Trigger Warning: Suicide

How did it come to this? I was sitting on an old truck tire and leaning back against my trailer. Without any AC, the inside was brutal at this time of the afternoon. Here under the awning it was just sweltering hot. At least my beer was cold. Well, cool. Sort of. I stared out across the dirt road and wondered again what happened.

I had everything. Or so I thought. I had money. I wasn’t rich, but I had more than I needed and a good income. I had a beautiful and sexy wife. She loved me and I was crazy about her. It had been a rough road to get there, but I had made it. And then it was all gone. Almost overnight. It was like the universe had watched me struggle up the hill of life and waited until I reached the top to flick me over the edge like a teenage boy flicking a booger.

I took another sip of my beer. Ha, a year ago I was drinking local craft brew. Now it’s Miller in a can. I went from a home and family to being alone in a van down by the river. Like that guy in the Saturday Night Live skits. Ok, it wasn’t actually that bad. I mean it wasn’t a van, it was an RV trailer. The AC wasn’t working, did I mention that? And neither was the indoor toilet. But there was a bed that folded down over the sofa, a little kitchen which worked, and a table.

And it wasn’t by the river either. It was, however, illegally parked on public lands outside of town. I have already been cited twice to move it, but my truck finally broke down two months ago. I had someone look at it and it is going to be $3,000 to get it running. Which I don’t have. I was working part time at minimum wage. I rode a bicycle ten miles to a warehouse that I was stocking for. The same work I did years ago in high school. Talk about coming full circle. Given the ride I made and the fact I didn’t have a working shower and add working in a warehouse environment, I was not the most pleasant person to be around. Two weeks ago they did a round of layoffs and they cut me.

Looking at the bright side, I am probably in the best shape of my life now. Going from riding a desk to riding a bicycle and hours of manual labor will do that. No more big meals either. Now it is peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and ramen noodles and canned tuna fish for dinner. And canned tuna makes me nauseous.

So here I was with my last $58, living in a broken trailer that the park service is threatening to seize, no working vehicle, no cell phone, no credit cards, and my last couple of beers. Yeah, I wasn’t living in a van down by the river, but I might as well be.

The ranger is supposed to be here tomorrow to check on me. And I will still be here, I don’t have anywhere else to go and no way to get there if I did. So he will make the call to have my trailer impounded. Then I will envy the guy in the van by the river. I guess this is my last night. My life went off a cliff a year ago, and tomorrow I will finally crash into the rocks at the bottom.

I checked the cooler. Five more beers. So what shall I do with the last night of my life? The sun is going down and it will start getting cooler. Maybe tonight will be a good time to review my life. Really look at how it went wrong. Now that there is nothing I can do about it. I opened a new beer and watched the sun setting and thought back to before everything went to shit.

[The Fall]

My name is Lucas Anderson. Some of my friends call me Luke. I am a pretty average guy. I am 5 foot 10 with sandy brown hair and a little overweight. Not obese or anything. But the sort of typical American male that eats a little too much and gets too little exercise kind of overweight. I am a project manager for a big pharmaceutical company. Not my dream job. Not even my career area I went to college for. I hold a degree in economics. It is a job I kind of fell into, and admittedly I am good at it. I just hate it.

I am married to Bethany (don’t call me Beth!). She is NOT an average woman. She is a very curvy 5 foot 5 with large natural D cup breasts which is balanced by her large rounded ass. She is almost always in heels, even when wearing jeans. Although she is most often in skirts and low cut tops. She is a wet dream walking. When we are in public, hand in hand, people will talk to her and not even realize I am there. They are not even trying to be rude, people just can’t take their eyes off of her. Unlike myself, Bethany loves her job. She is a stay at home wife. She cooks and cleans, she hosts parties, and takes care of me. She says it is her dream job. I know how lucky I am to have such an amazing woman in my life.

