Knee knocking together on legs bending apart, Holly Flax sits on her sagging motel bed and stares at the wall. It’s cheap and dirty. Bits of plaster flake away from it, peeling back on themselves in tight curls, and cobwebs of cracks branch from behind a vaguely pastoral painting that hangs askew.

Heaving a half-hearted sigh, she hugs herself, squeezing the already tightly held air that remains in her lungs. But it doesn’t press out the emotion within her, which stays damp and heavy in her chest. Rocking back and forth slowly while biting her bottom lip doesn’t provide any relief either.

Closing her eyes in quiet desperation, she imagines that she’s somewhere else, and someone else. Anything will do, as long as it’s not here, in a tired and dank motel room, and as long as she isn’t herself.

But it doesn’t work, because it never does. Reopening her eyes, the blur quickly becomes the wall, and looking around, the rest of the frayed features of the room remain the same. All are bathing in the warm dimness of the lamp on her nightstand, whose sixty-watt bulb illuminates, without apology, the nature of her surroundings. Meanwhile the semi-broken air conditioner that sputters and spits like an asthmatic smoker is the only sound that cleaves through the absolute silence that is her constant companion.

Apartment hunting is tougher then she remembered. Even in a city like Scranton, which is larger than the places she is used to. It isn’t just the phone-tag, or the inevitable disappointment she feels walking into a promised home and finding a small prison of stained carpets, tiny kitchenettes, and closet-sized bedrooms, either.

She thinks it’s the looks people give her. It’s the pity in their eyes when they see her. At a restaurant, asking meekly for a table for one is bad enough. The mild hesitation as the hostess grabs the single menu and slowly clears away the napkin wrapped silverware from the other settings on the table. But with the landlords who have shown her apartments it’s even worse. There is no illusion of a boyfriend or husband out of town, just the cold undeniable reality of a woman approaching forty living alone, in an apartment the size of a shoebox.

This motel room isn’t helping either. She’s been here a little over a week, and the inky blackness of depression that is overcoming her is only reaffirmed and echoed by this place. It’s not only a testament to her failures socially, but professionally as well. Its shabbiness and tiredness sinks into her at the end of the day, and there is nothing to ring her out, to free her from it all.

Finishing off the other half of the sigh, she gets up from the bed, which creaks happily at the lifted load, and shuffles towards the bathroom. Taking off her work clothes, while deliberately avoiding looking into the mirror so that she doesn’t see what she already knows to be true, she switches into her pajama pants and top. She then puddles water in her hands and rubs off the makeup she wore today. It doesn’t take long.

Back to the bed, and with an accompanying creak she plops herself down on it. Its not even ten at night, but her first day at Dunder-Mifflin as the Human Resources Representative has robbed her of any energy. She tries to attribute it to age, or stress, but she knows it was more than just a first day, and more than just a party in the parking lot after work.

She glances over at the dinged nightstand, and briefly contemplates plowing through another twenty or thirty pages of East of Eden before she gets too tired. She’s not one to usually read Nobel Laureates or anything, but Oprah had recommended it, and she would feel vaguely guilty about reading Wuthering Heights or Emma again.

She decides against it, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on it anyway. The ink of the paragraphs would run together, and she’d end up reading ten pages without remembering a sentence of it. Her mind would flit away to somewhere else, or rather someone else.

It was nothing. Really. Except it was kind of something.

Holly knew her life was uneventful, and spent mostly alone. That solitude, which wrapped around the moments she spent with others, lead her to a great deal of fatigued and frenzied analysis and evaluation of her own actions and that of everyone else’s.

And so it is that something small, which normal people would brush off as nothing and insignificant, engulfs her now as she lies in bed at night.

She wants to forget it. To chalk it all up to her being terrible with men, which she is, and not understanding them at all, which she doesn’t. But a small part of her, maybe the voice of hope thought crushed by life experience, is flickering all these thoughts of Michael Scott through her mind. Images of him smiling at her, offering to make her a mix, and jokes between them that seemingly come so easily.

And with men nothing is easy for her. Ever.

She flicks off the lamp, and lets her thoughts spin in the darkness of the room; free of the tyranny of depression they would otherwise have to face in the light. She wants clarity, but everything is so confusing.

