Midnight Orange

The orange sat on my desk like a tiny sun, mocking me. Three in the morning and the office still hummed with that particular frequency of desperation that only exists during crunch time. I peeled it, the citrus spray cutting through the recycled air and stale coffee breath that had become my atmosphere.

My phone buzzed. Sarah again. Twenty-three messages since our fight at dinner. She'd ordered the spinach salad, picked at each leaf with surgical precision, and told me she couldn't do this anymore—not the late nights, not the missed anniversaries, not the marriage that had become like two strangers sharing a WiFi password.

The ethernet cable on my floor had developed a fray at the connector, a tiny exposed wire that caught the desk lamp's light. I kept meaning to replace it, but there was something poetic about the way it still transmitted data through its own slow decay. We were all just frayed cables, weren't we? Signal degrading, connection intermittent, hoping nobody noticed the packets dropping.

I typed code that I wouldn't remember writing. The zombie project—that's what we called it in the dev team. Systems that should have been decommissioned years ago, still shuffling along, consuming resources, performing tasks everyone had forgotten the purpose of. Sometimes I looked in the mirror and saw the same dead eyes staring back.

The water cooler bubbled. I stood there, paper cup in hand, watching the bureaucratic sunrise tint the windows grey. Somewhere out there, Sarah was probably sleeping—or maybe lying awake, wondering where it all went wrong. I tossed the orange peel into the bin and watched it settle among the graveyard of abandoned attempts. Tomorrow I'd fix the cable. Tomorrow I'd call her back. Tomorrow I'd figure out what we were supposed to become when we stopped pretending this was sustainable.

For now, there was coffee, and the zombie project, and the faint citrus ghost on my fingers.