She had decided on an unusually cool day for summer, at her new kitchen table with a mug grasped tightly in her hands and a grimace on her face.

She’d felt… helpless. Hopeless. Utterly devoid of power to change the course of her life. Maybe calling off her wedding… well, she couldn’t call it a mistake but maybe it had been the biggest risk she’d ever take. Maybe she’d be sixty-five celebrating her retirement while Kelly whined about cellulite and Ryan rolled his tired eyes and Angela prayed for their souls and she’d still be holding onto this brave thing she’d done once. This one chance, this one limb she’d gone out onto without a safety net.

But Pam hadn’t wanted to make excuses, to grasp it so tightly that her fingers bled and she’d whisper well at least there’s this, at least I haven’t been completely spineless. She didn’t want to die a receptionist or that nice girl who was sweet to everyone or Roy’s almost-wife. There was more to her, she’d been sure. She’d seen the layers when she’d split herself open one night and packed her bags to the closest place she had to a home, set out on her own. There was boldness and creativity and bravery, maybe weak from atrophy after so many years of idleness, but they’d been there, just under the surface, waiting for the rest of her to catch up.

So she’d decided to change everything.

0o0

Pam disappears one day in August.

It’s unbearably hot beneath the sun so they thought that maybe she’d just melted. Or she’d overslept. But the phones keep ringing with no one to answer them and Roy appears with chicken or fish to an empty chair and at one o’clock they start to get worried. There’s no answer at her apartment.

Ryan takes her place.

0o0

The sun is rising to the east, overflowing like a cupped hand full of new beginnings and sweeping over the past and escaping to a better place.

The bus fills up slowly, each passenger finding their seats, some going, others coming but every single one with a common goal of chartering an escape route from a town called Scranton and a state called Pennsylvania. To somewhere colder, warmer, more populated, more secluded, home or anywhere but. Someplace different.

A girl in the back with curly hair and a suitcase and her iPod tuned to songs from a simpler time rests her forehead against the glass and she doesn’t look back as the bus pulls away from the station.

0o0

The break room converts into a make-shift detective’s office, missing only the sheriff with a big shiny badge propping his feet up on the desk (Dwight groans at himself when he remembers he returned his uniform to the station).

I’m not surprised. She was always an unstable girl. But Angela wrings her hands under the table, glancing through the blinds at reception as if Pam will show up and she’ll have the proper ability to point fingers and accuse and glare.

Pam is a real sweetheart. I hope nothing bad has happened to her. These small towns, they’re supposed to be safer than the cities, you know?

She was under a lot of stress since they called off the wedding. Parents had to pay for everything, her ex-fiancé still works downstairs. My bet? She took off because she just couldn’t deal with it anymore.

I didn’t really know her that well, but she seemed nice enough. Penelope was it?

They knock on her door, lock-pick their way in after three days. There’s an empty closet and missing suitcases and a note to her mother that they hand deliver with a shrug as explanation for how they got a hold of it.

The investigation ends there.

0o0

Pam reaches Arizona by Thursday. The bus jolts away from the curb of the station and it takes its large looming shadow with it, leaving her standing alone against the Southwestern backdrop of sandy rock formations and patient red. She thinks about Georgia O’Keefe who found inspiration from the vibrant shades in flowers and the statuesque skulls of bulls and hopes she can find the same muse here as well, among the desert, formulating some fusion of living hope and decayed idyllic dreams. She withdraws some money from the bank that she’d already transferred her life’s savings into (yet another detail that proves this wasn’t as impulsive as others would believe), renting a small apartment with a window that displays the landscape and a small living room where she can paint.

She leaves her mom the message that she’d promised after informing her conversationally that she’d be gone for awhile, knowing the note would tell the rest. When she’d muttered the word “awhile” she knew it could only be considered so to the dirt beneath her feet and the blue of the sky because time means different things to the immortal. She’d made sure not to lie, strictly speaking. She’d known that if she’d told anyone her plans they’d try to talk her out of it and she didn’t think she could survive anymore getaway attempts botched by her own insecurities.

