A Life Untouched

There’s a filmy layer of mold floating on the surface of my old coffee, cup cold and untouched since I left my office for the long weekend. The fluff of growth is a flat cloud in a puddle of liquid mud. It could be worse, honestly. It could be a left-behind latte with corroded chunks of milk emitting a rancid, sour odor. This is just drip coffee in a kitten mug. I imagine moving to clean it. It would take about forty-five seconds to pick it up and pour it down the drain, only a flick of the wrist.

Tossing my backpack in a spare chair instead, I move to sit behind my desk cluttered with unopened mail and unsent forms, the clutter of a corporate summer beginning to wreak its havoc across all my tabletop surfaces. The blasting AC has left everything cold to the touch, as if the seasons never transitioned. That’s how life feels in this place, slowly churning by so slowly that rigor mortis has set into time itself.

Hours drag on with agonizing dreariness, and not even my everyday walk in the sun is enough to cure me of how empty I feel when I see our break closet with its overused Keurig. My coworkers don’t even bother to wipe away the crumbs they’ve left behind from the leftover salads they brought for lunch. That cesspool of bacteria may as well be a reflection of the people I’ve been forced to spend my nine-to-five with. I was nice to them once before I woke up to the reality that they would never have my best interest at heart. I was nice to them before I began to resent them for representing the very things I hate so much.

It’s why I’ve stopped leaving my office almost entirely. I can’t stand their barbed smiles. I can hear them every day with their popping bubbles of laughter when they hang out in the hallway by my office. I could report them for congregating on company time. I could go out there and explode on them like the boiling pot I’ve become. Who knows what they think of me now anyway? It’s not like they bother to check in on me. They stopped doing that when I pulled away like a disinterested boyfriend, giving them clipped answers and ignoring their small talk.

They wouldn’t know my troubles if they slapped them in the face. They wouldn’t recognize my grief if I wrapped a bow around it and gifted it to them. I wish I could do that if only to spare myself this cyclical strain that has worn me down all these years. Some of them would even deserve to bear its burden, being the causes themselves.

No, I don’t believe that. I do though. I don’t.

There’s another burst of loud laughter seeping through the paper-thin walls. The blank email draft I’ve pulled up sits open with the words Good morning flashing at me with no follow up. I can’t seem to move my fingers against the keyboard, as if it would add a drum beat to the chorus of joy outside.

Every time I hear the smiles in their voices, the fact that they’re enjoying this career that I’ve settled on as my last resort, nausea rises in me like high tide. How can anyone be happy in these conditions? How can they find their purpose from an office space as grey as my own miserable attitude? How could they be doing well while I’m throwing my future away behind a computer? I used to have dreams. I used to imagine something greater than this. I used to think I was worth something.

Not to say I’m not competent…It’s just I never felt good enough when I did well. When I did, it was infused with this dreadful sense of imposter syndrome, as if the thing I was truly trying to be was only a mask I chose to wear, and somehow that made me less capable and less deserving of the compliments I got. My boss capitalized on that with an efficiency that scared me. When he took credit for our recent presentation on stock options, it was really the last shovelful of dirt he threw on my freshly buried coffin.

Hate me and call me a liar, I seethe to myself as I hear another chorus of giggles. They wouldn’t believe we worked for a fraud, even if I told them. I let him do that to me though, like the coward I am. Here I sit, nearing thirty and blaming this miserable place for destroying my life as if I haven’t totally ruined my own by staying here; as if I’m incapable of leaving. All along, for what felt like all my life, I’ve always wondered if anyone else sees me as the fool I believe myself to be. I don’t belong here. I don’t belong anywhere. I’ll never not be the depressed little girl I’ve always been, spoiling like mildewed laundry in a washer that doesn’t even work properly anymore. The mustiness of this office is no better with the dust beginning to cake on manila folders I haven’t bothered to touch in weeks.

Is that why I haven’t applied to work anywhere else? Is this why I waste my life away in this place, feeling my youth rot away with every day that I sit despondently behind a cheap desk with only an abandoned cup of coffee for my company? I should do something if I’m so miserable. I should be taking active steps. I should be wanting to be better, even if hearing the AC kick on with a rumble overhead makes me feel like my internal battery has just died. I shouldn’t be moaning and complaining about a life that I accepted, griping about people that at the end of the day I’m choosing to be around.

I should get a new job where I don’t feel like I’m sinking away into nothing.

I should move out of this god-awful city with its viciously cold winters, and its wind that cuts through me like razor blades.

I should go back to therapy.

I should start taking my medication.

I should really clean that stupid coffee cup.