No one ever thinks their life will end up blowing up in their face. No one pictures themselves with a button under their thumb that could change the world, with their new best friend peering through the grime and blood on his face, slowly twisting into a scowl they had never seen there before.

"Do it," he says. "Do it now, Jerry."

You never envision yourself pinned and betrayed. People are eternally optimistic. What fucking bullshit.

I never knew what I wanted to do with myself. I'm sure this is a problem that plagues most of the planet. So I went to college and got a degree in business. Not to talk down on business degrees, but it's kind of what you do when you don't know what to do, you know?

Me either.

Anyway, through people I met at college, I ended up getting an entry-level job at Cantech International Corp before I graduated. They develop software, mostly. As far as I know, anyway. I haven't learned too much about the company. My job is simple, repetitive, and numbing, which is probably just the way they like it. I work on the graphical user interfaces for the remarkably redundant shit they think up, and I have to make it so sixty-year old men can navigate their programs without losing it. Makes you a little sad.

But what I do is irrelevant. My life is not that interesting. It's just better for you to be able to form some sort of picture of me, something that you can look at and be like, really? That's how he ended up?

What else can I tell you? I found an apartment outside Cleveland after I graduated, lived there on my own for a couple years until I started getting serious with Alice and then she moved in, but that…well. It's hard to get into stuff like that without talking to you about Davis. So we should talk about Davis.

He's pretty important.

After about a year at Cantech, I wanted to kill myself. In a non-hyperbolic sense. I did not see a reason to keep on living. You work a job you hate, you come home and have nothing to relieve the boredom. Some people get into drinking, but I guess I wasn't that lucky. I got Davis.

It started to show. The depression, I mean. People just kind of drifted away from me, the boss (douchebag) would call me to his office now and then for 'personal evaluations,' like he thought he could pull me out of it, but pretty soon even he left me alone. As long as I got my work done, he didn't really care if I killed myself as long as I didn't take any good employees with me.

So it was no secret that I was unhappy. That was what drew Davis to me. Like flies to honey. Or shit, if you want a more accurate metaphor. I don't if it was like that for all of the people he went to, but he knew he could worm his way into my life with relative ease, and he went for it.

It was a Thursday. I went in to work just like I always did, not bothering with this casual option bone they throw at us when the weekend nears; shirt and tie, pressed slacks, and I was pretty much prepared to sit in my chair all day. It wasn't a cubicle place, they're trying to stop doing that. We didn't have our own offices, or anything, but the computers were against the wall and pretty spaced out. So it was kind of like privacy. Maybe. Maybe if we had had cubicles, Davis never would have noticed me.

It was after lunch. I had just gotten back from Chipotle and was feeling the spice tingling in the back of my throat, regretting leaving my drink there because I had no change for the vending machine, when he walked over to me.

"Jerry, right?"

I started. I hadn't been approached by anyone at work in so long that I wasn't used to hearing a voice that close to me. I saved my work out of reflex and turned in my chair.

There he stood. Around my age, probably twenty-eight, six feet, that sort of face that makes girls glance up at it again after they run their eyes down his body. Not that I did, I'm just saying.

"Yeah, Jerry. You're…?" I stood up, since he was.

"Davis. I'm over in coding." He held out his hand, and I shook it.

"Did you…uh, need something?" Holy shit, I was awkward. That happens when you don't talk to anyone. It's not like riding a bike.

"Nah," he said. "I think you do, man."

"Uh." I said. Fuck. "No, everything's under control here."

He smiled. "We should do lunch together tomorrow. You'll be here, right?"

"Nine to five," I said. Lunch. I felt like I had been set up on a blind date, but it couldn't hurt. "Yeah, sure, we could do that."

"See you then." And he left.

That was how I met Davis. Nothing weird, it wasn't like he said, "'Sup man, let's fuck shit up. You in?", even though that's pretty much what it came down to in the end.

Maybe I should slow down a bit. I don't want it to seem like all of this happened at once. I wasn't swept along like a kayak in shit river, I made the choices to bring me to the point of no return. Before it all happened, I lived a normal life. I had a steady, if fucking horrible, job. I was doing fine on my own, and I met Alice a little while after Davis brought himself into my life.

Alice was a sweetheart, and that's always gotten to me with girls. Some women are bitches, like complete bitches, and they think that guys find that an appealing personality trait. Alice was a bona fide nice girl. I met her at a bar, sort of. I'll tell you later. I had never seen her before, but I somehow managed to connect with another human being and we managed to have enough in common to the point where some coffee after we met didn't seem like a bad idea.

And it was great. She had found a job doing what she loved, which made her a happy person—as in, the complete opposite of me. Oddly enough, it rubbed off. I found myself happier in her company then I had ever been, a feeling I had been so estranged from that I actually thought I was sick, or something. Is that funny or is it sad?

"What do you do, Jerry?" she had asked me. Not my favorite question in the world, but one that was bound to come up. I told her I worked at Cantech doing software development, and that it paid the bills, but wasn't really enjoyable.

"That's a shame," she responded. "But there are other things besides work that can be fulfilling."

Truer words were never spoken. I asked her if she wanted to get dinner later, and she agreed. I don't know if that's how most relationships start, but tried and true never hurt anyone, and it worked out for us. She was just…terrific. Alice was exactly what I needed to yank myself out of the meaningless hole I had dug. Her and Davis, I guess, and what I got into. But Alice, we got on, we had great sex, and we could talk, which was something that had been missing from my life for too long.

So that's the outline of my life. The teachers always said you should make an outline before you start a story. The one I laid out is short and lacks any sort of ending, but I'm not here to tell you an outline. I'm here to tell you about my life.

Here's where it starts.