My favorite hobby is driving. A twisty road and a powerful engine relaxes me. I currently own a 2010 Dodge Challenger R/T. I bought it used and it has its share of dings and scrapes, it has a lot of miles, and it burns a little oil. But it has a powerful v8 that you can feel in your butt when you are driving and I like it. Bethany of course hates it, which is why we always take her 2016 BMW X5 when we are together. I do appreciate the gas mileage of the 4 cylinder hybrid engine, and it is comfortable, it just doesn’t give me the driving experience that I like. And maintenance is five times that of my Dodge.

Bethany’s favorite hobby is clubbing. She goes out once a week, sometimes twice. She loves dressing up. Usually in a tight slinky dress, low cut on the top to put her incredible breasts on display. Sometimes she pairs that with what I call her stripper heels. The ones with a two inch platform and six inch heel. Yes, if you did the math, that puts her two inches taller than me. I have to admit she is like a piece of art. A sexy piece of art. Well, to be honest, it is more the slutty side of sexy. But she loves it. She loves to dance and she loves the attention.

I, on the other hand, hate it. I hate the crowds, the pounding music, and I hate the way everyone stares at my wife. To her it is just fun, but to me ... well I admit it makes me jealous. But I love her, so I try not to be the stick in the mud, as she sometimes refers to me. I found those evenings draining. And not just from the constant stimulation, but also from keeping myself from starting a fight with every guy that “brushes” past her. She tells me it is not a big deal and she doesn’t mind. She goes with a group of friends that all hang together and keep each other safe and the wolves at bay. Mostly. So she doesn’t really need me looming over her and putting a blanket on the party. Sometimes I join them, but often now I just skip it. She understands that it is not my thing. The stress of those outings on me, plus the stress from my job is not a good combination. I have been enough times to know that she and her friends can take care of themselves.

While I didn’t like her hobby, she always made it up to me. She would dress up for me at home and sex was always on the menu. After a long frustrating day I might come home to find Bethany finishing dinner in nothing but a pair of heels. She would beg to give me a blow job and then draw that out for a half an hour while I laid back in the living room chair. There is no better stress relief than that. And it wasn’t just one way. I would spend hours just focusing on pleasuring her. I loved to do it. Sometimes after she got home from the club at 2am and she was hot and sweaty and horny.

So, back to my job. Did I mention that I hate it? Well I do. A project manager is the middle man of IT projects. You don’t own any of the resources, you don’t produce any of the products, and you don’t get any of the credit. Your whole role is keeping multiple groups of people coordinated and keeping details from getting lost. Which would be fine if everyone shared the common goal and cared about the success of the project. But some groups hate each other and refuse to work with them. And the ones that get along don’t share your project’s priorities. And within the groups, some people don’t care and some are lazy and some are just stupid. I have to work with them all and somehow manage to make it all work on time.

So why do it? Well in my case, it turns out I am good at it. I am really good with details and keeping track of lots of them. And balancing that with the differences between all the groups and all the individuals to find a path through to success. And they pay me well to do that. Even then I would have quit long ago if it were just me. The money allows me to take care of Bethany. I would put up with anything that helps me make her happy. I heard someone comment once that I loved nothing more than to make Bethany happy. And that is what Bethany loved most as well. I suppose there was some truth in that, but I was ok with it.

So while I have a reason to put up with all the shit and assholes and unreasonable expectations, I still need to keep my sanity somehow. Bethany makes it all worthwhile of course. And getting out on the road and driving also helps let go of my frustrations. Those are some of the things that keep me going from week to week.

That brings me to my other hobby that keeps me going. It is my dabbling in the stock market. I get to use my economics and financial schooling to study companies and markets and patterns. For a long time it was mostly research and limited day trading. But over time it has become more serious and more focused. I have narrowed it down to specific segments of the healthcare market. Pharmaceuticals versus hospitals and medical organizations versus populations. There were patterns and interactions there that allowed me to make limited predictions on changes in stock prices in the market. Both upward and downward. Not something that you could use every day, but once in a while when certain events took place and only for a limited window of time. Exactly that set of events looked to be coming together.

