It was six years ago. Leilah was 26. She had graduated from college three years ago and was working at a job she hated. It wasn’t that she hated to work. It was actually quite the opposite. She loved working, but all the same she hated this job. More specifically, she hated the past year of her life. Her anxiety had been spiraling. Her eating habits had taken a non-existent turn. She was smoking and drinking coffee as though they were the air of the fresh outdoors and nectar straight from the ancient gods. Her dating life was a slew of awful men, one worse than the one before. To line the men whom she encountered up would mimic a lineup of all the usual suspects in a jail house.
