People aren’t meant to live this way, she thought. The laptop was practically a tenant in her queen-size bed, which she was downgrading to a full after the move. Frequently she woke up to the sleek silver rectangle on the pillow next to her, where her boyfriend once used to sleep. Almost a year had now passed since their breakup. She thought about buying a cake to mark the calendar spread, but cakes reminded her of divorcées who threw themselves divorce showers. Nothing at all against divorcées (“some of my best friends are divorcées!!”), whom she loved as a category and felt an intense sort of camaraderie towards. But a divorce shower? Bleak, very bleak.
Working from bed was bad for her sleep hygiene, she knew, but the bedroom was the only halfway-tidy area in the entire apartment. Dishes piled up, not only in the sink but cascading across the counters and into the living room like an invasive species. Diet Coke cans lay strewn across tables and desks — look away for a moment, and three more popped up. You spot one baby Diet Coke in an apartment, there’s likely an entire infestation. It was poor man’s Adderall abuse. The garbage can was supplemented by Whole Foods paper bags filled to the handle with plastic food wrappings. Paper towels substituted for toilet paper, which meant she could only pee, because the towels didn’t flush. She went full anteater mode in bed, holding the comforter up to her mouth to slurp the crumbs away.
They said applying for jobs was a full-time job, and by that logic, what she needed was a wife to do the homemaking, a manager to hold her accountable to deadlines, and a secretary to take calls from her mom. It was demeaning, reading through the numerous requirements on each listing, only to scroll to the salary at the bottom. She knew they were all victims of capitalism, in a macro sort of way, but in the micro sense, was it really necessary that she be one, too? It didn’t seem to matter whether she applied to entry-level or director; she was always over-, under-, not qualified.
Tomorrow, her roommate returned, which sparked the motivation of fear deep within her soul. This is no way to live. She had to clean. In total, it took only forty-five minutes. As a reward, she got herself off by reading amateur internet smut full of mixed metaphors and grammatical errors like: “i wants to made her cum like a juicy ripe waterfall over my pulsating animal cock.” For some reason, that turned her on more, imagining a person behind the screen too horny and frenzied to type anything literary.
After that, she had no more excuses. It was already almost noon. She felt overcome by a deep wave of fatigue, as she always did when the actual work was about to start. The fatigue masked the pain of self-assessment. Did a graduate degree from an R1 institute mean nothing these days? She wished she could rewind to the blissful age of being on her parent’s health insurance. She would do all the unpaid internships — the useful ones. Why, in her idealistic youth, had she imagined herself an artist? The hubris was astounding in retrospect. Now she was piecing together her life experiences for hiring managers who outsourced to AI, marketing herself as a “storyteller.” (Whatever that meant.)
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