Morning all. Somehow it is Thursday. I feel like somehow I missed a few days in there. Don’t get me wrong I am happy we are heading towards the weekend, but somehow I woke up thinking today was Tuesday. Strange. Regardless, I have my post on writing ready for later today and I am ready to get started on today with the morning prompt. Everyone else ready? Good, thel lets go. See you in fifteen.
There are so many ways I wanted to take this that it took me a little longer to get started than usual. The sentence just sparked a lot of possibilities for me. I may have to reuse this sentence sometime. Anyway, here is what I ended up with.
Thursday, November 5th: There was a strange comfort in knowing he could no longer turn aside from his course.
There was a strange comfort in knowing he could no longer turn aside from his course. There was no turning back. All the months of plotting and planning, scheming and arranging. All of it was done. He sat through his last board meeting. He attended his last cocktail party, which were under the surface more business meetings with alcohol and food, often mediocre food, attempting to conceal the fact.
His property was sold. The house was snapped up quickly by those eager for the cache of his zip code. He wished them better joy then he found there. After the house came the cars. A few of them were a wrench to part with as the collection took him over twenty years to assemble.
Then he thought about why he bought them. How each one represented a personal reward for doing something he didn’t want to do. They were the prize he allowed himself when he was forced to concede to another’s demands against his will for the good of the company, to compromise what he thought they should be doing against what they were doing, when he was out voted on the board.
While he liked cars and once, in the dim dark past indulged himself in restoring vintage automobiles with meticulous care, those vehicles were sold long ago. They helped to finance the company in the early years, his own personal equity. If any of those remained in his keeping he might not have been able to part with them now. But they were gone and in the end what the remaining cars represented was not something he wanted to hold on to.
He knew what the others thought. He smiled to himself. In the past few months, when the sales of his personal items became more commonly known, questions of his health had arisen. He was willing to bet he had been asked more about how he was feeling in the last six months than in his entire life time combined.
Everyone expected word of a terminal illness to leak at any moment. When it didn’t concerns for his mental state were brought up. To calm the fears, and because he needed calm waters in which to leave them, he went to a session with the psychiatrist they recommended. It had been a surprisingly pleasant conversation where he, in the confidence of the medical office confessed his plans. The doctor listend and pronounced him sane.
He felt a little guilty for not explaining why he was taking such measures. But his wiliness to leave calm waters behind did not extend that deeply into his private affairs. And now it was done. The last item sold, the few things he was keeping stowed away on board the ship he was even now piloting out of the harbor.
The ship was purchased not as a reward for doing something he didn’t want to do but as a promise to himself. He needed time away from the business so that it didn’t swallow him whole. So he bought the ship, he could never call it just a boat, and occasionally slipped off for afternoons alone. His afternoons had been increasing to weekends and the occasional holiday and now that he was untethered he was going to sail away for a while.
Off into the sunset as romance novelists tended to say. He had no illusions about staying off into the sunset. He would be just a temporary visitor. He just needed time. Time to think. Time to simply be. While he always claimed to want it, after the events of last year, time began to take on a different meaning.
Ten til Midnight 