According to one financial services company, to be on track for your comfortable retirement you should have eight times your salary put aside in a safe “retirement” account (e.g., 401(k)) by the time you reach 65.

To get there, have 1x (one times your) salary saved at 35, 2x salary at 40, 4x at 50, 5x at 55 and 6x at 60.

Assuming, of course that you started saving at age 25, stopped saving at 67 and lived until 92, expecting to live on 85% of your normal work pay after you retire.

That thought floated through Lee’s eyes as he tried to settle down and dance part of a routine he had learned with Guin the previous week.

His happiness, like a solid sphere of ice, had been dropped from a great height and broken into pieces.

Lee broke his memorable moments into slices, areas under a curve, the curve’s shape determined by the number of people he could recognise and recall at a moment’s notice, amplified by the emotional level shared by the people.

Lee’s personality traits, like his happiness, could be broken into as many pieces as necessary for him to both try to make the people around him happy as well as keep happy the disjointed personality traits that wanted to be treated like royalty at the same time the traits acted like servants at the beck and call of the people around Lee.

Lee had goals to accomplish, some short-term, some undefined by timelines.

The nearest short-term goal was keeping the three women in his presence satisfied by the movements of his body.

The second nearest short-term goal was to complete a “homework” assignment of gathering his financial data into a semi-organised portfolio for analysis by a financial planner, to make sure having 10x his salary saved at 40 was keeping him on the track that would make his wife happy and financially comfortable/secure.

The two goals were not completely at odds with one another but they were like two polarised filters causing a moire pattern distorting his vision, hearing, disrupting his stimuli data set and disconnecting him further from the people in the room.

Lee heard a recorded voice in his thoughts, the memory from a road trip he and his former brother in-law took, when they talked about how most people, regardless of age, have a default age they imagine themselves to be.  A subset of the population learns to compartmentalise themselves successfully, cutting off their disparate behaviours that would not work well in one subcultural situation or another, or with one person or another.

In other words, our personality traits may have different levels of maturity, a giggle from our childhood squeaking out when we’re in our 60s, given the right conditions.

Lee liked to have fun, partly a mask and partly who he was the moment he took his first breath, leaping feet first, a “breech birth,” from his mother’s womb.

But life isn’t always just fun.  There’s a…well, not seriousness, not exactly, something else.

Lee set out goals and objectives for himself and others around him that he considered essential to the healthy continuation of his species, requiring not so much seriousness as a focused determination to complete a series of steps to reach them.

That didn’t stop him from believing in the saying, “Poof!  A miracle happened here.”

In one thought, he was floating around the room with his dance partner, dipping her and spinning her like a princess resting in his arms weightlessly.

But to get there, he had to know the moves and the strong physical leadership that gave his dance partner the confidence to trust his head, arm, leg and torso positions.

One of the broken pieces of Lee’s personality was the fear and almost hatred of being told what to do.

Yet, there he was on the dance floor, having to give himself up to his dance partner, Guin, and relearn the steps and body movements for a dance routine, one of the ultimate fears in Lee’s repertoire of “I don’t want to be backed into a corner where I can’t hide my mistakes from the crowd eying me in the spotlight.”

It was a form of a control issue.  Lee liked to be in control of his moments, no matter how spontaneous they were or appeared to be.

A juxtaposition.  A dichotomy.  A recognition of the compartmentalisation of personality traits that never allowed one trait to meet another.

He liked to dance spastically in order to avoid the problem he had with converting short-term body movements into long-term memories, which, when tested, brought up all sorts of childhood memories of the times he was bullied because of his height and awkwardness until he grew taller and somewhat handsome, offsetting his athletic deficiencies.

There it was, out in the open.  Alone with his wife, alone with Bai or alone with Jenn, Lee had no problem allowing himself to be shown the dance steps he needed to make to transform two people into a single dancing unit because Lee could focus his people-pleasing thoughts solely on one person and turn down the noise in his head that constituted the perceived needs of people around him.

He could convert his wants and desires for one person into a reshaped set of wants and desires for the person beside him, if needed.

Lee didn’t know everything but he imagined he thought he saw more than some people realised.

He knew how and when to throw up a word like “sister” to disguise his true feelings.

