Five years. That’s how long he’d been at that awful job. The instructions had always been there, right above his desk. He knew what to do, but somehow breaking the window, discarding his briefcase, using that blazer he’d gotten at an after Christmas sale to cover the shards of glass in the window frame and fleeing to a farmhouse in the South of France seemed, I dunno, ungrateful? Ungrateful to the parents who’d helped him finish school, the co-workers who had been so supportive after the incident, and his fiancé, who was expecting him home for dinner.

Nonetheless, the time had come.

This entry is part of my journal, published January 11, 2011, in New York.