Sphinx in the Break Room

The orange sat on my desk like a small, pregnant sun. I'd been running on caffeine and regret since 7 AM, and now it was 2:00 PM and I still hadn't cracked it open.

"You're going to talk to him, right?" Sarah asked, leaning against my cubicle wall. She'd been working here three months and still believed in things like courage and speaking truth to power. I'd been here three years and believed mainly in direct deposit and health insurance.

"The sphinx awaits," I said, nodding toward the corner office.

The CEO—let's call him what he was: a modern sphinx perched on a pile of shareholder value, posing riddles about synergy and rightsizing. If you answered wrong, you didn't get eaten. You just got slowly digested by the mortgage industry instead.

I peeled the orange. The spray of citrus hit the air like bottled optimism. I'd been running from this conversation for six months. Since the merger. Since the layoffs. Since they killed the project I'd spent two years building like it was nothing more than a typo in a spreadsheet.

"He asked me yesterday if I was 'engaged,'" I told Sarah. "Not in the marital sense. In the corporate sense. As in: am I fully present, am I leaning in, am I giving 110 percent to a company that would replace me with an algorithm if the numbers penciled out."

Sarah's face did that thing young faces do when they realize maybe the adults don't have it figured out either. "So what did you say?"

"I said I was working on some initiatives." I laughed, and it sounded like someone shaking a bag of broken glass. "I didn't tell him I spend my lunch hour running around the park until my lungs burn, just to feel something real. Just to remember my body belongs to me for forty-five minutes a day."

The sphinx's door opened. He stepped out, smiling that smile that never reached his eyes. "Janet, good—you're still here. Come on in. We need to discuss your trajectory."

I looked at my half-eaten orange. The wedges sat there like little questions.

I stood up. My legs felt light, like they'd been running.

"Actually," I said, and my voice didn't shake, "I have something to discuss too."

Sarah's eyes went wide.

The sphinx waited.

I walked toward the office, leaving the orange on my desk. Sometimes you don't solve the riddle. Sometimes you just stop playing the game.