Chicken Tacos

Nate wasn’t sure if he was actually going to kill himself tonight, but he was prepared either way. He had been planning it all month, stockpiling his Xanax. Dr. Simmons had written the prescription a couple of months ago to help with his anxiety, but Nate didn’t feel much of a difference. It had been his fourth medication he’d tried over the years, and he was exhausted with the failed approaches. That’s when he realized they might work better in bulk, mixed with a few cocktails. 

Technically, he had major depressive disorder, but he found the terminology quite dramatic. What he really felt was a dullness about the entire world. It wasn't that he spent all day in bed, unable to brush his teeth or eat dinner. He just found life monotonous, and wondered if anything new would ever happen again. 

Each day he got up for work, snoozed his alarm twice, shaved his face, packed his lunch, drove his twenty-four minute commute to work, and input a version of the same information into his computer, wondering where it all went. He knew the numbers were doing something, but he couldn’t register that anything coming from his hands had any real power. 

Nate sat in his six by six foot cubicle thinking about the bottle of pills in his car. He wondered why he had even come to work today. What were you supposed to do on the last day of your life? He figured he might as well live out the monotony one last time. 

Today wasn’t just any day at work though. The head of HR, Helen, was retiring, and the office was having a going away party for her. They hung a banner and a few streamers, but it hardly came across as festive with the bright lighting and absence of an open bar. 

Over the last half hour, he had sat in his cubicle trying to look busy, working up the courage to join his coworkers. The cheering from down the hall felt like a living thing that was trying to creep inside of him. Sometimes the noises blurred to sound like cries for help. Nate could tell the cake had just been brought out.

He really did want a piece. He hadn’t had lunch or even breakfast today, just a bag of chips from the vending machine. The employees typically ran through the snacks quickly, so at the end of the month it was down to the scraps, leaving the gum and pretzels to do some heavy lifting. Today he had scored Cool Ranch Doritos. 

Last Sunday, he had a meal prepped his food for the entire week. He had made enough chicken tacos to get him through lunches and dinners, and had planned to bring them to the office today, but his mom called him this morning to discuss how to properly get a stain out of his clothes.

He figured she must have woken up twentysome odd years ago when he was in undergrad. Back then, he would often call her to ask her about things like this, little ways of living he should've known, like how to iron clothes or if you could use expired milk. 

 He didn't talk to his mother much, but to be fair, she didn’t think of him a lot, let alone remember him. Shelly had shown signs of early onset dementia when he was in highschool, often forgetting little things, like to pick him up from soccer practice, or if she had run the dishwasher or not. It had progressed over the years, and now she was 71 living in a memory care facility with no recollection of him on most days. 

Nate’s father helped pay Shelly's bills, but he couldn’t find it in himself to visit, or even write letters. Nate understood that she didn’t feel like the woman they grew up with, but he found it impossible to disregard that there were some days when she woke up and did remember them. Days when she wanted her husband and he was miles away, deliberately forgetting her. 

His therapists often concluded that his depression must be tied to his mother, that her losing her memory must make him feel this emptiness. He found that explanation to be too simple. He used to be devastated about his mother, of course. But even in the moments when she would come back to him, he didn't see life the way he used to. It didn’t suddenly become less dull. On his most cynical days, he felt getting old must be synonymous with wanting to kill yourself. He wondered if his mother was lucky to forget who she was, where she was, or how to do things like submit a timesheet or contribute to a 401k. 

Nate spoke to his mother for close to half an hour that morning. He had to skip his shower, settling for just splashing water on his face. All that to say, he forgot to grab his tupperware, so two servings of tacos sat in his fridge at home. And the pills sat in his car. And he sat in his cubicle. And Shelly sat in her room.

As Nate stared at his corded phone, he overheard the same sentiment over and over, some version of:“it’s not going to be the same without you.” He believed that at that moment, they really thought it wouldn’t be the same without Helen. And even though he was about to go in there and say something similar, he knew that no one would care so much next week and nothing would truly change. They might take on more work from Helen, but they would eat the same snacks and continue to leave just a little early on Fridays until they retired, or the company was bought out by private equity.

To Nate, it seemed so easy for other people to possess a fleeting emotion that could feel very heavy for a moment. Easy for people to cry during a sad song or feel happy at Facebook videos of soldiers reuniting with their dogs. Perhaps it was all fake. Or maybe catered food could make anything feel a bit more real. 