0o0

Pam is missing.

Jim reads the email over and over again, trying to force the words to sink in by shaking his head and stirring them around. There’s a part of him that feels guilty, for casino night, for leaving, for not calling. He tries her number and it goes to voicemail, not that he’d been expecting anything more. He thinks about leaving a message, lets one word (“where…”) slip from his tongue before he hangs up.

0o0

Pam hears the beep of her cell phone, “you have one new message”, but the movers are placing her just-bought arm chair in the corner and her apartment smells like new paint and well…

The delete button feels like the closest thing to freedom she’s experienced in a long time. She’s done with that life for the time being.

0o0

There’s a plastic bag of cardigans that’s picked up from the donations bin in Scranton. Pink and tan and baby blue and every other color that spells out in tiny scrawl “there’s nothing to see here, move along.”

They each find a home in another woman’s closet and their original owner won’t miss them.

0o0

There’s another job and another boss and another town that she tries to fit her life snuggly into without scratching the corners and she finds that moving past and on and up and out is easier when you’re not reminded of all the mistakes you’ve ever made at each turned corner. It was difficult to be satisfied with the new slide of a leaf if you’d already wasted the same one before.

She’d rejected four receptionist jobs before finally finding one teaching art to the elderly at a retirement home across town. There’s something about seeing hope in age, watching their eyes light up, mapping roads of paths’ traveled across their faces, that makes her feel better about coming home to an empty apartment. There’s still time.

There are men here too. It’s not as if there weren’t ones back in Scranton but there she was engaged and in love (not to the same man the whole time, though) and it seemed a little ridiculous to notice the other boys in the playground if there were two already pulling her pigtails. But here she can notice them and notice them noticing her without shame. She has a few casual dates with dinners and movies and swapping stories from their past, but nothing long term. It’s nice to just like someone without everything turning into an epic love story.

Pam starts wearing her hair down and she throws out all of her hair clips.

0o0

Jim tries not to wonder too much, tries to reassure himself that she’s a smart girl, a clever girl, a safe girl who wouldn’t let anything happen to herself. He likes to think he gives her self-reliance more credit than Roy ever had.

He prefers not to think too hard on his lack of worry over the fact that the girl who never took any risks had disappeared off the face of the earth. Maybe he knows her too well. There’s that logical part of him that explains patiently that there’s no way he could simply know, no way for him to feel her presence or absence of danger when he hadn’t actually spoken to her in nine months, the time it would take for a baby to be conceived, grow, and be birthed on schedule. And sometimes he thinks of their silence as a child, a thing to be nurtured and stroked until it could protect itself.

But there’s that other part, the part that labeled their expressions and somersaulting relationship in metaphors, that sees desert whenever he thinks of her and he just… knows.

0o0

“Twenty bucks on Mexico.”

This is the game they’ve taken to playing during lunch.

“Nope, definitely Canada. Much easier to cross the border.”

Angela thinks it’s morbid but no one points out that it’s less so than believing she isn’t alive somewhere, instead on a beach sipping margaritas. So they guess, betting imaginary money because they all assume none of them will ever know, as a way to lighten the tension when the new receptionist sits down in the mornings and maybe just a little out of jealousy. All of them have considered dropping off the edge of the world, but that’s a difficult thing to manage when you sleepwalk through your life. To them Pam is a legend, a battle weary soldier that was injured and sent back home from enemy lines.

This is how the first year goes.

0o0

It’s too quiet here. The view of the ocean doesn’t provide him peace anymore, instead reminding him of all places he could use it to drift to, could float away to a place where no one cares how much card stock costs and people actually live their lives instead of waiting on someone else to live it for them. Jim loosens his tie to stop the feeling like he’s suffocating, gets one breath in (which is more like a sigh) before the strangling cuts in again.

