Electric Dreams

Starting a new life

                                                                

You need Chaos in your Soul to give birth to a dancing Star
                                                                                                                                                                   Friedrich Nietzsche

Ben Solo stood at the large window of his high rise office and stared down at the city below. He loved this city . The Golden Gate Bridge, year round fog, the cable cars. This city had been his home for many years and he would miss it.
San Francisco held many charms and adventures for a single man in his thirties. Not that he had time for such frivolous things as visiting Alcatraz or seeing a baseball game at Oracle Park.
He was much too busy with work , designing skyscrapers and impressive apartment buildings.

His current assignment was to figure out a earthquake resistant brick. He thought he was onto something exceptional when the memo arrived .

The job transfer came out of the clear blue. He was blindsided.

Seattle, Washington?

Well at least it was on the same coast as San Francisco. He didn't know much more about the city than that.
Strategic Design Company, needed a warm body in its Seattle office within a week. Ben was one of the best young architects in the company and his experience would greatly benefit the Seattle area.

He pushed his dark glasses up his nose and turned away from the misty window. He felt a little dizzy from looking down from such heights and bumped into his desk, sloping coffee all over his paperwork.

"Oh dang it!" He hated swearing , it practically burned his ears when other people cursed at minor problems.
He bent down to rub his sore shin and bumped his desk again with his back side, sending streams of the brown liquid onto the low pile carpet .

He got strange looks from the other architects. They thought him the office odd ball.

He never joined them for drinks after work . The bar scene just wasn't his thing. Girls didn't think him attractive anyway. He couldn't get over how they would gawk at him and whisper behind their hands, giggling.

Maybe he just didn't fit in here anymore.

He didn't like it , didn't ask for it but maybe it was a good thing. He didn't know. His perfectly planned world was changing and he didn't like change. But someone once said that the only constant in the world was change.

So he said good bye to who ever would look him in the eye, packed his bags , gave his pet fish to the neighbor and handed in his keys.
It didn't go as smoothly as he'd liked. But it was pare for the course in his world.

People at work grumbled a half hearted farewell, his zipper on his luggage broke and he had forgotten to buy fish food so his neighbor had to go by the pet store in the pouring rain.

The flight took only two hours which was a blessing. Ben had the longest legs on the planet and just couldn't get comfortable sitting in the confinement of the seat he was assigned too.
He kept bumping the seat in front of him with his knees ,irritating a nun almost to where she was tempted to throttled him with her rosary beads.

The first thing that struck him about Seattle was the trees. There were forests full of ferns and tall trees.
Is this why Seattle was called the Emerald City?