Everything Changes

inevitably becomes routine, the random confluence of timing and fortune that configures its components all but forgotten. But every so often, I catch a glimpse of my life out of the corner of my eye, and am rendered breathless by it. This is my own doing, this life, with my millionaire-playboy housemate and my stunning fiancée with blood as blue as the clear winter sky. I spend my days toiling in my office, and then come home to a spectacular brownstone where I hang with rock musicians and beautiful people. This is no accident. I made this happen. I had a plan.

    I am about to fuck it all up in a spectacular fashion.

    Morning. I don’t have to open my eyes to know that Hope is long gone. She’ll have awakened at six, preferring to shower and change in her own apartment before going to work. Hope works at Christie’s, evaluating nineteenth-century paintings that will ultimately be auctioned off to the rich and stuffy, and although she won’t come out and say it, she’s mildly disgusted by my shower, with its gooey shampoo bottles, dented Irish Spring bars, scattered Q-tips, and disposable Bic razors planted strategically on every available surface. I’ve repeatedly offered to stock her Bumble and Bumble hair care products and Burberry body wash, but she blanches at the impropriety of the whole premarital bathroom thing. In truth, she’s only recently begun sleeping over—mostly on weekends—a gracious concession to the diamond I recently, unbelievably, placed on her finger.
    I roll over and survey my room lovingly, and with a touch of wonder, as I’ve done almost every morning for the last three years. It’s a large, square room, about eighteen by eighteen feet. I’ve furnished it sparingly to maintain the feeling of open space. It contains my queen-size bed, a small cherrywood desk from the Door Store upon which sit a black eighteen-inch flat-screen computer monitor, a cell phone charger, a cordless phone and charger, scattered pictures, receipts, dry-cleaning stubs, and approximately six months’ worth of miscellaneous mail and papers that I fully intend to get to, although I probably never will. The floor-to-ceiling bookcases are crammed with an eclectic collection of trade paperbacks, contemporary fiction mostly, some of the classics for show, a handful of the better Star Trek novels, screenplays printed off the Internet, and three or four years’ worth of
Esquire
and
Entertainment Weekly
. Opposite my bed is an entertainment center containing a thirty-two-inch Panasonic flat-screen with built-in DVD player, a VCR, and a Fisher stereo. The center of the room contains only an expanse of thick wine-colored carpeting that is more than occasionally littered with discarded clothing. On one wall hangs a framed, original
Rocky
movie poster on which a bloodied, pre-steroids Stallone collapses into Adrian’s arms, and on the opposite, a well-known Kandinsky print, a gift from Hope. The door to the bathroom is between the bookcase and the desk. The bedroom in my last apartment was roughly the size of my bathroom.
    On my way to the shower, I see that Hope’s hung one of my suits on the bathroom doorknob with a yellow Post-it note in her elegant script.
Perfect for the party, but it needs to be dry-cleaned. Love you, H.
Her parents are throwing a party in our honor this coming Saturday night in their apartment, to officially announce our engagement. This despite their evident disappointment in their daughter’s selection of a mate, although I think I’m starting to grow on her mother, Vivian, who finds my suburban middle-class sensibilities humorously quaint. I consider Hope’s note and the somber dark suit she’s selected, clearly having overlooked the Moe Ginsburg label or she’d have rejected it for sure. Today is Monday. “Fuck,” I say for no readily apparent reason.
    My bathroom is all done in a soothing gray, the tiles, the wallpaper, sink, bath, and toilet all peacefully monochromatic, contrasted nicely by the white towels that hang on the brushed chrome rack. It’s like a halfway house between sleep and consciousness, muted, functional, and unchallenging to the eye.
    While I’m taking a leak, I notice something disturbing. My piss, usually a vibrant Big Bird yellow in the morning, is colorless, except for what appears to be the occasional flash of a cola-colored thread within the stream. When I look into the bowl, the colors have separated and I see a small floating nebula, which is now an