"Why do you want to go to work there, anyway, Sharon? You'll lose momentum on your career, moving out to a backwater like that place, and what are you going to do for fun?", asked Melanie, facing her best friend across a small outdoor table. "Look around you, aren't you tired of all this noise, the constant traffic, the sirens, the people?", Sharon replied, waving her arm at the passing pedestrians on the sidewalk, people on their lunch break, sleeves rolled up with the warm weather. "It's the city, isn't that why we're here? I mean, look around us, this is where it's happening, not in some place out in the middle of nowhere. You may as well be working in a convent for all it matters if you move." Melanie propped her sunglasses on top of her head, a practiced maneuver that looked casual, but also took great care not to mess up her hundred dollar haircut. Taking a bite of her sandwich, she looked across the table, beyond Sharon, at a handsome young man, well dressed, reading a financial newspaper. A prop, she wondered? Not with his shoes, she decided, wondering if she would be able to catch his eye. "Are you checking someone out in the middle of trying to persuade me to stay?" Sharon interrupted. "You're not being very convincing…" "Sorry, but that's another big reason for working downtown, and you know it! That's something you'll miss too. What kind of guys do you think you'll meet there? Boring suburban married men who think that getting a lawn tractor is a big deal, or worse, some high school dropout living in a trailer park." "Everyone thinks that, that it's just some backwater town, but it's a big city, like a million people or something.", Sharon replied, shaking her head. She'd been down this path before, always the same answers. "So? It's not New York, so what does it matter?" Melanie resumed looking at the man reading his financial paper, who hadn't looked up from it since she last looked at him. Too caught up in it, she thought. Probably have a heart attack at 35.

The waiter came by, dropped off the check, and asked if there was anything he could get them. Melanie asked him "Yes, there is, Have you ever been to Kansas City? "Pointing to Sharon, she continued " She wants to move there for some unknown reason. I mean, people there dream of coming here, not the other way around." Sharon rolled her eyes, Melanie had a habit of doing this, bringing uninterested people into her conversations, guiding them towards the answers she sought. Preaching to the choir, Sharon called it.

"Actually Ma'am, that's where I'm from, and lemme tell you, I was glad to leave. There is nothing to do there. It's just flat, cattle yards, and boring suburbs." Looking at Sharon, he said "Look, whatever you're thinking about that's there, it isn't." He left the receipt, and went over to another table.

"See, he lived there, and he didn't like it either." Melanie said, a little cocky that her earlier comments were validated. "It's what I want, it's a change, something completely different than here. It's not like it's another universe," Sharon replied, getting up, smoothing her skirt, and collecting her purse.

Later that day, Sharon caught herself daydreaming out the window of her office. Looking at her monitor, then back out the window at the buildings casting a late day shadow on the sidewalk below, she smiled. She compared the image below her, the cab's waiting at a stop light, people crossing the street, cell phones pressed to their ears, making late appointments, moving with the flow of foot traffic, not looking at the buildings they worked in, to the visions in her mind. A city, modern with glass, set across the river from tall white concrete structures that jutted up 20 stories, thick, windowless, purposeful. Grain elevators, she had learned on asking one afternoon a few months prior, while interviewing for a job there.

The grain elevators symbolized Kansas City to her. The recent history, the contrast in the cultures living there. Still moving wheat from the farms to the far-off bakeries and factories. The endless farmland stretching off, just a few miles from the city center, beckoning her to take a drive. Such a difference in intensity, she had noticed. Eating lunch downtown between interviews, she had been hard pressed to find anyone talking on a cell phone, making urgent deal closings, or checking their messages. None of that self conscious pretentiousness that seemed to ooze from everyone in midtown New York. And she could see the grain elevators from downtown, white, tall, a beacon of sorts, guiding her.

It had come about kind of quickly, and she really couldn't pin down a specific event that had triggered her desire to change, to uproot a solid 10 years of her career, to leave her friends, her whole life behind for something unknown. It wasn't that she disliked her job, or her friends, or that she wasn't happy finding relationships.

Maybe it was watching too many old westerns, she mused, thinking back to watching lanky men in oversized hats talk with drawling voices, riding off wistfully into the sunset. Or maybe it was an ad on the subway for a pioneer history exhibit at the museum. Leaning back, chewing on the tip of a pen, she tried to place the moment, but couldn't. It seemed that it had always been there, waiting to come out, waiting patiently for her to become tired of New York. She started when she heard her phone ring, the caller id giving an area code that she didn't recognize, and her pulse got a little quicker when she answered.

He pulled into the office park, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel to the beat of country music on his radio. Pulling into the parking spot he usually parked in, he turned off the car, and looked at the building, sighing resignedly. How long had he worked here, he thought, doing the same job, parking in the same spot, next to the same car every day, the routine of the days blurring into a long daymonthyear, it was getting hard to tell. He looked at the building, a four story glass office, seemingly stamped out of a mold, essentially featureless, with mowed grass around it. His eyes drew automatically to the spot where his office would be, if he had a window, but things didn't move quickly enough here for a fast promotion path he knew.

