My Darling – Chapter 1 – I’ve Met You

My darling,

I’ve been at the company ten years. Long enough to stop noticing the hum of the building, the smell of the third-floor carpet, the break room clock that’s said 4:47 for as long as anyone remembers and that nobody bothers to fix, because fixing it would require someone to care. I’m not proud of that. I’m also not going to pretend it isn’t comfortable. 

There’s a version of a life where you know exactly how every Tuesday will go before it happens, and people talk about that like it’s a tragedy. Mostly it just means you’ve stopped spending energy on things that were never going to surprise you.

You show up in September. Intern, twenty-three, some communications degree I’d never heard of, the kind of resume that reads like enthusiasm more than experience. 

HR sends the usual welcome email and I read about four words of it before deleting it, because I’ve read that email a dozen times for a dozen interns, and most of them figure out the printer and then disappear.

You’re loud. 

That’s the first thing I remember about you, and it’s still true, for the record – you’re loud in meetings, loud on the phone, loud about things nobody else in the building has the energy to be loud about. 

Not rude-loud. 

Enthusiastic-loud, the kind that hasn’t been told no enough times yet. 

That first week you ask why we route everything through legal twice, why anyone still reads a report nobody’s opened in years, and the senior people in the room do that thing where they glance at each other instead of answering, because the honest answer is nobody, we’ve just always done it this way,and that answer embarrasses everyone except you, apparently, because you keep asking it.

I think you’re naive at first. Not extraordinary – naive. Here’s someone who hasn’t been disappointed enough yet, I think. 

Give it a year. Give it one bad review, one project killed for no reason, one manager taking credit for your idea in a meeting you weren’t invited to, and you’ll learn to stop asking why, same as the rest of us.

You don’t go quiet, though.

 I know that much about you surprisingly early. You’re new enough to still believe things can be better, which is a different condition entirely, and a more annoying one, because naive people usually go quiet eventually.

 You don’t.

 I’ve been there long enough to know exactly where hope goes to die – which drawer, which meeting, which manager’s inbox – and I don’t say that to you, obviously, because saying it out loud to a twenty-three-year-old on her second week feels like a specific kind of cruelty even by my standards.

What I say instead, the first time you actually speak to me, is something about the coffee machine on the third floor having been broken since before you were hired. You’d gone up with a mug and come back empty-handed, mentioned it to the room in general, mostly to make conversation. 

I mention the machine without really thinking – pure reflex, the kind of dry observation I make eight times a day to nobody in particular – and you look at me like it’s the saddest thing you’ve heard all week. Also maybe the funniest. Both at once, which is still how you take most things, somehow – sad and funny in the same breath, like the two aren’t as separate as everyone else pretends they are.

You ask how long it’s actually been broken. Not the vague version – real time, weeks or months. 

I tell you I genuinely can’t remember a version of the office where it worked. 

You say that’s an insane way to run a building. 

I tell you to welcome to the company.

You laugh, short and surprised, like you hadn’t expected the exchange to go anywhere, and go back to your desk. 

I go back to mine and don’t think about it again until the next morning, when I notice – not on purpose, just the way you notice weather – that you’re at your desk before I am, going through files that belong to a department two doors down from the one you’d been assigned to.

I tell you those aren’t yours. You say you know, you’d finished your own, you got bored. I point out you got bored on your second week. You say you get bored easily, it’s a design flaw, and go back to the file without looking up, and add that whoever built the filing system clearly hated the people who’d have to use it – alphabetized by first name instead of company name, which you say is insane.

I’ve known that for six years and stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing a smell you live inside of. 

You point it out once, on your second week, and I notice it every time I open that cabinet for a month straight after, which I resent slightly, because being right about something small and useless shouldn’t be as satisfying to watch as it is.

Sometime in your first month you ask why I don’t seem to like the job. Not accusatory – genuinely curious, the way you ask most things, like you’re collecting data on a species you haven’t fully classified yet.

I tell you I like it fine.

You say that isn’t the same thing.

I tell you it’s close enough.

You say it really isn’t – that liking something fine is what you say about a sandwich, and I’ve been there ten years, and that isn’t a sandwich answer.

I don’t have anything to say to that. 

Or I have several things and none of them are things I’m willing to say to an intern I’ve known three weeks, so I change the subject badly and ask whether you’ve finished a report that was due an hour earlier.

You clock the deflection. You always do. 

There’s a specific little flicker in your face when you know I’m avoiding something – your eyebrows move first, then the corner of your mouth, then you decide whether you’re going to let me get away with it.

You let me, that time. Go back to your desk.

I sit there a minute longer than the moment warrants, irritated that I don’t have a better answer.

More irritated that you noticed I didn’t.

You notice most things.

It’s still a problem.