I don’t care about him. I don’t care about my job. And I could care less about the baby of his that I’m carrying.

I had to listen to stuff like that for five hours. Five hours of my time. On a Saturday. My first Saturday off in a month. It was Yoshiko today. She makes twice as much as I do and yet she has to bitch to me when her latest boyfriend starts cheating. Men like younger, cuter women, I want to tell her. She may know this, or she may not – I just get to listen to her bile against everyone and everything over 4,000 yen worth of Italian. It was Misaki before that. Five men, two abortions.

Before Misaki it was Hitomi. I don't know much about her men, but there was one abortion. And before Hitomi it was Noriko. Two men, no abortions, but a divorce for the guy who was married to the tennis player.

While Yoshiko, Misaki and Hitomi were getting sex and abortions I had a dumb job and not much else, save an apartment, a few plants and a cat that hates me. I almost kicked her when she somehow managed to get herself pregnant.

The reason my girlfriends pick me to listen to their stories is because mine are so boring. That means I’m boring, which makes me insignificant, as a brick wall should be.

I’ve been a brick wall all of my life; when I was fifteen I listened for months to a cousin as she told me about fucking the biology teacher and the English teacher – and, of course, all the details of the subsequent abortion.

Instead of having a life of my own I listen to stories of other girls’ lives – and I can’t stand it.

How many abortions have I heard about? Twenty? Thirty? Forty?

And this morning I learned that one of the cat’s kittens is pregnant. How?