The Ascent

Elena stared at the coaxial cable snaking across her apartment floor, a black umbilical cord connecting her to a world she'd mostly stopped believing in. Three weeks after the layoff, and she still hadn't canceled her internet. Some part of her insisted she might need it, though for what—besides doom-scrolling and job rejections—she couldn't say.

Her phone lit up. Another LinkedIn notification: someone from her old company announcing their exciting new role at a firm that specialized in "disruptive wellness solutions." Elena had sat through enough PowerPoint presentations to recognize corporate **pyramid** schemes when she saw them, even dressed up in venture capital vocabulary and Instagram aesthetics. The structure never changed. Only the names of the people climbing over each other to reach the top.

The **cat**, Mercutio, jumped onto her desk, scattering the resumes she'd been agonizing over for days. He knocked a half-empty takeout container to the floor. Wilted **spinach** and cold rice spilled across her resume's carefully curated accomplishments. Elena watched it happen with a strange detachment.

"You're right," she said to the cat. "It's just paper."

She'd spent six years climbing toward something that didn't exist—a stable career, a future, a version of herself that felt solid instead of perpetually provisional. The layoff had shattered that illusion, but what frightened her more was the relief she'd felt when it happened. The hollowed-out feeling in her chest wasn't loss. It was the terrifying clarity of finally seeing things as they were.

Her mother called, worried about her silence. Elena answered, listened to the familiar questions about applications and networking and marketable skills, said the right things. Afterward, she sat on her balcony watching the city flicker below, thinking about how everyone she knew was tangled in some version of the same cable—tethered to expectations, to structures designed to extract their labor and sell it back to them as purpose.

The cat rubbed against her leg, purring insistently. It was dinner time. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Elena went inside, stepped over the spilled spinach and scattered paper, and opened a fresh can of cat food. Some obligations were simple. Some connections were real. She could start there.