It was time to do something. Something different. But what, he asked himself. He could go to another company, but he knew most of them in the city, and he really didn't stand to gain anything different by switching. Maybe a different commute, different roads to go down, but he knew even before completing the thought that in a few years, it'd be the same as where he was now. But what to do? He'd thought, when he was getting out of school, about all the choices he had to make, where to move, what to do for work, what kind of people he'd meet, and what he'd do with his life. Looking back, he'd realized he hadn't made any striking choices, jut taken a easy path to a good, if boring life.

Kansas City was only about 50 miles from where he grew up, yet was a striking contrast from that small town . A few small factories that paid barely better than minimum wage, farms, a few gas stations, and a hotel just off the highway were his hometown choices. Working in each of the three factories while in school, he'd realized the people there had started work the same age he had, 10, even 20 years ago, and hadn't gone anywhere, were still parking in the same spot, driving the same cars they bought new, back before they had a kid or three. He'd saved what he could, and left the year after graduating.

He hadn't thought about the factory days in a while, but this morning, he began to realize he was in the same trap as the people in the life he moved away from. His last promotion was over a year ago, with a minimal raise, he was close to the maximum salary for his job. Opening the door, nd passing the receptionist, he mouthed the words she said verbatim, knowing his exact response ahead of time.

That's it, I need to do something, he thought, sitting down at his desk. I'm in a trap, but at least I realize it, and can get out. He started digging through his desk, rummaging with some intensity when a coworker, seeing the unusual activity, stopped and asked him, "Jeff, what's going on in here, you doing a cleanup? Lord knows your cube needs it!" "No, I'm just looking for something I put away a while ago. Something I think it's time to find.", Jeff replied, not even looking up, picturing in his mind a faceless drone with a cup of coffee in it's mechanical arm, standing in the doorway. "Ok, man, I'll leave you be", and the man wandered off, vaguely wondering what was so important to find at this early hour.

Ah ha!, Jeff pulled out a stack of rental car maps that a friend of his had been collecting. All from the same company, must have had a corporate discount, he thought, glancing through them. Maps of Cleveland, Chicago, Minneapolis, places in the Midwest. No, those won't do, he thought. He leafed through another stack of them, these from the east coast, stopping on a larger map filled of both sides with streets.

"New York" he said out loud, "That would be a change!" he laughed to himself.

He shoved the rest of the maps back in the drawer, and flattened the New York map on his desk. He was eating a bagel, somewhat absentmindedly, and had to occasionally dust the crumbs off the map as he pored over the different streets, his fingers tracing down the lines, his imagination starting to flow. He realized that he hadn't really daydreamed in a long time. Hadn't thought about all the neat things he could be seeing and doing. He looked at his bagel, a Midwest version of a bagel, and wondered how much better one from New York would taste. Maybe it would taste the same, he didn't know, but the desire to find out started.

"Sharon, I'm going to be frank with you, we're not gong to be able to match your current salary, so I want you to tell me what will work, what you're looking for here. I mean, our office here is only 3.50 a square foot, at the firm you're at now, it's on what, 53rd and 5th? You're talking 120 a square foot. Your rent's probably through the roof in your apartment. We just don't have the same costs here, so salaries are lower." the man on the other end of the phone told her. He'd just offered her a position at a small firm on the outskirts of Kansas City.

Things started moving a little slower for her, and she realized she must have paused a moment too long, for Bob began asking her again "So what sort of money are we talking here, do you have a figure in mind?" "Well, um, I didn't realize that it would be cheaper there, so I guess I haven't thought about something concrete for dollars yet, I'm sorry." She said, honestly not knowing what to ask for. "Ok, look, maybe I can help out a bit, give you some costs, and let you think about it a bit." "Sure, that'd be great. What's an average house selling for, cost of insurance, cars, that stuff." She stated asking, jotting down the figures he told her. Not bad, she thought, comparing the cost of her 1 bedroom midtown apartment to the price of a very nice home. And, of course, she realized, she'd need a car, she hadn't owned one since college, and even then, when it was stolen, she hadn't replaced it, deciding it wasn't worth the effort keeping even a clunker in the city.

She did some quick calculations, they bargained for a few minutes, and they decided on a salary a third less than what she was making now, but probably well into the upper brackets there, she thought. Hanging up, and now with a date set on her calendar, time started to slow down.

New York. She was giving it up. Moving away from the crowded streets, the rush hour subway rides, standing too close to people who thought bathing was optional. Moving away from a small apartment whose only redeeming feature was that it had a wonderful view of the Empire State building, if you stood on the bed. She laughed at the thought of that, remembering the landlord telling her to do just that. Well, time to tell everyone, she thought, getting up from her desk.

"I'm telling you man, those people there are nuts, haven't you ever seen the 'Godfather'?" "Dave, we've already talked about that, that you think New York is a bunch of Mafia guys running around in Lincolns, dumping bodies in the river and stuff. Who knows, maybe that stuff happens, but remember that guy who shot up the church here last year, man, there's nuts everywhere." , Jeff replied, knowing it was useless to convince his friend otherwise. Dave lived for movies, he watched them on the weekends, waited in line to see the newest show, but somehow never quite grasped that movies were a skewed view on someone's idea of reality. "No, I saw it on some show once, that people who moved to New York were like 70 times more likely to win the lottery than to not be mugged. What are you going to do there? Besides get mugged?"

..tbc..