly will be warned once – the second time, they’ll be walked off site. The client agreed to buy several more saws and batteries and chargers so we could slam out the second floor, which they want done ASAP, so we were all reassigned there. Of course, telling 40 people to go share 6 saws and half a lift of plywood still won’t get the job done any faster, it just results in a sudden increase of people with nothing to do!

Someone fell and/or hit his head off a ledger and gave himself what he suspects is a concussion. He refused to report it or even go to the hospital after work and claim it wasn’t work related. I pointed out he’s going to give himself punch-drunk syndrome if he keeps this up.

Everyone was also in a sour mood because of Father’s Day.

The Vagabond chastised me for not calling or sending a letter to my father on Father’s day. The guy who says he isn’t going to visit his family in Italy anymore is trying to give me guidance on family matters! Don’t tell me what to do with my family, and I won’t tell you what to do with yours! It also makes me laugh bitterly. I’m not sure my parents ever accepted any of my partners – sometimes justified, sometimes not – but they definitely wouldn’t accept him, so the point is moot. There is nothing to be gained by trying to rebuild bridges.

So I went back to the hotel and got blind drunk.

He hadn’t left for the job yet, they were leaving Tuesday morning. He asked how my day was and I debated just telling him the details of work and leaving it there. But I knew, somewhere inside me, I should confide in him – I should want to confide in him. I was keeping all this anger inside and it was tearing me apart. I let it out, bit by bit, and he wanted me to keep talking, so I let it all out. Finally he video-called me and we stayed up late into the night, hashing things out.

A conversation we should have had a long time ago, really. He says he doesn’t want to be my boyfriend, he wants to be my partner. Semantics, really. And ironically, I was referring to him as my partner for a while. His Italian name sounds like a woman’s name in English and people kept thinking we were lesbians, so I swapped to boyfriend just to clarify that he is indeed a man. But you can read between the lines – not just a romantic attachment, but a partnership. The two of you against the world.

He was sort of upset I had planned to go to New Zealand for six months, but I pointed out that he’s always planning to go to South America, and he could come to New Zealand with me. He replied that I could also come to South America with him. Well, why not both?

“I’m not sure you even know what a partnership is”! I blurted out. Partnership is planning your life together, not this constant arguing. I want this, you want that, how do we make it work, how do we meet halfway?

He froze, and half-smiled. It’s rare to leave him speechless.

“Maybe I don’t. Maybe you’ll teach me.” He finally said.

Why not both… a few months in New Zealand, a few months in South America. Two restless travelers, travelling together.

His job is a camp job, meaning you live in a barracks the client builds to house its workers. He’s decided it’s a good opportunity to dry himself out, an implicit admission that his indulgences were partly to blame for the outburst the other weekend.

He surprised me at the end of the call by suggesting we go to couples counselling, although for different reasons than I had. He wanted to hear a professional say yay or nay for us being a functional relationship. I agreed readily and happily. I’m tired of this dance – even if they say no, it will be something decisive. But I do truly believe any relationship can work if both parties really want it to. He laments that he thinks about me every day, dodging the fact that he could have jumped on his bike and come out to see me, instead of accepting another job.

“Is a few thousand dollars really worth this?” He texts me, after we say goodnight and I’ve drifted off, so I get it in the morning.

Ah, to be able to dismiss a few thousand dollars as chump change!

Is it worth… “this”? Missing him?

I wonder that every day.