The walls here are soft, not like a blanket but like one of those boards that you can stick pieces of felt to for telling stories to children. Maybe one day I’ll stick some felt animals on my wall and tell the story of Noah’s Ark. Their felt figures stacked haphazardly above the boat. Dinosaurs crying for help from the expanse of the soft, grey sea. But maybe kids all have tablets now and they don’t use felt anymore. It doesn’t matter. There are no children here.
Anyway—it is soft. Soft and a muted grey color flecked with whites and reds like a man’s suit, I guess. Not a lot of men here either. Not really anyone in suits. But it’s the kind of thing you can imagine being suiting fabric. Or maybe one day I’ll just tear it down and wrap a soft, grey cloak around myself. It will be a toga or a sari or a cape. You can’t make a suit without needles, scissors, other sharp objects.
Everything is grey here, not just the walls. The only other thing I can really see from my designated space is the ceiling and that’s filled with grey too. Grey tiles with pounding, fluorescent lights interspersed between them, washing out any other colors. At first, the lights made my head hurt, but I guess now my head has grown used to it and doesn’t hurt, or it perpetually hurts and I’ve just accepted this as the new normal. It’s hard to say.
There are other people here too. I can hear them and sometimes they visit them or they visit me and we talk about how grey it is and how you can almost see out the window if you stand in the right spot. There’s a small balcony area, but no one is allowed to go out there. My neighbor said that they are afraid we might jump. She said it like she was joking, but I don’t think she really was. Her eyes weren’t joking.
They give us meaningless work to complete. It piles up and then I look at it and write notes about it. I even call people sometimes. Then I pile it up for someone else. I guess that’s how work works. I didn’t know that before, but here it is true.
It feels like I’ve been here for years, but it’s hard to say at this point. Maybe it was only a week, a day, an hour, a minute. Time is stretching out across the sunny spot on the floor to warm its belly like a housecat.
You know in the movie version of The Wizard of Oz? It starts out in black and white. Being there feels like being stuck on the bleak Kansas prairie. All grey. I understand why Dorothy was glad to leave (but not why she was so eager to go home). When I leave, it’s like I’m suddenly in Oz and like Dorothy, I’m overcome; the color outside is so blinding, so brilliant in comparison to the grey expanse inside.
I head to the restroom and say goodbye to my coworkers. I check my email once more, turn off my computer, and grab my purse. It’s finally 5 o’clock. Work is over for today.
