I manage a small chain bicycle store. Most days I wake up an hour early to read, make breakfast, tidy up the room I share with my gf, and walk from our apartment 15 minutes to the shop.
The work itself is ok. I dislike the entitlement and attitudes of the public, but fixing things can be satisfying, and I get to travel around the island sometimes for deliveries.
When I first moved to this country a couple of years ago, it was with a woman who was trying to get away from her boyfriend, who didn't know she was sleeping with older men for money. I thought this made her interesting, but as we grew closer I realized how much like everyone else I was, in that I couldn't maintain a serious relationship where both of us were sleeping with other people. I broke up with her, joined a football club, and began swimming in the ocean, which was right outside the flat I was sharing with a self-made millionaire Maori man and a couple of recent university grads.
I met another woman, who had also moved to this country, and who's visa was expiring at the same time as mine. We moved into a modern, sterile, industrial apartment together that I come home to in the evenings. I like to spend that time reading, writing, and talking with her, or else cycling in the hills.
Lately I have become unsure about our plans to move to yet another country, together. I dream about cycling through the desert, with everything I own strapped to my bike, and this is what I'll probably do in October, for three months on the Arabian peninsula, then Egypt, Morocco, before finding another country to live and work in. I have planned all this in my head, but not how I will break up with her.
What matters to me most is reading and observing and then writing about what is happening, otherwise things just get quiet in my head and I start to feel (even more so) that I'm not really existing at all. I may cite this as a reason why I must remove myself from her. I don't know what the truth is, so any explanation I can come up with feels fine.