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~This was to be a collection of the strange and wonderful true stories that I had encountered during my years in retail, any characters mentioned are true recreations of real world people and all events are true... unfortunately circumstance didn't allow for me to write more than two tales from a possibly endless collection.~

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01- How To Save A Life

Here I am once again standing lost in thought as the world speeds by, I breath slowly as a solitary tear runs down my cheek. I fell like I am standing in the middle of a busy highway, the people like traffic passing by in their journey over the horizon of the future, the world pays me no heed as it moves unstoppably forward, ever transient, ever changing.
I barely see the faces of the people around me as I lose myself in my own thoughts, those around fade into a sort of blandness, an existence without any real feature like porcelain figurines with their empty, painted faces. The tide of humanity flowing around me was as meaningless right now as those extras you see on tv, just something to fill the background.
The argument plays over and over in my head, the anger, the accusations, all the insults and subtle torments.
God, I want to scream.
The things that I said to her, how could I be so dumb?
You know how the story goes, our relationship was in trouble and a civil conversation slowly degenerated into civil war, the ammunition little more than pure venom, which of us could say the most hurtful thing to the other. Why oh why did I allow this to happen?
I lost my temper, I shouldn't have but I did and in those few minutes that I regret more now than even the most horrible mistakes of my past I said things to her that even now shock me. Terrible words that I did not even know that I had the capacity to utter, things that I had never thought that I would ever speak aloud.
I see now that all she had really wanted was my support, to know that I was standing strong by her, but at the time all that I saw were accusations of failures, of inadequacies that were my responsibility and deteriorations that were my doing. Pride took over, or maybe it was just some deep hidden cruelty but I met her tirade with a stream of invective, with a darkness that would ever stain my soul, and from there we were doomed. Retrospect, another glorious irony of a universe reminding us of the price of conscious thought.
I deserve the torment that burns deep inside me now, the broken heart and the bruised ego are a testament to my unending stupidity, the sense of loss, the feeling that everything I ever was has fallen to pieces.
The worst part of it was not the screaming, no that is just an accepted eventuality in any arguement, the worst part was when she stopped screaming at me. Her voice low and spoken between deep breaths she told me that she could see now that we were a mistake, I was not the man she thought I was, that we had no future because our past was little more than a shared delusion. We were a lie from day one.
She told me to get out. Get out of my own house.
And I did, but I told her to pack up her things and be out by the time that I got back in the morning, this morning.
And she was gone. I stood in the empty house, in the living room that no longer felt so living, by the sofa on which I used to play with her feet as we watched stupid movies and drank wine. It was in that one moment of recollection that it suddenly occurred to me just how alone I now was.
For lack of a bit of understanding and compromise I now stood in what was once a home but now just a house, a lonely, empty house. All the good that I had in this world had slipped through my fingers like so many grains of sand falling through the pinch of an hourglass. Little by little until it had fallen away and when the chance came to turn it over and start afresh I instead had picked up that hourglass and smashed it upon the ground, scattering the sand forever.
I had to get out of there, I had to go somewhere. Anywhere. It didn't matter where my feet might take me so long as I was around people, that there was some semblance of life and emotion around me. I needed to be surrounded by life but left by myself, to be in a place were I can see interaction without having to be involved in the process myself.
Standing here next to the frozen foods section, surrounded by frigid peas and bored housewives I can't help but feel that coming to the shop might have been another mistake...