Spinach in Your Teeth

You've been a corporate zombie for three years when Marcus notices the spinach. It's stuck between your front teeth during the Wednesday morning pitch meeting—your fourth presentation this week, still riding the caffeine high from a 3 AM panic session about quarterly projections.

He texts you under the table: *spinach. front teeth. left side.*

You excuse yourself, humiliated, and scrub at the mirror in the bathroom with your fingernail until your gums bleed. When you return, Marcus catches your eye and mouths a single word: *friend.*

It's the first real thing he's said to you in months.

Later that night, you're both working late again—the deadline looming like a guillotine. The office is bathed in orange light from the streetlamps below, turning the cubicle farm into something almost beautiful. Almost.

"Why do we do this?" Marcus asks, spinning in his chair. He's thirty-two and his hairline is already receding. You're twenty-nine and you've forgotten what it feels like to not be tired.

You want to say something profound. Something about ambition, about the mortgage, about the way your parents raised you to believe that suffering now meant something better later. Instead you say: "I don't know."

Marcus stands up and walks to the window. You follow him, and there it is—that orange glow again, coating everything in surreal light. The city below is alive in ways you haven't been in years.

"I'm going to quit," he says quietly. "Move to that farm in Vermont. The one with the spinach fields."

You've heard about the farm. His sister's place. He talks about it sometimes, in the small hours when you're both still here, pretending the email will ever stop coming.

"You should," you say, and you mean it. You hate him a little in that moment, but you love him too. He's your only real friend here, the only person who sees the zombie behind the suit.

"Come with me," he says.

The offer hangs there between you, heavy and terrifying. You could. You have savings. You're not married to this life, not really. You just forgot you had a choice.

You look at your reflection in the glass—tired eyes, teeth probably still carrying bits of lunch, wearing a shirt you bought on sale because you stopped caring what you looked like years ago.

"I can't," you say, and you hate yourself a little for it.

Marcus nods. He doesn't push. That's the thing about real friends—they know exactly how much you can carry, and they don't add weight beyond what you can bear.

He leaves two weeks later. You watch his empty cubicle get reassigned to a new hire—twenty-two, bright-eyed, already becoming something she doesn't recognize yet.

Sometimes, late at night when the orange light floods in through the windows, you think about Vermont. About spinach fields and choices not made. About the friend who saw your teeth and saved you, just for a moment, from becoming something worse than a zombie.

Someone who's forgotten how to be seen at all.