Author's Chapter Notes:
So four months later, I return with a short little update, because I was sort of easing myself back into this story. My original plan was for this to just go up to the finale, but I might go further than that now. We'll see.
He tilts his head back and looks at the cracked ceiling, feels a breeze come in through the slightly open window. It’s spring and he can smell flowers outside, azaleas maybe or honeysuckle, he thinks. Something fragrant and light that makes his head feel sort of disconnected from the rest of his body because- well.
And he’s in this office again, another Monday afternoon, another hour of staring up at these now familiar cracks in the ceiling. There are five, no wait, six. He wonders how old this building is. Wonders if these cracks will ever be fixed.
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“I’ve been thinking about leaving.”
“Scranton, the country, either one really. This entire life. I’m thinking about leaving it behind.”
“It’s not…entirely because of her or this whole thing or whatever. It’s also just- What am I doing here? Like what am I actually doing here, you know?”
“Yeah. I want to do more. I want to- I don’t know.”
“I just want to go somewhere else. I want to be someone else.”
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He has two escape routes right now.
There’s a ticket to Australia placed neatly in the top right drawer of his desk at home. A plane ticket to the other side of the world so he can be there instead of here when she’s really finally never going to be his.
Then there’s a transfer to another state, something more permanent, that’s his if he just says the word.
But he hasn’t said the word yet and he’s sort of terrified of traveling alone.
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“I’ve been offered this promotion which would transfer me to our branch in Connecticut. I’m thinking about taking it.”
“I haven’t decided if I want to take a step further in this career or abandon it completely or- But what would I do besides this? So I’ll probably take it.”
“Yeah, remember our last session when you gave me the sage advice to talk to HR about her planning her wedding on company time if it was bothering me so much?”
“Yeah, so I did that and she found out even though I immediately took my name off of it and so…”
“That’s part of the reason, yeah.”
“It feels like it’s ending, you know? With this whole thing and her wedding being a month and a half away. It feels like it’s just over.”
“Our whole thing.”
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He’d driven into the city with the window down and the radio turned up loud to a station with just static. As if he was trying to drown out some part of him. He let the wind and the white noise from the speakers roar in his ears until the inside of his head was nothing more than an ocean.
He felt guiltless, calm, okay. Until the car stopped moving and all the noise was gone.
His therapist twists his mouth a little while he jots something down. He’s almost gotten the hang of watching the barrel of the pen and making out what letters are being written. He thinks there’s an E and maybe an A, but after that he loses his place and looks back up at the cracks.
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“She didn’t say anything when she found out. Oh, and by the way, I had to tell her to her face that I complained about her. Okay, so it was the back of her head, but I knew what her face was doing. And that- And she just nodded and said, ‘Okay,’ and walked away.”
“I felt like a shitty best friend. Because who complains to someone else about their best friend? You’re supposed to talk to them about it, right?”
“So I took the next day off, lied to her about a doctor’s appointment in the city which was really a meeting with corporate to talk about the transfer.”
“Because that’s what we do. We don’t talk about things. We just pretend they don’t happen until it feels like they really never did happen.”
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He’s thinking about how she smiles more when the weather gets warmer. He’s thinking about how sometimes she comes into work humming and sometimes she puts a vase of lilies on her desk and sometimes she makes him eat outside with her so she can make chains out of dandelions while she sits cross legged amidst the grass. But she hasn’t done any of that yet this year. And it’s ridiculous how that makes him feel emptied out a little.
How it’s sort of the reason he hasn’t gone anywhere yet and hasn’t decided if he ever will go anywhere.
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“I don’t sleep now.”
“The past two or three weeks. Since this whole thing happened.”
“I try and I’m exhausted, but I just lie there in the dark and I can’t fall asleep.”
“I feel restless and I can’t get comfortable. Some nights I just don’t even bother closing my eyes and I just watch the numbers on my clock until it’s 7:30 and my alarm’s going off.”
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He closes his eyes now, just to see what happens. But all he gets is his eyelids glowing orange from the sunlight shining in on them. It’s not like it is at night when he closes his eyes when it’s just little dots moving across the darkness. The same thing he sees when he opens his eyes.
He hears a noise and when he opens his eyes, his therapist is tearing a piece of paper from a pad and handing it to him. A prescription he realizes. Something to help him sleep, he’s being told. Something to help him.
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“I don’t think I need-”
“I just- I don’t want to be one of those people on medication. I don’t want to only be able to sleep because I took something that knocked me out. That isn’t-”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay.”
“No, you’re right.”
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It’s a ball in his hand as he’s walking down the sidewalk. The sharper corners of the crumpled paper digging into his palm. He feels the paper getting soggy from the sweat of his hands and he’s angry for some reason. Angry at this stupid scrap of paper, because it’s telling him that he’s defective, flawed, he can’t do this on his own.
But he can, he’s so sure that he can do this without- So he tosses it into the first trashcan he passes as he makes his way back to his car.
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