Something important had inexplicably vanished. He stared at the walls of his former office, absolutely puzzled and confoundedly bemused. Few things in Alastair's life had leveled such a shock. In fact, as he continued staring off absently into the space before him, Alastair could only count one other such instance -- the unexpected death of his father. The shock of that though was not nearly as immediate. Alastair was young and unfamiliar with him in many respects. The effects of that death were felt over a period of time which could be represented as an oddly continuous distribution of hurt and missed time and lost experience. The whole lot of it was strange, but Alastair was able to hold his own.
Alastair walked down the hall. He was a bit confused, a bit concerned, and a bit over the edge. For the moment, the frigthening, harrowing aspects which Alastair feared most over the past several weeks had irremediably gripped his entire sense of being. Alastair saw time move past him in slow-motion. The slower it moved, the heavier he felt -- until Alastair had expanded into a super-massive, aging gas ball, ready to implode.
Alastair felt betrayed, and his reaction to the betrayal was anything but healthy. As most betrayals begin, Alastair's began with the gift of himself to another and ended with the irresponsible and irrevocable misappropriation of blood and body, years of toil and selfless understanding.
This was all known. This was all common. People lose their jobs all the time. Unfortunately, not many seem to steep themselves in horribly inexplicable messes in the process.
"Pressure," Alastair remembered saying, "can be a good thing. It can spur on the imagination and inimitably disrupt the status quo at its cowardly foundations." Alastair felt profoundly naive and ashamed for having been so drunk with youth and inexperience. "Turns out," Alastair would now tell himself, "that a man's self worth ought to remain a constant in this universe. Evidently, I was once a young dirigible."
And with all this, Alastair's eyes finally opened to the hurt around him, and he grew from that in ways which would be shown to astound even the least of his friends and lovers -- this horribly embarassing scandal would only open the door to greater opportunity. He had no way of knowing at the time that judgment really is a two-way street, in that the hurt perpetrated by ill-will, ingraciousness, and misunderstanding can often become a distinctly reversible process.
And thus began Alastair's big day.
...Some More
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