Maybe it’s the wedding proposal, she thinks. Maybe that clouds her judgment of what happened today with Michael. She’s thirty-eight and has never even been engaged. Wishful thinking, that’s it. Like the hope and promise of a new forever between two people has shifted something in her that makes her want this little spark of excitement to be fanned into a raging wildfire. 

Then there is the small part of her, again, that brings up his defense of her in the parking lot to that weird guy with the glasses. Why had he said that? She knew, or thought she did, that he was being serious enough. And she couldn’t even remember the last time a man had said something nice about her like that, or really even showed her any attention whatsoever.

Another sigh parts her lips in the blackness, and she brings her hand to her head. Pulling back the hair from her forehead, she feels the tension on her skin. If only she could shut down her mind, turn it off for just long enough to go to sleep, she’d be so much happier.

But she can’t, and never could. Especially now, with fresh fuel to burn, it churns and rotates without slowing down.

She wonders now, as she often does in the stillness of contemplation in bed, how they all do it. It seems as though everyone has someone else, whether dating or married. How are all these people meeting one another? How are they falling in love? What is she doing so wrong?

She used to just think it was because of how she looked. Every freckle, mole, pound gained, or line on her face was Exhibit A. They all screamed, “you can do better” to men who might fleetingly be interested. But the problem with that was the fact that everyone had someone else, not just models and actresses. So then what was wrong with her?

Holly turns to look at the clock glowing red in the dark. Its almost ten now, and she’s seriously contemplating picking Steinbeck up. Maybe she can wedge the words into her mind so that it’ll be too preoccupied to continue to whir and spin all these thoughts through it.

Because this is the worst part. This sort of self-pity and self-loathing that seemingly leads nowhere except further misery, and staved off sleep. It makes her feel despondent but curiously dangerous as well. As if a reckless action might lead to favorable results, something unexpected in a life that has been all too expected.

It already happened once today, she realizes, thinking back. Something inside of her, almost completely foreign, had put her hand on his jacket lightly and then held it there in the parking lot. Eventually their shared awkward laughter had separated them, and she had been embarrassed for a while, but he hadn’t pulled away. She had done something completely unlike her and something good had happened. Maybe that wasn’t so shocking.

She flips the light back on suddenly, her eyes squinting hard against its brightness. The tiredness of the room is ignored now, as she reaches onto a little table for her cell phone. Grabbing it, she sits down on the corner of the bed with it in her hands, looking intently at it for direction. It provides none though, and for every second that goes by she feels the burst of hope and of energy drain out of her. Calling him at ten o’clock at night? On the first day that they met?

Still, that doesn’t stop her from scrolling down to his cell phone number, which the guy in the glasses told her and insisted she memorize.

Michael.

It’s the unknown, and a game of chicken, she realizes. With about a five-millimeter movement of her thumb she could change something in her life for the better. Then again, she could make it worse, and embarrass herself completely, which history dictates is far more likely. Her bottom lip is tense between her teeth, and she wishes she knew what to do.

God, she wants so badly to take a chance again like she did in the parking lot today. It’s not just that she likes Michael, and she thinks that maybe, hopefully, he might like her back, it’s breaking the mounting frustration of the usual. It’s finally taking a risk that might pay off, just like she’s hoping this job will.

Her job. And suddenly it’s as if the hope and audacity that flows through her at the thought of Michael is crushed. The warm flicker of possibility snuffed out. She needs this job; she has to have this job, and messing that up by calling him tonight, making things awkward and looking desperate, would be awful.

Another sigh, because she knows it’s a rickety justification. But it works. She quietly walks over to the table and sets the cell phone on it. Turning her back to it now, she retreats to bed, and turns off the light for the final time.

She has time. There’s always tomorrow. Rome wasn’t built in a day. They can get to know each other. She’s stupid to feel like this so fast. What was she thinking? Why does she imagine things like this without any hope of them happening? What is wrong with her?

Holly closes her eyes tightly against all these thoughts and questions. It takes, she guesses, at least another hour before she finally falls asleep. But she doesn’t open her eyes once during that time, not even to let the tears that pool in her eyes spill down her cheeks to the lumpy and uncomfortable pillow below.