There was an awakening of sorts, a discovery that she was much stronger than she realized. The voices of doubt, fear, and self-loathing, which had been so deafening for weeks, were quieter these days. If they managed to gain volume in her mind, she didn't believe the lies they told, and they fell into the background noise again.
She had thrown herself into her art, the cathartic release of her emotions through the expression of the right side of her brain. She used every brushstroke as a salve, every smudge of charcoal with her finger a bandage for her battered heart, letting the pain pour out of her and onto the paper. Her sketchbook sat opened on her desk, a small display of her growth and change, a private catalog of her stream of consciousness, sketches of things she saw, snippets of words that came to her. She had wanted it to be healing, a way to express herself without actually talking to someone, but as she thumbed through it, her vision was rather myopic, the topic singular. Regardless, it gave her hands something to do, allowing them to instead push him out of her thoughts even though he sat closer to her than ever before. The mere feet felt like miles, and every day it seemed he drifted further, even as the copier's proximity gave her a front-row seat to the torture of hearing him banter with Karen in a way he used to only do with her. She would catch herself studying the back of his neck, where the edges of his long brown hair and the top of his collar collided as if all the mysteries of the last few months were written there.
There would be moments. Exchanges she would cling to, despite her efforts to brush them off, and replay them at night as a rebellious tear would draw a path down the side of her face to her hair as she stared at the blackness of her ceiling. Whispered flashes danced in the shadows of her mind: catching his ill-timed glance in the conference room, a brief, murmured goodnight as he grabbed his coat, the flicker of his eyes as he checked his messages. He had only been back a little over a week, and there were a thousand little cracks in the façade she rebuilt every day on her drive to work. Some cracks were like fissures, the slow drip of his physical nearness wearing away at her. Other times were like a hammer to the stone of her, remolding her entirely until she didn't know where the inside was any longer, unrecognizable from the shape she showed the world. She watched across the bullpen as Karen held the new coworker's baby, and he leaned casually against her desk, the familiar lines of him always calling to her. Their conversation was brief, but when Karen met her eyes confidently as he walked away, there was an implicit declaration in the language of women, a meaningful statement on the symbolism of a baby...and him.
She had no idea what Karen knew about her. There were times she would glance at her with suspicion, and she swore he had told her everything; every dark, terrible secret she had ever confessed to him with her eyes and the undercurrents of all the things they left unsaid. Other times, she would smile warmly, and Pam was certain he had never even uttered her name in her presence. Surely she would not see her as benign if she knew that just a few short months ago, the man she was sleeping with, who held her hand and opened doors for her, had laid everything at her feet, and she had let him walk away.
More often, days were punctuated by the lack of him, as he actively avoided her. His ambivalence to her was surpassed only by the pitying contempt most of the eyes in the office held for her since she had called off her wedding; believing she had foolishly thrown away her only potential chance at happiness.
Square footage does not lie, and despite his efforts, eventually, their paths crossed. She held her breath when he had miscalculated on mapping his path and perfectly timed breaks and went for coffee at the same time as she had. Out of her peripheral vision, she watched him pause slightly in the doorway as the blinds rattled on the glass, then resigning his fate, felt him brush behind her, the softness of her cardigan moving somewhat from the cotton of his dress shirt. Knowing the meter and rhythms of his movements so intimately, she could tell he was awkward and stilted, gone was the easy, familiar flow of him around her. He stood inches from her, shoulder-to-shoulder facing the coffee maker, and her body leaned towards his by degrees of its own before she counteracted the gravity and righted herself. For a brief moment, the noise of the office faded, and she could hear his soft inhale and exhale.
He glanced at her with a slight smile before reaching for the cabinet in front of her.
"Your cup is still here. No one ever tossed it." She spoke quietly, wading slowly into the stormy waters that surrounded him. The unfinished thought hung between them, and she knew he heard the words 'I wouldn't let them' as clear as if she had spoken them aloud.
"Oh, good. I would hate to have to go mug hunting. You can't find 'Grandma is a Great Cook' just anywhere."
The levity of his comment fell and landed on the cheap linoleum tiles at their feet. There were a dozen broken words that lingered in their eyes before she reached up and grabbed his old coffee cup, and handed it to him. The brushing of their fingers as he took it, a gesture so ordinary to go unnoticed any other time and with any other person, sent tiny electric sparks through her that settled warm in the pit of her stomach. Now, she knew what those hands felt like on her body, the pressure, and give as they traced invisible markings on her soul. That night, with her repurposed bridesmaid's dress and hastily wiped away tears, had changed her fundamentally and she would never again be the same. Somewhat reassuringly, when she lifted her face to his, she read the same story in his eyes; awareness and knowledge were now the enemy. With an anguished grimace he shifted away from her as if she had burned him and the pain had just registered to his brain. She felt the moment snap like a tight cable, and they were thrown, once again, into the basic kitchen with its fluorescent lights and phones ringing in the distance.
Then there was Andy. Her initial impression of the man was a cross between a used car salesman and a circus performer. Still, when he stood in front of her desk, reading word for word, every last detail out of the book Things That Annoy Pam Beesly, she sat in shocked horror at his incredible insight accented by his profoundly tone-deaf request for a date. It wasn't until he smacked Jim on the shoulder as he passed that it all became clear, and as he turned slowly to smirk triumphantly in her direction, shades of him returned to her, vibrant and elusive. Their secret language, understood only by them, was exchanged once more, and she couldn't stop the smile that spread from somewhere deep in reply. Despite her efforts to school her expression, by the time the camera crew called her in for an interview, her cheeks ached in overuse. She barely heard their questions as she replayed every nuanced thing Andy had mentioned and how that meant Jim had remembered so many minute details about her, and the oddly intimate feeling that held.
She felt something stirred alive inside her that she had not felt in a very, very long time.
Hope.
Author's Chapter Notes:
I promise I'm still around. ;)