It had not been an easy road to get here. My dad past suddenly when I was 15. Mom did not take it well. We didn’t lose our house or anything. There was some life insurance and there were payments from Social Security as well. I began taking care of mom and the house. Initially it was just cooking and cleaning. Later, when her drinking became worse, I took on more responsibilities.

After graduation I didn’t really have a plan for my life. I got a job and started at a local community college. Just working through general ed classes while living at home and continuing to care for mom. A community college doesn’t have what people think of as a “college experience”, but they did have some groups and clubs and a theater program. I didn’t get involved with any of that. I was too busy and it was just a stepping stone to better things.

It was the last few weeks of my second school year that the next big blow came. I had classes and then went straight to my warehouse job to put in another 8 hour shift. It was midnight when I got home and found mom in the living room. Apparently sometime during the day she had thrown up and choked on her own vomit. Her body was cold and stiff, so it had happened many hours ago while I was away instead of being here to take care of her.

No one blamed me. But I knew that I had let her down. I should have taken care of her better, been there for her. But I didn’t, and I wasn’t. I had stayed strong after my dad passed, because mom needed me to. But now that I had failed at that, I didn’t have a reason.

Somehow I passed my remaining classes without me attending class or taking the finals. They mailed me my certificate for my General Associate of Science degree. Whatever that was good for. The next year was a blur to me. I’m not really sure what I did, other than gaining some weight. And I’d rather not think about the things I do remember. What matters is that a year later I got my life back together. I had some inheritance money and sold the house. Most of the house proceeds went to the bank of course. I was accepted into the economics program at the university four hours away, so I packed up and restarted my life.

I was doing school full time, living off campus, and working part time to make my money stretch. I didn’t have the typical college experience or friends. Since I had transferred in with my associates degree, I was already an upperclassman. While most of the students were just starting to live their life, I had already lived one and was starting a new one. Add the fact that I had a one bedroom apartment off campus and worked 32 hours a week on top of a heavy school load, I didn’t have a lot of time to just hang out with fellow students. Not that I was a recluse or anything.

In my second year my life changed again. I was working with a group of students on a shared project for our game theory class. Game theory was about economics, not video games. We finished up our project early and the rest of the students decided to head over to a party that was happening. I wasn’t scheduled for work and I didn’t have anything early the next morning so I decided I would accept their invitation to join them.

I had some drinks, was feeling mellow, and circulated and talked with students I had little in common with. That was when the strike came. Like a raptor striking a rabbit in the field it came out of nowhere and was just as unexpected. Suddenly I found myself face to face with the sexiest woman I had ever met. It was Bethany. She asked me to dance with her. I probably looked ridiculous dancing there in the middle of someone’s living room, but I didn’t care.

She was a woman among girls. She wore a short tight mini skirt that accentuated her long legs and a low-cut top that showcased her ample bust. Her dark hair was styled and her make up was sexy with glitter around her eyes. As if that didn’t make her stand out enough, her 5’ 7” height on top of her high heels put her well above the other girls and some of the guys.

I felt like I was in the presence of a goddess. She touched me while we danced and it sent shocks through me. At one point my brain was clear enough to wonder if I was getting pranked, but when she put her hand on my shoulder I found that I didn’t care if I was or not. After a few songs she dragged me over to a couch to sit. She was asking me questions. About myself, my family (none), my area of study and plans for the future. I stared into her eyes and told her anything she wanted to know. I would have given her my social security number or mother’s maiden name if she asked, without a second thought.

A group of girls showed up to pull her away. But first, she pulled out her phone and took a selfie of us together. Then she asked for my phone number and she punched it in. “I’d love to chat more later, Lucas.” she said and kissed me on the cheek. I watched as Bethany was pulled away. I am not ashamed to say that I stared at her ass the whole time. The way it moved in that skirt when she walked was truly something. I noticed several other guys were doing the same. We looked at each other for a moment after she left.