He had no clue why Helen was leaving the company. She wasn’t old enough to retire, and he couldn’t imagine her moving up the corporate ladder any more. After his years of experience, he learned that some people were just meant to stay where they were. He couldn’t imagine himself ever moving up, and he’d learned early on that promotions were just traps thinly veiled as opportunity.

Helen had been advocating for new tools for years to help support her and the team process new hires. Request after request was denied, and he had heard her complain about it in the breakroom a handful of times. Likely, leadership didn’t believe her work was that hard, and was just hoping to eliminate her role with AI in the next few years. Maybe she was tired of no one listening to her. Or maybe she was just moving to Florida like every other person he knew, willing to accept natural disasters as a trade off for no state taxes. 

Someone was surely going to be promoted, though he had no reason to believe it was him. He hadn’t gone out of his way to work outside of his usual tasks for years. As his work got more repetitive and automatic, he didn’t tell anyone. Rather, he would spend hours reading AITA threads on Reddit, or playing solitaire on his desktop. With their cubicles, no one was privy to what he was doing. Sometimes he could go a whole day without talking to another employee, so much so he wondered if they forgot about him sometimes. He wondered if he died in his cubicle, how long it would take people to notice. Would they continue to pay a dead man’s salary? He knew his bosses didn’t care about him at all. He had read stories about owners dying and their cats beginning to eat them after a few days. He felt like his life was in a similar vein, and they didn't even have the decency to wait until he was dead to begin eating him. 

While Helen was only in her fifties, she was longest standing employee at the company. This company had seen entirely new faces since she’d been here. To Nate, it felt like everything was hers. The water cooler and the coffee filters. The payroll and the extra cords for the printer. Of course, none of that was true. This place didn't really belong to anyone, or do anything. 

Nate had been at the company for nine years. He was 46 now and couldn’t believe it had gone by so quickly. When did he start to feel like an old man? He couldn’t imagine a world where this was his life for the next twenty years. But he also couldn’t imagine a tomorrow, even though it would undoubtedly mimic today, and every day before. 

It was hard for him to imagine a young version of himself, with ideas beyond what to add to his grocery list and how many pills it would take to kill himself. He spent so many of his youthful nights wondering what would happen if he died. Now he believed that it was nothing and he didn’t care. He wondered how people could trick themselves into believing their career was their purpose and why he found that so impossible. The first time he even considered a bigger meaning to life was when he did acid for the first time over two decades ago. He thought about the conversations him and his friends would have over and over, beating the horse to a pulp. The more of life he saw, he realized everyone had those conversations. He wondered how all 20 year olds came to debate freewill until 4am.

He looked at his life in its current state and debated free will once more. He’d always believed in it, but now he wondered if it would be easier to imagine a world where he had no choice but to sit in this dreary office. It was all he was going to do either way. 

“Hey, what are you doing in here still?” Lucy asked as she grabbed her phone from her desk, unplugging it from her charger. “The cake just got cut, it’s red velvet!” 

“I was just finishing up something before we got out of here for the weekend, I’m about to head in.” He hadn’t done a bit of work all day. 

“Alright, well come on!” He turned back to his computer and closed out of a few tabs. It was clear that Lucy was not leaving without him as she hovered over his desk.

He had never gotten close to any of his coworkers, but he and Lucy had built up a sort of rapport over the years. He found himself awkward in every conversation, but she didn’t seem to mind.

At first when he started his professional life, he wanted to be invited to things. He enjoyed happy hours and making small talk with people he shared an office with. But now he was a single man in his forties, and couldn’t understand what he added to any situation. He didn’t have any new thoughts, didn't want to discuss religion, and couldn’t stand to be hungover at work. He did like Lucy though. 

They walked into the communal space being used for the party and were immediately surrounded by Helen and a few others in flimsy party hats. 

“Wooo!” Lucy said as she walked in, met with a louder “Wooo” from the group. 

“You guys have to get some cake, there is way too much,” Helen said as she forced some onto them, placing pieces on small paper plates. Nate felt the silence between the group and knew it was his turn to talk. 

“Are you going to miss it?” Nate asked.

“Hm, what do you think, Nate?” She laughed at her own joke and Nate managed a slight smile. 

“I am going to miss you all though!” She gestured her hand around the room to the 50 people in various conversations with each other.

