My Road To Success

      I was your average boy: I thought baseball was the climax of life, I thought it was fun to pull girls’ braids, and I hated school.

           When I grew up I changed. I wasn’t your average man. I fought…hard. At first, I fought to get into college. With a terrible academic history, and a family with no money or faith in me, I wasn’t set up to succeed. But I struggled past that and was accepted into an esteemed university. The summer before I left I worked like a slave to get the money for traveling. I lived without pocket money, not for a night at the bar with my pals nor even for a soda at the local pop shop. I had bigger aims.

           I had managed to make a sponsor out of my uncle Fred, through lots of sweet talk and manipulation. But I knew that it was just a lend. Every night when I went to bed I thought about my road to success, and how hard I had it in a family with no moral or financial support. I was above them all. And when I went to university I carried that attitude with me.

           While I was there I fought with myself for good grades. Not because I was tempted to stay out late at night or dawdle in my studies, my thoughts were completely bent on graduation and success, but because I still had that struggle to understand and complete. I went home that first summer and worked like a slave again. This time I didn’t have any pals that I could waste my money on, so I spent all my time working and planning. The next summer I didn’t go home, in fact, I didn’t see my family again for years. Instead, I worked as an intern for one of my professors who was impressed by my diligence. I may not have had any friends, and maybe I wasn’t even the best student in my class. But if effort leads to success I was going to be the next Albert Einstein.

           After that, it was all on repeat. I graduated, not with honors, but with good grades nonetheless. I was now a certified petroleum engineer. An odd-sounding job, but very well-paying. Basically, my job was to come up with methods to improve oil and gas extraction and production. Not an easy job, but I am not joking about the money. I was good at what I did, and the money came fast and hard.

           The first thing I did, true to character, was to send Uncle Fred all the money back with some roses and a note pouring out all the gratitude that I didn’t feel. Of course, I knew that without his patronage I wouldn’t have gotten far, but I felt that I was simply entitled to the opportunity to succeed, it wasn’t as though I hadn’t put any work in.

           I allowed myself to buy a home (anything but modest), and after that, I bought everything you think about when you dream about being rich. But through all this I never got lazy, I prided myself that I was successful without being a workaholic – this last idea came because I now took Sundays off work. I wasn’t at the top, but I was well off and it was good enough. I had luxurious things and yet somehow I never had a luxurious life.

           Years passed. This is pretty much the most boring life that a fellow could lead. And it would have been only just if I had died like this because this is what I had spent my whole life setting myself up for. But the only reason that you are reading this story is because something intervened with my glorious idea of success. A woman, of course.

           Talk about predictable endings, I know. The rich successful man who hates all men and makes his way in the world as high as he can despite any opposition, felled by the wiles of a woman. I was rich and successful, and if I felt one emotion toward mankind it was a bitter hatred for these sluggish creatures who either groveled all their lives at the bottom or got fat at the top. They were all the same.

           Even though I felt this annoyance and disgust for all men, I was still more appalled by women. I had seen men fall many times. Sometimes for those giggly girls who tumbled right into the laps of their delighted princes. Sometimes they were sassy gals who liked to bite their princes before they kissed them. All this play bitterness from them faded when you looked at the pale and queenly goddess that some men fell for. She cares for no delicate things but even her clothes and skin are covered with hard rocks and gems, and her face and hair with a black scowl of control. There were also the shy and fetching ones or the hard-working wife material woman who wasn’t such a pain to live with after the honeymoon as the others, but more of a pain before. That was all I thought of for women, someone you had to live with. But I didn’t have to, and I was content to live to my dying days free, only interacting with the other sex when they served me, or else I would just ignore them.

           Until I met probably the only woman in the world who felt the same way toward men as I did toward women. She felt that they were unnecessary, except to serve her. She was also a petroleum engineer, and she was just as successful as I was. And just as driven by success as I was. I couldn’t ignore her because she ignored me first. I couldn’t have her serve me because I had to serve her. She wasn’t trying to attract me with her attitude, she was simply trying to forget that I and my entire sex existed. She was witty, clever, and funny but never stooped to sass. She allowed men to help her – under a salary, of course – but they were never necessary. She wasn’t a cold goddess, she led with the perfect blend of will, desire, and reason not bewitchment. She could hold back but she never did it because she was timid. And, although she was as hardworking as any mother of ten, she never thought of doing the work for anyone but herself. And yet, not even a fool would have called her selfish.

           Was it love … I don’t know. But it stopped me. It felt strange to have someone else that I wanted to think about. I saw myself reflected and I was fascinated, not because I liked how I looked in a woman, but because I now saw my life from the outside.

           It was like a slow thawing. And after only two months of it, my personal life and work life had been ruined. So, I decided that doing something couldn’t be worse than what was already happening to me. So, I did something. I don’t quite know what I intended to say or do, or even what I wanted to come from it. I went into her office with a strange feeling in my chest. Could it have been vulnerability? I didn’t know at the time. Looking back, it was a little bit of that and the tiniest bit of hope.

           When I went into her office I learned that she was brought to the hospital with a heart attack. So unexpected in such a young patient. I went to the hospital, apparently just in time. The doctor told me that she only had a few hours. She apparently had no family to be there when she died. So, I stayed, all alone to watch this woman die. This woman who had started something in me.

           In the bed beside her there was a girl, she held a rosary tightly in her hands. And in the position I was in, I laughed at her in my heart.

           Did I feel pity for this woman who was dying in front of me with no one but me to care if she died or not? And she didn’t even know I was there. I had felt some bud among the snow, but had she felt it? I stared at her monitor with these thoughts running through my mind.

           And then her vital signs just stopped. She was gone, and I was thrown back into the grave that I had worked so hard to earn. This success that I was dying of. Everything that I had wanted looked back at me in that scene.

           I stared into the little red light of the medical machine that had, in such a cold and sterile way, just announced the death of that bud I had had. And I thought about loneliness and the damned.

           I went out into the waiting room just to be away from that scene. There were blank white walls and white chairs. The only decorations were three pictures. They were expressive modern art; they gave the impression of a dirty snowbank. And there was one word on each, the first said “wish”. Had I wished? Yes, I had. I had wished that I may have had some sort of happiness.

           The next picture was “dream”. I had dreamed too, but in this past bit of my life, my dreaming hadn’t been only about success. But that bud had to die now.

           The last was “pray”. I was surprised by this. I’d never had a reason to pray, did I now?

           I thought about my life; I thought about my past and my future. I remembered the girl with the rosary clasped in her hands, and I remembered the death scene I had just witnessed. And I obeyed the sign. I did the closest thing to prayer I was capable of at that moment. I cried.

           And after that, I went home and looked at my sterile house. Then I drove back to the hospital and talked to the woman who held the rosary. If she hadn’t meant her faith I would have gone back to my old life and died like that. But this cancer patient who had suffered for three years now took me in and taught me warmth.

           I will always be grateful for that woman. Yes, for the one who taught me how to pray truly, slowly, and haltingly. It was a painful and strange process, and I wouldn’t have done it alone. But mostly for that woman who had first made me wish for something more, had made me dream about a little more than success, and whose loss made me gain. Now I won’t die alone and cold, thank you for that.