Spinach at the Pyramid

Forty-seven years old and eating spinach from a plastic container in the breakroom of the Pyramid Corporation — the name itself a joke about corporate hierarchies, the ones at the top crushing everyone below. The spinach tasted like nothing, like Monday mornings, like missed opportunities.

She'd met him at a conference in Palm Springs five years ago. He'd read her palm in a hotel bar, his thumb tracing the lines of her hand while both pretended it wasn't foreplay. "You'll bear great burdens," he'd said, and she'd laughed, ordered another drink, let him believe he was profound.

Now her father was dying, and she was bearing it alone. The oncologist had used words like "pyramid scheme of hope" — false promises stacked upon false promises, each tier more expensive than the last.

The water cooler bubbled behind her. Someone laughed in the hallway — bright, young laughter that belonged to people who still believed time was something they had, not something they were running out of.

She'd stopped eating the spinach. Just stared at it, thinking about how her mother used to say "eat your greens" like it was incantation against mortality, as if chlorophyll could stop the inevitable.

Her phone buzzed. A text from the Palm Springs man — still in her contacts under "Conference Dave" — asking if she'd be at this year's event. She considered the distance between who she was then and who she was now, measured in dead father's and stalled careers and spinach wilting in plastic containers.

She typed back: "No. I'm done with pyramids."

Then deleted it. Typed: "Maybe."

The truth was, she'd bear it — all of it. Because that's what people did. They ate the spinach, paid the bills, loved the dying, showed up. It wasn't heroic. It was just bearing the weight of being human, one ordinary day at a time.

She threw the spinach away and went back to her desk.