Leela hated her job. She hated being a second class worker to the executives who couldn't take a piss without the help of an assistant, and she hated being told what to do, by anyone. It didn't help her to know that everyone her age hated their job or the paycheck attached, it didn't help her to think she was average and had no right to complain. But apparently it should have comforted her that she at the very least could afford to live and even go on vacation when she wanted.
Her boyfriend was very good to her he loved her so much that sometimes she thought he might be crazy. What in the world did he see in her, with all her problems and all her flaws, and all her neuroticisms, didn't he know what loving her entailed? If he did he would surely leave.
But he did make it easier, he did make everything bearable, and falling asleep even under his otherwise suffocating exhales of yeasty steamy breath, she felt secure and the sweat that used to represent a clautrophobian closeness of obession gone wrong, reminded her instead that he was her protector from all that could destroy her spirit. She didn't really believe that, she knew that when worse came to worse she would always have herself to face in the mirror and only herself.
As a matter of fact as she looked in the mirror this morning, she felt something alltogether wretched rise in her stomach a feeling of disgust and bloated imagery floated to the surface. She recognized this sensation from all the other times it happened before, her ankles swelled before her eyes and her round ass rose with the addition of last night's fried shrimp which she knew she should've thrown-up the minute she let them slide down her esophagus. She always tried to stifle those feelings, especially when she was with Paul.
He always made her feel like she was the most beautiful woman in the world in spite of her bulgy knees and rounded jawlines that always came at the end of the twenty-eight day cycle that had ruled her life since she was fourteen. I mean some girls got their periods, some girls menstruated but for Leela it was a never ending rollercoater ride of cramps and emotional uncertainty that was sure to drive any one around her to question even their own sanity. It was evil the way her mind would take a perfectly kind and normal act of love and turn it into a paranoid plot for her mental destruction. She was suspicious of everyone and everything, in a subtle way so that she seemed to be trusting, seemed to have faith, but in the back of her mind she ALWAYS had a back-up plan of some sort. There was always a way out.
Well except with Paul, with Paul there never was a way out, maybe cause she didn't want one or maybe because for the first time in her whole life she trusted someone to stay around, and she trusted someone to follow through. God knows why, it wasn't like he had proven himself any more worthy than the rest, but there was something about him, something that instantly told her that he was good.
Of course there was always her mother's voice whispering in the back of her head, it CAN"T last forever and when it ends it will hurt you, it will hurt you like you have never been hurt before. Her voice was always there causing Leela to doubt her otherwise confident instincts,so she knew that what she had with Paul was all an illusion in her logical mind or at least in the side of her heart that had been cold for so long the edges had freezer burn. Leela trusted Paul in spite of all that, in fact for the first time maybe ever she could honestly say she loved someone, "with no ifs, ands or buts attached" as her eloquent father would say.
Love, was a confusing thing to Leela, she never quite got the concept of it. To give so much of yourself that it hard to tell where one person starts and the other begins, to give up soul responsibility of your life and allow another access to your inner most ideas, one might as well have walked down Madison Avenue in nothing but last year's tacky stiletto heels. It was an absurd notion, what was the point of having inner thoughts at all if you just let them out whenever your emotions got the best of you? It wasn't sensible, and it most certainly wasn't safe.
Was it possible that this illusion of security, that this conceptualized wall of protection might be the very thing that did her in? It certainly was. In fact this fear grew to consume her a little more each day. A lot like her double chin which was slowly consuming her graceful neck in the mirror more every morning. And she hated that she had to go to work she and her chins,; she wanted to stay in bed all day, be paid to test sunscreens on the equator. She wished she had the kind of job that would impress people when you talked about it at a bar, the kind of job that would make a good story of inspiration for her kids someday. But she didn't, she was a data-entering, client contacting, secretary. Nothing could have sealed her fate with a more dismal tone, nothing.
She wished she was an artist like her friend Jill, but Jill was barely surviving, living on macaroni and cheese in her mother's basement wreck-room. And Leela would rather answer and transfer phones until she was seventy three than ever live with her mother again. Still it seemed foolish to believe that there wasn't anyway out of the corner she had mistakenly painted herself into, there had to be a way out. And she would have to find it soon because she couldn't keep her apathy under wraps much longer, they would soon realize as quickly as she did that she was overqualified and underinspired to continue boring virtual holes in her head with spreadsheet data filing and the incessant ringing of that god damn phone.
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