At two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, on a rainy April day, Greg Brande realizes his life had been one long side quest. He stands, raises his hands to shoulder level, as if frightened by a thug in a dark alley, and shakes his head while grumbling some words from deep within, things that he has never thought to grumble, because these were the kind of introspective things that other people say, like: “I’ve gone astray.”

Greg’s bobblehead nods in agreement from its computer monitor perch, though it’s untouched by human hand. Greg frowns. His co-workers at the web site design firm Black and Grey, Inc. continue clacking away with their busy work, oblivious to his revelation, though most would prefer to be willfully ignorant if given the choice. Nothing has changed here but Greg.

It’s a terrible thing, realizing that your life has been moving in the wrong direction, isn’t it? You like to think of your life as a road, surrounded one both sides by desert or fields or snow or whatever, and at the beginning – in your starting town – there are a million routes, spanning out in every direction, and now, at this age, let’s face it, there are very few, and we think, Well, I can turn around and drive back to the beginning, but by the time I get there my car might not be able to get as far. So why bother? You tell me.

As Greg collects his jacket and car keys, he thinks about the day that he was given his marching orders from his father outside the tool shed on a swelteringly hot Alabama evening. Do what you love and everything will fall into place, his father had said, ever the benevolent quest giver. His words should have been the beacon with which Greg navigated his way through life. Instead, they were ignored, and now they rang in the bitter halls of his resignation.

Why didn’t he listen to his father’s advice? Why did he partake in quests that he knew were not part of the main mission? You could say that he was taking his time, of course, because that’s what one does when one is afraid to do something with one’s life, because the sooner you get to it, the sooner you get done with it, and the sooner you’re done with it, the sooner the game is over, and the sooner the game is over, well, the sooner you’re dead, aren’t you?

But that’s no way to look at things.

Greg excuses himself, though no one is listening, and walks to stairwell. He takes a seat on the nearest step and puts his head in his hands and wonders what he can do to get back on track.

He repeats. Back on track. Back on track. Back on track. He repeats.

Isn’t changing one’s life something that people only do in movies? He wonders. A couple interns laugh as they carry down a couple water jugs down the stairs. They must be working towards the main quest, Greg things. That’s why they’re so happy.

That night, as Greg walks home, he can’t help but feel like everyone in the world is achieving great things that are propelling them towards the climax of some fantastically imagined, universe-spanning story, while he’s dithering his life away in the bonus content.

His apartment brings him no comfort. His cats don’t console him; they yowl hungrily around the dinner bowl. He takes a seat at the dinner table and eats a leftover salmon plate while his neighbors watch American Idol. He finishes his plate and cleans it in the sink, then turns himself over to his bed, which he lies in for a few hours, staring at the ceiling, thinking deep thoughts about purpose and character.

The next morning, he will wake and return to work with his miserable thoughts of powerlessness suppressed, his will subdued, and his mission all but forgotten. That’s not the sad part of the tale, however.

The true tragedy of this story is not that Greg, having realized the inanity of his actions up until that point, did nothing concrete to ensure that he did not cross further into the realm of the side quest and waste his life away on things that don’t really matter, but that the crisis itself, the one that shot him out of his chair on an existential Tuesday afternoon, never occurred to him again, and the opportunity to change passed him by only once and was forgotten in an evening’s sleep.