We are a product of our environment, and we have the power to mould our environment. We can curate an environment to thrive, or we can unknowingly stifle ourselves.
Kate works in an office and suffers back problems.
She wakes up every morning to the sound of an alarm she hates out of existence and after several additional alarms she finally resurrects herself by staring at a makeup tutorial. Kate feels utterly powerless at the impending exhaustion of the day. With despair, she clings onto routine to carry her through her morning. Kate must triage morning activities because of her slow start. Quick thinking and guile allow her to make quick work of her essential morning chores. Kate pops her absolutely necessary pills, a contraceptive for sex which will not almost certainly not happen and a mild painkilling for the internal cramping she naturally suffers.
Kate does not have enough time to apply makeup and inserts a tampon. Kate feels hideous, but she cannot be late today. She received a warning last month which came very close to her losing her job. I cannot. Kate feels blood pumping throughout her body, sending her into almost a panic. But as fortune would have it painkiller she previously ingested kicks in, and she makes it into the cold elevator shaft, in which she descends. During this interval she contemplates how the chill would normally worsen her cramping abdomen. This is until a primal maternal feeling, fuzzied by the opiate, swells up inside of her. This is best Kate will feel all day.
People bustle around her. She feels her sense of personal identity strip away. She imagines their hands to her around her, about to violate her and touch her, but before Kate is consumed by her fantasy, the feeling dies, and Kate remembers the ordeal of her work that she must do. Numbness begins to set in as she sits down. Kate is about to put on her favourite music, wistful songs about how the love of her life is just around the corner. Instead she remembers that that offensive political campaign is raging on and she must be informed. This is her duty. Kate spends her commute listening to people verbally attacking each other.
Kate stares into Bill’s dead fish eyes. She likes to imagine that Bill is a tuna, a delicacy she had once when she was promoted. It had been from answering calls to reviewing templates containing all the possible conversations a customer and an attendant could have. Bill says some words, very predictable of him. There were few changes to the document that she was tasked to update. Five minutes late to the pre-work meeting and her final warning. James is looking. Customers have been demanding to be addressed by the correct honorifics, several of which she had only just learn this morning during the heated argument. Bill’s dead eyes leave, and formulaically he greets each of her associates. James brief acknowledgement stabs her causing flutter in her chest, the edge of which, dulled. Kate briefly contemplates her templated words, but none allow her to express her undisclosed desires. Not in this context. No, James should start a legitimate conversation. That is social conversion convention.
Kate sits down at her desk, on which is adorned with sentimental ornamentation from her youth. Several of which are idols whom she practically worshipped as a child. She recalled reading all the content about these idols that she could possibly find. She had searched and searched until she finally had laid her eyes of a treasure trove of content, all of which dedicated to explicit prose about these idols. Lust filled her eyes, she could no longer recall what she even liked in these idols. The memories of them smeared with nonsense.
• She found this work, or more precisely this work found her as her only options were this and degrading cleaning jobs. Kate had not considered service jobs as she would have felt so violated in them, and the terror of a customer becoming obsessed with her was too much for her to consider. She feels tape wrap around her face. Nails dig into her. I want to scream but I can’t. Affixation switches to being ravenous. Kate realised she missed her sugary yellow and blue cereal. No wonder this day is off to a bad start.
She sits under her office’s open plan corpse trees. Their chrome exterior infinitely reflecting the gaunt faces of her co-workers and distorting them into gross, barely formed forms. On second consideration, the reflections can only be a finite number of forms, just like the finite number of forms, just like the finite number of honorifics being generated each day she will have to manually update. Each honorific contains a number of rules with how the sentences form around them. She will have to learn each of these rules so she can update this document, a process that is very error prone. However, mistakes will be caught when users complain. She must familiarise herself with the product so she pulls out her device and uses the product. It doesn’t work as expected. No one told her that they changed one of the bright colours to another. She will have to implement further updates to her document, only after she can locate who in this complex knows where to excavate this information. Her device informs her the location that she must go to to undertake this procedure. Good, I didn’t need to ask. This glimmer of hope is distorted beyond recognition when she stares up at the monstrous trees. This time, reflection is warped into a myriad of other worldly stairs. This in turn is shattered by the cramps. As she proceeds towards the diagonal labyrinth she overhears serval co-workers – one she recognises – discussing the argument from the morning. All of whom agree that that person is stupid and verbalise their hatred him. They nod and yell in agreement. One who she doesn’t recognise leers at her aft, and calls out if she wants to join them after work. They surround her. The lady she recognises breasts jiggle with hard nipples pointing through. She agrees out of instinct to come with them after work. The lady regards her with wide pupils. Kate thinks James and how his pupils would dilate when she greets him. She sits down and imagines what she will do to herself after work, but her brain starts buzzing and anxiety returns in full force. The task she was to undertake is completely forgotten and she returns to hunching over and working on her document, seemingly unaware that anything had past, but now with James’s warping features in her brains fighting off aggravating arguments and honorific rules. The rules quickly triumph until anger seeps through, and storms her thoughtress. Her brain becomes a storm of rage directed at the source. This cannot do. Kate forces herself to look at distracting content on her device. She is temporarily mollified. The pain persists but this time is compounded by her back complications. After Kate rips her eyeballs from her device, she turns her attention to the document. The rest of the day creeps by a slow annoy. Kate’s back screams at her. Her inner organs join the chorus. Kate does some work and has an unpleasant time.
Then after work she goes out with some co-worker who coerced her into going out with them. She complains about her back and receives lots of sympathy with does very little for her pain. She leaves them after the group’s conversations turn to politics. Kate cared about this discourse earlier in the day. Really, she just wants to get fucked on whatever at this point. She worries a bit about how she could lose her job. Now she feels conflicted about the drinks that begin to go around. The is fearful and borderline paranoid that that drink will cause her work performance to go down and she will lose her job and lifestyle where she can go and occasionally get tuna at a restaurant, despite rising prices.
She finds herself going home in the cold, with work on her mind, but not enough to maintain interest. Having experienced an unpleasant day, although not the worst of her life. She looks at a screen for several hours and feels a fleeting sense of joy, and finally falls asleep.
The End