When Everything Breaks

Just because things are not okay now, doesn’t mean they never will be.

Years ago when I was first living in Australia, my Aussie boyfriend worked at this god-awful job in downtown Melbourne. He would spend 12 + intense hours each shift staring into brightly blinking screens for a company whose morals were questionable. But it paid well and was only temporary.

I forget the exact details of this one particular shift, but he’d had a terrible, terrible day. He’d had to work even later than scheduled, causing him to miss the final late-night tram. We had no car, so earlier he had cycled his bike to the station, trammed it, and then biked the final blocks to work.

Leaving work closer to midnight than happy hour, his bike tire quickly went flat, meaning he had no choice but to walk it home, which took hours.

Halfway home, a thunderstorm no one expected pelted down on the poor guy, as he pushed his flattened bicycle up steep side-walk hills, late in the night, still reeling from the crappiness of his workday.

Expecting misery at the door, I let him in and offered to listen to his complaints. But instead of swearing or blaming, he just laughed and said, “I’m good. I just figured, if everything has gone so horribly wrong today and it all sucks this much, something good for me must be just around the corner.”