JON, January 2016

Another day with no news of my brother.

Is he dead or alive? No one knows.

You know, having a job you have to take care of is both the best and the worst thing.

I don’t sit at home looking at my phone, waiting for a message about how things are over there. I can let my mind go blank. Just focus on work.

But that’s also the worst. I don’t want to forget him. I don’t want to have to go to work and do anything else than trying to find him.

However, that’s the real problem, isn’t it?

Sometimes shit happen to people you love, like when they work half a world away, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it but wait.

For news. Any news.

And then you have to have something to do in order not to go crazy.

So I’m glad I have my job. So far.

But I don’t know for how long I can do it, without being too distracted. When will I reach the turning point when my job becomes a liability? And I become a liability?

And I have to call in sick.

Which I can’t, because I don’t have an awful lot of coverage for that, and my wife doesn’t have a job and we have two kids, one of them with a diagnosis.

Is there some kind of job you can have in a family crisis that is guaranteed never to make the crisis worse?

I’d pay good money for that.

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Companion story

Warriors

Jon works hard to prevent a young man from juvenile detention, but begins to doubt his own motives.

Also, flashback to a dark secret in the lives of the Reese-brothers.

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Cover photo by Ethan Sykes on Unsplash

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