He comes home from the business trip and puts his brief case down in the dining room, leaning it against the buffet so that it will be easy to pick it up in the morning and take to work. He takes his shoes off before coming into the house, but will come back and pick them up later – after taking the dog out – and bring them upstairs and remove the insoles and put shoe trees in them so that the leather stays fresh. He will carry his roller bag upstairs and lay it on the carpet in the bedroom and unzip it. He will remove his dirty clothes and put them in the hamper. And remove his dopp kit and liquids, gels and aerosols in their quart zip lock bag from the roller bag and dump the liquids, gels and aerosols into the dopp kit and put it in the bottom drawer by the bathroom sink. And he will eat something, because even though it is late it has been five hours since his last meal and he is hungry. Something sensible. And he will talk with his wife about the trip. About the restaurant they went to and what they ate, and the honky tonks on Broadway, and going for a run in the humid morning. And most of all the spicy fried chicken they had, which he sent her a picture of in real-time, before he ate it. And they will talk about what she did, and pet the dog. And then they will go to bed because it is late and he has to be downtown tomorrow for a 9 am meeting.

And it will go on. And in some ways it all sounds quite lovely, and in some ways very boring and mundane. But it is what it is for now. At least until next spring, when they will go to Greece with her parents, and he will decide whether to switch jobs, and maybe they’ll move to a Ojai, or Petaluma, or Sunland. What you think about it, and whether you feel suffocated or optimistic about tomorrow, next week, next month, next year depends on whether you enjoy every single day. And whether you like the people you work with, and whether you have interactions that leave you smiling and positive, or whether life just wears you down until you’re raw and mean.