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So, smile in melody

Strictly for me.

Glimpse how beautiful

It all could be.

Let our love be the thing

That makes your heart skip a beat.

It's simple: it's true; it's destiny too,

And I only want to be with you

Now, if given a rose

You'd better watch the thorns,

But the good scents

Give way to good sense.

So tell me you feel the same

As I feel for you:

That my words free your soul

And our dreams are real...

Philip was 26.  So was Sally.  Philip had considered it his "A to Z" birthday: the mark of the beginning and end of something that he couldn't quite put his finger on.  This will be important to remember, especially since she privately held the same feeling.  She didn't share this with anyone else, not yet at least.

Despite his own efforts, she was still better at expressing herself than he was as a musician, which was why she was a famous performer and he wasn't.  It wasn't that he wasn't talented, he was and had a catalogue of songs that rivaled hers.  He didn't pursue his music as anything more than a hobby though.  As a result, he was working at a privately owned pizza place, which was run by the parents of an old high school friend.  It was an easy job, one that his friend, the son of the owner, abandoned for a higher paying job long ago.  Actually, Philip made a pretty healthy salary. 

Philip had been working at the restaurant since he was seventeen and never went to college.  He was promoted to a shift manager when he was 22.  He liked their product.  They served a good pie.  Over the years, he'd even created a few items which had been added to the menu, which he took great pride in.  He did like the location of the store and they had a pretty good lunch rush except for Sundays.  It was always a predictable and steady flow of people, which included many regulars, that lasted from about 11:30 to about 1:15.  Saturday's rush started later but also lasted a little later. 

His responsibilities as the daytime shift manager mainly consisted of running the shift, over-seeing the front and back of the house and making sure that everything ran smoothly.  He often dealt with quarrels between the cooks and the waitresses and sometimes had to fire people.  He also took charge of ordering all of the inventory for the store and had even talked the boss into buying a computer for the store so that he could keep track of the payroll and inventory from the store.  Philip took his job seriously and he often stayed until four or five.  Although, sometimes he left as early as two o'clock.

Philip was actually pretty tired of his job even though he was relatively content.  He really felt like his life was slipping away and that his job had become too important in his life.  He felt that it defined him and the definition didn't fit with his image of who he wanted to be and felt he could be.  He could just barely afford his own little meager life and as many of the things that society told him that he needed, like his cell phone or his new computer with it's high speed cable connection.

He'd done a lot of research and saved up for well over a year to pay for the hardware to build his dream computer.  He knew exactly what he wanted to do with this computer and was pretty sure it was now technically feasible.  The most expensive part of the entire system was the Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), which would give him 2.5 terabytes of space for data, which came at a bargain price of $5,000.00.  At this time, he couldn't have been able to fathom what this computer would end up being capable of though, despite how much space he'd allocated for data.