work / life balance

[Guest Kyubey]

"So? How was your day?"

I'm sitting in your office, pressing one finger to my ear to better hear your voice. The low din of the dealership threatens to drown out the soft hum coming into my other ear; I'm trying to hear you better. There isn't much for us to talk about. I'm only calling because my question is pressing, and I can't reach your supervisor. Still, I ask. I ask because there is that strange, unspoken sigh in your voice, the note of not wanting to put down the phone and fade away from a comforting voice. Or is that simple tiredness? Can I presume enough to tell the difference?

"It's been alright. Had lunch with Jacob, worked on some stuff here."

Jacob is the manager that's quitting, quitting because he can't have what you have. You didn't have to tell me you talked to him, so you must tell me because you know I'm an eavesdropper, a nosy hoarder of information, a person who meddles with things beyond her pay grade. You must tell me because you would like to tell me about your conversation with Jacob; you want to talk about your day, like you would talk to a friend. Only, I work for you, and we're skating on thin ice.

"Busy day?"

"Productive day."

I have a tendency to talk and fill silences. This time, I wait for you. So you talk a little more, before you say you'll see me on Monday.

Have a good night.

Ω

I didn't see myself here, at this job. I was thrown by your excessively informal demeanor; my interview was an hour and some minutes of questions scattered amidst conversation. I accepted the offer because -- I was curious.

Your friendliness, at first, meant little to me. Sometimes you were an outright distraction from the work I'd been assigned, which I was peevishly intent on completing. 'What if you could pump all the oceans into the atmosphere and have it orbit the earth, to get all the treasure at the bottom of the sea?' You debated jean pockets with me, considering my retail background. Then again, you have that talent of making people feel special. You have an interest that feels genuine. That, I came to understand, is what people respond to in a leader.

But I couldn't discount the rest of it, not over time. 'Did you ask Sasha that question?' 'What question,' you said innocently. 'Did you ask her what she thought about having the hottest manager in the region?' No, you hadn't asked me. But you grinned over it.

We are naturally interested in the people who are interested in us. You treated me like someone you wanted to know more about, so I could not help but slowly turn towards you, as flowers turn towards the sun. It is harder to remember a time when I faced away from you.

Ω

"So did you catch the hedgehog?"

Six months later, you shift awkwardly from foot to foot. Six months later, we are not such good friends anymore. You have promised me pictures and stories, and underdelivered. Certainly you've been gone, out of state, traveling for work; certainly we have seen little of each other. But the warmth has carried on, as warm as sporadic text and email can be. The sudden absence of it is abrupt.

Have I erred in some way? Have I misunderstood you? I am lost without you here. I am a stranger, an alien, an equation without a simple answer to everyone else; without you, I am oversimplified, rounded off. How far I am from my time with you, describing so vividly how I should move around the country, embrace opportunities, ascend to dazzling heights. Weakness was as visible to you as that promise of greatness. You described a person I could become, so that I might believe in becoming.

Our misfortune is in there being more to the whole story, then, or the misinterpretation of such a story. The people around me tell me you're never coming back. They tell me you're going to move on to greater things. Then why is everything still in your office? Why all your stupid decorations?

I slowly regret my reciprocation of your friendliness. Ironically, I regret it because I dream it has diminished yours.

Ω

But you do come back. You come back and you look at me in such a strange, stilted way that I fear the burden of it. I am more attractive than I was when you left. I am a stronger indictment of your implied missteps. Who picked up your phone and hated me - your fiancée, or your supervisor?

The fun fact you share during our new colleague's icebreaker is that you're engaged with three children. The next day, you advise that coworker that I am a pursuer of married men.

"No," I tell you, "I like my men damaged and unavailable."

I suppose I can consider you sporting about that.

Ω

You do come back around too. You circle around to my desk and talk and talk and talk, talk for forty-five minutes straight, about where you've been, what you've been doing. You hold me up from what I'm doing, again, and you hold me in disbelief. Here we are, in January. Here we are, as I have endured your stiff appearances and radio silence since August. Here we are, two days into your return, and here we return to where we had been.

The truth is that we are alike, as alike as people can be with a decade difference in age. The telling of your stories is not simply in narrating the events: you are enough a storyteller that the average listener could be reasonably entertained. The telling of it all is in telling it to someone who can see it through eyes like yours, telling it to someone who can understand what it is you mean.

I have missed you. Did you miss me?

Ω

"Do you have a minute?"

"I always have a minute for you."

Your only defense is in hoping people cannot see the tree for the forest. I disguise structure behind a passion for people, you say. I don't like people to see the structure. Can they see us, then? Can they guess? When I pass by the glass doors of your office, we look up and at each other, for no reason, silently.

I am different. This is different. The difference lies in the risk, because I am a woman, and your subordinate. The things you say to me require a depth of trust that your bosses wouldn't want you to chance in the workplace. But you do. I don't want to stop you, because - who else do I have to play with?

I talk about moving away, and becoming a different person. I talk about deceiving all the people who won't know enough to know better. Smiling, you ask jokingly what kind of degenerate this might make me. There's a word for it, of course: a word that applies to us both. We are the foxes in the henhouse. We are the wolves leading the sheep. I tell you that my type of degenerate is successful in the workplace: I tell you, in other words, that you are right. I tell you, in other words, that it takes one to know one.

Ω

"How was your day?"

Corporate headquarters might not be so keen on listening to you right now. Your clout has come up against a harder limit; you have advocated for me too radically. You have proposed dramatic exceptions to my position and advancement. Perhaps you have sold me a little indecently, the promises of a hedge fund manager to investors. Here we are, almost a year later. The hardest part of leaving will be leaving you. I have been so lucky to have someone who understands me.

But we are dangerous people. We are destroyers. We are conquerers. We are cannibals. We are trying to get by and be happy in a world that wants us to wear velvet gloves as we crush fragile, hollow bones. It is I who may destroy you yet, the way rocks wait for a ship to sail into them. For a little while, the rocks and the ship are together.

So I ask you about your day, when the day before you were again struggling to look me in the eye. I ask because I am sorry for you, for me, for the both of us. You are getting married in November. You make fun of another colleague because he doesn't have a straight answer on loving his wife. But do you?

Monday will come and go. The day is coming when I will go too. Can I call you then?