AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Normally when I get sushi, it’s from this hole-in-the-wall place connected to a strip mall. Each roll—with like ten pieces or more—costs an average of five bucks. Authentic Japanese sushi isn’t even available on the laminated menu. Which, nine times out of ten, is sticky.
This place…is not that place.
Soft, faintly oriental music flits through the air. Dim, romantic lighting floats above each table, gold-spun fixtures accenting gold-flecked décor. We’re settled into a circle booth, in a far corner, distant enough I can’t hear anyone else murmuring on the other side of the room.
My gaze catches on a single meal item costing forty-seven dollars, and I look away in lightheaded horror.
Come on, Marcella. You’ll own a coordinated set of Tupperware someday soon… You can handle this.
I dare another peek.
I see a vegetable dinner with a whopping three assorted veggies that costs eighteen bucks.
Internally, I sob.
Whatever I order here is going to ruin me for my cheap sushi restaurant forever.
After the past few months, you’d think I’d be used to the extravagance of finding myself at nice restaurants or nice venues or in five-star hotel rooms, but something about the customer service façade places distance between whatever’s going on and me.
It’s professional dissociation.
Present enough to work. Absent enough to survive.
Basically, I remember nothing but a loose desire to murder everyone and everything within a five-mile radius.
Across from me, F-man’s leg bounces under the table while his fingers drum against his leather menu. He’s back to usual—smiling stupidly and moving excessively—but do I mind it less?
He doesn’t like sushi.
That must reassure my hatred.
Sadly, it appears I have a soul, and after his heroic acts this day, it is very difficult to continue despising him for shallow things. Adding frustration to frustration…that leaves precious little to hate him for.
While I’m pretending to be the kind of adult who deserves nice Tupperware, I can admit it.
He’s not a whiny manchild. If I weren’t around to handle his meals, he’d be buying and using his own three frying pans to reheat his food. He knows how to dress himself; I just eliminate the time and effort of coordinating his own outfits to match occasion and weather. My job is to free up his time. My job is to do the things he would otherwise do. He is neither unwilling nor incapable.
The decisions he makes that alter the schedules I’ve made are thought-out, effective, and meaningful. I know that because his businesses thrive. What he does works, and that’s all that matters. So what if his actions give me more work and drag me around? That is literally my job description.
I’m honestly just pissy about having an amazing, well-paying, high-demand job.
I am a horrible, horrible person.
F-man runs his fingers through his auburn waves, rustling them so they catch new shades in the ambient lighting.
The only negative emotion I have left for him is envy.
I envy him.
I envy his easy smiles and his stable life.
There are so many struggles that can’t touch him. So many struggles that built integral fears into the foundation of my character, forcing me to erect guards and walls. I don’t believe that anyone exists without facing some kind of suffering, but there is a luxury in never waking up in the middle of the night to hear your parents worrying over how they’ll feed their kids tomorrow. There is a luxury in never once believing you were a burden on the people you love just because you had to eat.
Loss comes for all of us, eventually, so while I do sympathize with his pain of losing his father so young, I can’t pity him.
Outside the merciless flow of the universe itself, he is untouchable.
And I envy that kind of safety.