“Oh please! You’re going to forget us tomorrow,” Lucy joked.

“I certainly will not!” Helen reassured them.

Nate stood awkwardly, cutting up his cake into small pieces to waste the time as he ate, and watched his coworkers turn to speak to each other.

Lucy walked across the room to speak to their coworker Greg. He was a bit younger than all of them, likely in his early thirties. Nate could recognize that he was handsome, and wondered what he was doing wasting his youth in this office. He sometimes found him a bit annoying and unprofessional. But maybe it was just a different generation, because everyone loved Greg, and sometimes Nate saw why.

Lucy showed him something on her phone and Nate wondered what it was. Greg smiled and rubbed her back a bit. Nate caught Lucy’s eye and she smiled. 

Across the room, Helen spoke to the office manager Lindsay, and seemed to be thanking her for setting up the event and she pointed to the streamers, cake, and guests. 

The minutes felt so long, and Nate wondered when he could leave without coming off across as rude. He scanned the table of food to see if there was anything worth eating. He grabbed a couple of pigs in a blanket and pretended to be perusing other options after he had already written them off. 

“Nate!” Lucy yelled from a few feet over, and waved her hand encouraging him to come over. 

“Okay, settle a debate for us. Do you think it’s weird to follow someone on Instagram if they haven't responded to you on Hinge?”  

He was taken aback that she had asked him something so specific; that had never been their relationship. He wondered why she would ever want his advice, considering he’d never spoken of a relationship. 

“Um, I don’t know. Do you know him in real life?”

“Him? Oh god no!” Lucy threw her head back laughing. “I’m a lesbian, Nate! I thought that was obvious.” Nate turned a bit red. Should that have been obvious to him? He wondered how he could have been working with Lucy for close to a decade and not know something like that. 

“And of course not, it’s Hinge! Just a girl, Daniella. I liked her last night.” He had never used dating apps. In college he had dated around a bit, but it was all people he had met organically, friends of friends. He couldn’t understand how people would see photos of a person and want to talk to them, let alone sleep with them.

“I’m honestly not sure, I don’t have Instagram,” Nate admitted.

“What? That’s insane!” Greg said, shaking Nate’s shoulder, a bit too roughly.

“Facebook seems to keep me updated.”

“Fair enough!” Lucy said. 

“So to make this make sense to you, is it weird to friend them on Facebook?” Nate laughed and pondered the question.

“It’s weird as hell,” Greg said, and Lucy laughed.

“I think it might be weird,” Nate decided. “But maybe lesbians are different?” Everyone laughed at that, and he wondered why people always found him funny when he wasn’t trying to be. 

“Oh they’re different!” Greg joked. 

“Cheers to that! I’m doing it.” Lucy said as she dramatically hit follow on the profile. 

“I can’t wait to see if she blocks you,” Greg replied. 

“Or falls helplessly in love with my determination!” 

“Okay, five bucks she doesn’t accept the request!” Greg stuck his hand out to shake on it. 

“Fine, and I bet that she follows back,” Lucy countered, reaching for his hand, “Where’s your money going Nate?” 

“I bet she messages you.” They all laughed and bumped shoulders with him. 

“Wow you’re catching on to lesbians fast,” Lucy joked, and then reached for his hand to shake on it, Greg following suit after. Nate had never touched these people and suddenly it was happening all at once.

Helen had wandered over and joined their circle, “Are you guys still thinking we should go to a happy hour after this?” 

“Yes please, I’m in dire need of a beer.” Greg seemed relieved that the party was coming to an end too. Maybe no one was happy to be there. 

“Do you want to grab a drink with us?” Lucy looked at Nate as she asked. “Come on, we have to see what Daniella says!”

“Or doesn’t say!” Greg shouted from the buffet table he’d wandered over to. 

Nate was surprised to get an invite. He considered it and contemplated if he would feel left out, but decided he could just drink more if that was the case. 

He wondered why people only came together in these random ways at rare events like weddings or parties, and why it was hard to do things like make people laugh on a regular Friday. 

“Yeah, I’ll come,” Nate replied.

The pills would be there tomorrow. Something new was happening that he wanted to see through. Plus, it felt nice when Lucy asked him. He still had the whole weekend ahead of him, maybe it did make more sense to live it. He grabbed his coat and turned off his computer as they walked out, just as he did every day. He did have that extra food to get through anyway.