Inventory of Leaving

The cardboard box sat on my desk like a small coffin. Six years of my career, about to be reduced to whatever I could carry in a single container.

I picked up the papaya from my desk first — a retirement gift from Jenkins that had sat uneaten for three weeks. Its skin was mottled with yellow bruises, a metaphor for everything this job had become. I dropped it in the trash.

The orange hat hung on the back of my chair, a remnant of the Halloween party where Marcus and I first kissed. I could still smell his cologne on the brim, or maybe I was just imagining ghosts. That hat went into the box.

My computer screen flickered. The cable connecting it to the wall had been fraying for months, exposed wires like the nerves I'd developed about this place. I'd meant to replace it, like I'd meant to leave a dozen times before. Some problems you just learn to live with.

The breakroom refrigerator yielded a container of spinach, purchased during my brief January attempt at self-improvement. It had liquefied into something unrecognizable, much like the version of myself I'd been when I started here — ambitious, optimistic, willing to believe that eating better would somehow fix everything that was broken.

I looked around the empty cubicle. Someone else would sit here tomorrow. They'd bring their own photos, their own snacks, their own delusions about what this job could become. They'd probably fix the cable.

The box felt impossibly light as I walked to the elevator. Marcus was waiting there, holding two coffees like nothing had changed. He saw the box and my face and the orange hat visible through the cardboard flaps.

"You're actually doing it," he said.

"I'm actually doing it."

"Could've used another hat," he attempted, but his smile didn't reach his eyes.

"Yours was the only one worth keeping."

The elevator doors opened. I stepped through them carrying nothing but a box of ghosts and the sudden terrifying realization that leaving wasn't the hard part — it was finally figuring out what came next.