He’s so sick of being alone. When he’s at home watching TV on an empty couch he can feel it grip his chest and at work he’s just alone with people around and he’s just so so sick sick sick of it. He tries to close his eyes and think of her but her image is fading and her features are starting to take on the look of that watercolor she’d painted for him once, purple and blue like a bruise that hasn’t started to heal, because that’s the only concrete thing he has to latch onto. He finds himself Googling her name just to see her face but he gets an Pam Beesly whose husband died in the Civil War and a woman in Arizona who has a piece in the local art gallery and he can’t bring himself to hope.

The water swells and Jim takes a deep breath, ignoring the sting of salt water and placing his hands carefully in his pockets.

0o0

Pam sells her first piece of artwork on a Tuesday in April and finds out the news the next morning. She calls the branch every once and awhile, to hear the shift from one receptionist’s voice to another, because it makes her feel better in a way that leaves a guilty aftertaste that they haven’t managed to hold one down after she left. But this time it’s a recording, spelling out the details of the upcoming closure, the merger, how this will affect your business… she stops listening after that. She sits on her front porch in her new house until the sun sets angrier than normal and she still isn’t sure what she feels.

0o0

The branch closes in May and Jim gets the call a week later.

He doesn’t show up to work the next day and Stamford isn’t like Scranton. They don’t wonder and his seat is filled by the next Monday.

0o0

It may be intuition but she’s not sure there’s a label for the tick of her fingers or that tingle somewhere unidentifiable near her gut that makes her pick up the phone. But she knows. She knows that the past has collected enough dust and there’s enough fire in her veins and they’ve reflected until their ears are sore and they’re ready. She’s ready. When she calls, she knows he is too.

0o0

Pam meets him at the bus station, tired and haggard from the three day drive, unsure in himself and his decision drop his whole life and not care where the pieces fell. But when he sees her, sees the paint on her jeans, the wind-swept carelessness in her hair, the unbridled smile on her face when she sees his lanky frame puddle down the steps… he doesn’t need much more confirmation than that. So he gathers her in his arms like a life preserver in choppy waters, holding her to him with the same relief that shows on her face pressed into his chest. Later there’ll be questions and conversation and wonderment over how they’d taken the chances they had when for so long they’d been stagnant, but for now she cries and he rubs her back and it’s enough.

0o0

The branch had been closed long enough for them all to find new jobs, move to other cities and settle into life without Dunder-Mifflin, but there was a constant influx of communication that kept them all tied together, even if it was simply by a string of words in a email window.

Jan saw Pam at a gas station when she went to visit her sister in Scottsdale.

The rumor drifts around like an aged tumbleweed, rolling through emails traded back and forth, some adding to its size with their own theories and other stripping it bit by bit with skepticism.

Some say it made sense; Pam had a desert landscape calendar at her desk for the year 2006, said she had sketched some on her notepad when she thought no one was watching in the summer before she left. Others insist she’d been kidnapped or something equally exciting (mainly Kelly and Michael) and no one trusted Jan’s word 100%. She’d been having substance abuse problems (mainly wine and sips from flasks under the dinner table) ever since she was fired and tossed out on her ass to the hard pavement of New York City.

But still. They think, maybe.

0o0

There’s a long necklace of wooden fence here that surrounds their property, a small house with a kiln so Pam can fire her pottery pieces, an old fashioned type-writer that Jim prefers to a laptop because there’s a satisfying plink to the keys. There are nights spent in town watching old westerns on the big screen, mornings hiding from the sun, afternoons planting desert flowers that don’t mind the heat and days that stretch. Where there had been monotony and florescent and deafening quiet between outbursts, here there’s natural light, working jobs from home, peace. There’s curiosity when looking into the future instead of dread, clay under her nails and ink smudged on his, deep kisses under the stars and laughter in the wind.

0o0

One day in August, the world rips and reshuffles and everything begins to fall into place.