A Deep Breath

March 17, 2024

A young man sighs.

The city was cold. The streets were busy. Everything familiar refused to admit of anything new or novel or foreign. Everything was as it had been and asserted that it would continue to be.

His stomach was a ball of fused, jagged metal. His chest threatened to curl itself into a single point. His hands hung at his sides. He squeezed them. The sweat from his palms pushed its way to the tops of his fingers.

One mistake had led to two had led to three, four, and a week’s worth of constant, low-grade anxiety. He could afford to lose. That’s why he was there. That’s what they all said. But they looked at him with those eyes. They used those words and said those phrases that took up so little time but occupied so much space.

On Monday he left at 10:48 a.m.

On Tuesday, he made it to 1:16 p.m.

He was at his desk two-and-a-half hours early on Thursday, but left four minutes after the bell.

Today, Thursday, he got lucky. He made back nearly half of what he’d lost in the first 15 minutes of the open. Then he spent 4 hours clawing back another thirty percent. He broke a rule to do it, but he did well.

He’d been walking and stopped with a group at the intersection. The breeze from the street pushed into him.

Then he’d lost it all. He’d counted. One-hundred-and-seven trades to get back eighty percent of what he’d lost over three days. Three trades to lose one-hundred-and-sixty-three percent of it.

The crosswalk sign turned. He moved with the crowd.

There were others. There were worse ones. He’d met a few. At least a couple were still there, too.

He could do it. He’d already done it. That’s why he was there. That’s why he’d packed up and rented a little apartment and told himself a thousand times that he wasn’t greedy and that he was doing it for some other reason, that it was a game he enjoyed and was pretty good at playing.

That was mostly true. He enjoyed it a little more than half the time.

But something like this had never happened. It wasn’t even his money. He didn’t even know if it was real. He’s heard that the new guys are put in a simulator without their knowing, even though they sort’ve know because how foolish would it be to do otherwise?