He knew that something had changed from one week to another in his new relationship with a fellow published writer who seemed down and discouraged as if she had read a short story of Lee’s that thinly disguised his satire and parody of romance novel writing because he was insanely envious of the writer’s talent and jealous of her fan base; Lee sensed the writer could have been hurt by something Lee had said or written but he also knew the world didn’t revolve around him and the writer could just as well feel down and discouraged because of a rejection letter that had nothing to do with Lee.

Just because we can sense a shift in a public persona doesn’t mean the shift had anything to do with us.

When Lee practiced dancing with Bai, he worried about making Guin and/or his wife happy at the same time because they were in the room, too.

He couldn’t close off the world.

When Lee practiced dancing with Guin, he dropped his mask for a moment, as did she, and a new emotion welled up inside him and flashed across his face, as did hers.

The emotion was not easily labeled although translucent images of similar raw emotional states blinded Lee temporarily, forcing him to turn away because he and she had stood on the precipice of the abyss together, a bottomless pit that contained ancient sets of states of energy that passed from being to being over the millennia, long before Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was a catchphrase, back when eat-or-be-eaten was the only understood “feeling” between two living things.

When was the last time Lee tapped into that animalistic flight-or-fight feeling between himself and a woman in his arms?  When was the last time he wanted to claw her eyes out, cut through the external barriers and see what was really inside the mysterious creature?

The feeling lasted two seconds and then it was gone.

Other emotions scrolled across the marquees of their faces, from “are you getting this?” to “I’m not sure” to unanswerable questions and unquestionable answers.

What Lee understood was he could not satisfy all three of them in the same way at the same time and keep his personality traits in their crumbled states.

Lee liked playing the part of the knight in shining armor saving the damsel in distress.

But which damsel needed saving and which one didn’t want to be saved, let alone saved by him?  Which one neither needed nor wanted to be saved?

It was not an either/or situation.  There were no absolutes.  Sometimes it really was just about rescuing each other from a moment deteriorating into nothingness, a simple joy shared for a brief interlude and then going on to the next moment.

Lee had more to learn.  He couldn’t trust that the number of twitter followers or website views per hour said anything about what people said in front of him about him or to him or about themselves.

He was slowly learning to let go of his independent “don’t tell me what to do” spirit and trust his three friends to share themselves with him on the dance floor, all of them wishing well for the others, their reasons left unexplained and sometimes only demonstrated in uncontrollably-fast realtime where masks fall away from faces and raw emotions other than “meditative happiness, one with the universe” are shared by two and entrusted to each other for eternity.

Lee learned from everyone, including the high school homeroom, English composition and drama teacher who had a crush on Lee when Lee was president of the drama club, sharing his private journal with her as part of his English composition class, along with all the other students (who mostly wrote gossip or fleeting teenager feelings), letting his teacher in on private thoughts of his he disguised as short stories about himself and his teenaged girlfriend he just broke up with, written in such a way that it could have been about his teacher, too, not realising the future consequences of his actions.  He still remembered what she wrote in his journal:  “There are ‘girls‘ who have strong feelings for you.  If you’re willing to get hurt again, the love they give you will open your heart to more than you can possibly know right now.  You are meant to be loved again.”

It was the same when he went on a trip to see a dramatic play at the local community theatre with his drama teacher and fellow members of the National Thespian Society.  Lee was focused on studying the acting styles of the people on stage while three or four of his female classmates took turns sitting beside Lee, playing footsy/handsy with him, trying to break through his concentration for a quickie kiss or anything physical.  Lee knew what they were doing but had no idea what he was supposed to do in response, not wanting to let the girls know he was an inexperienced kisser and wasn’t sure what all the hand signals meant as to how many “bases” he was supposed to go to while seated two or three seats away from his teacher who was encouraging the girls to act on her behalf and report back to her during intermissions how far they had gotten.  Lee played hard-to-get rather than be played by his teacher during the third act of a play.

That moment and the one where the teacher invited him to her house while her husband was out of town set the tone for Lee’s future relationships with women.

But decades in a desert can make a guy more thirsty than he thought possible.

Thirsty for new experiences, willing to throw away the old and start anew.

All for the sake of a good story, the story of our lives, while helping people become more informed individuals, bettering themselves if they wanted.

Did Lee want to leave a legacy?

Was he willing to have his skin pricked by a thorn?

What’s a good story without a little suspense?  Just ask Charles & Eddie: “Would I lie to you?”

Until next time, dear readers!