Jack
Jack did not have much of a childhood to write home about. That obviously did not hinder his meteoric rise; as a young professional, he was already on top of his game. He was quite successful, with a salary in the six digits, vacations pre-planned for a year in advance, and stocks and bonds neatly sorted out. While he could hold on to investments with alacrity, what he couldn’t hold on to, for dear life, were relationships. Friends, men or women, would come and go from his life, with surprising frequency. To him even his biological family, the little he had, felt like it was on borrowed time. I think the lack of long-term connectivity with human beings wasn’t particularly bothersome to Jack. I gathered this over the course of half-a-year when we crossed paths several times. Notwithstanding our differences as obvious as night and day, including our respective skin colors, we shared a common interest: salsa. It was over salsa that we first met. We were both enrolled in a week...