The Drowning Room

The fluorescent lights hummed their eternal complaint as Maya sat on the toilet lid, her phone glowing with unanswered messages. Outside, the office churned like a living organism, but in here, she could finally breathe.

She'd become a zombie somewhere between the age of thirty and thirty-five—those years when your mother stops calling to ask about your dreams and starts asking about your 401(k). The dead don't dream, after all. They just metabolize coffee into spreadsheets and hope nobody notices they've stopped feeling anything.

The interview yesterday had been a train wreck. Some twenty-something with an orange tie had asked about her five-year plan. Five years. She couldn't plan past lunch.

"What can you bring to this role?" he'd asked, pen hovering like a weapon.

She'd almost said: The ability to bullshit my way through meetings while imagining everyone naked. She'd almost said: The comfort of knowing that the bull they sell you about passion and purpose is just fertilizer for someone else's garden.

Instead she'd smiled and told him about her "proven track record of cross-functional synergy."

Her phone buzzed again. David, her ex, wanted to know if he could pick up the dog. It had been their dog, once—a rescue named River who loved water more than any living thing Maya had ever known. River would fetch sticks from the ocean until her paws bled, joy incarnate in fur and saliva. Now River was David's dog. Now River was probably sleeping on David's new girlfriend's side of the bed.

Maya stood up and looked in the mirror. The woman staring back had her mother's eyes and her father's talent for disappointing everyone she loved.

She flushed the toilet—an act of closure, however small—and stepped back into the hallway.

The break room smelled of stale coffee and artificial creamer. Todd from accounting was microwaving fish again. The humanity of it all was crushing.

Her phone lit up one last time. Not David this time. A message from her mother: Your father's having that procedure next Tuesday. The water's shut off in the building again. Everything's falling apart.

Maya typed back: I'll be there.

And for the first time in years, she felt something stir beneath the numbness. Not hope. Hope was for people with orange ties and five-year plans. This was something older and harder—the recognition that being a zombie meant you couldn't die, and that in its own way, was a kind of terrible gift.

She walked back to her desk, sat down, and opened the spreadsheet. The numbers blurred like watercolors, but she kept working. Some days, breathing is enough.