Chapter 3: What You Learn

The job teaches you things. How to make coffee that tastes like regret. How to nod during meetings that could have been emails. How to answer questions you're not being asked. How to look busy when there's nothing to do. How to look focused when you've stopped caring. How to become someone who fits.

Janet becomes your mentor. This is what they call it when someone decides you're worth the effort of breaking correctly.

"You care too much," she tells you three weeks in, and you're in her office which smells like expensive candles and disappointment. "I can see it in your emails. All that sincerity. All those exclamation points. You think being enthusiastic makes you seem committed."

"I am committed," you say.

"Then stop performing commitment and just do the work."

You learn to remove the exclamation points. You learn to write emails that say everything and mean nothing. You learn the difference between being good at your job and being good at looking like you're good at your job. They're not the same thing. The second one matters more.

The phone doesn't ring again for two months. You start to think you imagined it. Start to think maybe you had some kind of episode, some stress-induced hallucination brought on by too much coffee and not enough sleep and the particular kind of loneliness that comes from living in a city where everyone is ambitious and no one is happy.

Then it's January and you're walking home and it's dark at 5 PM which seems wrong, which seems like the world is broken at a fundamental level, and the phone buzzes in your pocket.

Your number. Your voice.

"You're still there," the voice says, and it sounds tired. More tired than before.

"I'm here."

"I was hoping you wouldn't be. I was hoping you'd ignored me and gone to the bookstore anyway and now you'd be someone else and I wouldn't have to be me."

You stop walking. You're standing outside a Starbucks and inside there are people on laptops and they all look like you. Same tired eyes. Same clothing that costs too much. Same feeling of slowly disappearing into a life that looks good from outside.

"What happens now?" you ask.

"You meet someone. His name is David. He works on the fifth floor. He's funny and smart and he makes you feel like maybe you're funny and smart too. And you'll think: finally. Finally something good."

"And?"

"And he believes the same things Janet believes. That wanting makes you weak. That needing makes you pathetic. That love is something you fit in between meetings. You'll think you can change him. You can't. But you'll spend three years trying."

You can hear traffic in the background of the future call. A siren. Someone shouting. The same sounds that are in your present because cities never really change, they just keep making the same noises while everyone inside them pretends they're going somewhere.

"I can just not date him," you say.

"You can. But you won't. Because by now you're already becoming the person who stays. Who accepts. Who makes do. Janet's teaching you well."

"I could quit."

"You could."

"But I won't."

"No," the voice says, and it's your voice, and it knows you better than you know yourself because it's had more time to learn all the ways you fail. "You won't."

The call ends. You stand outside the Starbucks and watch the people who look like you and you think about David who you haven't met yet and Janet who you see every day and the bookstore that probably hired someone else by now, someone who said yes when they should have, someone who wanted something and wasn't afraid to admit it.

You go back to work the next day. And the next. And the next.

In March, you meet David.