Bagged

Prologue

"Connor whatever you do, do it with love. Be it how you read a book, read it with passion. Be it walking down the street, walk with enthusiasm" my mum began, with coughs as her punctuation. Her lungs refusing to process the precious oxygen she needed. My seven year old brain was still caught attempting to decode what "passion" could possibly mean. Maybe a fruit? Mom had once mentioned it before. After a brief coughing fit my mother continued her speech. I listened intently like I always did when she spoke

"Connor remember my love. I love you, I will always love you. I know you're too young to understand but mommy wants you to know something her mum told her"

"Yes mum, what is it?" I questioned. My attention span was thin even at the best of times.

"You'll understand this later. But the second you look into the eyes of your true love. You'll know it's them your heart belongs too" my mother finished her speech with a final cough and laid back once again on her hospital bed.
"But mum my heart is yours" I said quietly attempting to crawl up and lay beside my mother. Her smile was enough to soothe my soul for what would be one of the most tragic nights of my existence.

My life has never been rather breath taking. I'm no genius child who won a scholarship to some high class university. Beyond the fact I'm an orphan, I'm nothing special. Instead I work in a grocery store, located in upper Manhattan. Where anyone who owned a Gucci anything seemed to come for their pasta needs and blended kale anything. I often laughed at the the amount of kale to chocolate ratio sold during a day.

The perks of working in a grocery store was the consistency of attractive males. Either shopping for their significant others or simply grabbing the ingredients to some far fetched recipe that I could never create myself. But whatever it may be I savoured every decently attractive person that walked through the doors during my shifts. It brought a sense of excitement to my day. Often enough though I would be left with nothing better to do than rotating soup cans so their labels faced forward. Often judging the amount of chemicals in each can deluding to a semi-healthy meal.

Unfortunately for me, on this mellow Thursday night. With a 10 am class waiting for me in just 9 hours. I was stuck rotating all the soup cans on aisle eight so their lying labels faced forward. It's a pet peeve of mine to face the cans. It's as if every customer assumed every can has its own individual calorie count. They don't. They're all the same. But often enough I would be found in this aisle doing this tedious task because some twenty-nothing thought they could find a can with three les calories than the rest.

My trance of soup cans was broken as two young males passed my aisle in a fit of laughter. A box of condoms and marshmallows in their hands. The passing sight was refreshing for my boredom and donated me with the focus I needed to finish the task at hand. Just 250 more soup cans to go.