The Hierarchy of Loss

Maya sat at her desk on the forty-second floor, the corporate pyramid rising beneath her like a monument to ambition she no longer felt. Her iPhone lay face-down, a dark mirror refusing to show her the text message she knew had arrived—that final confirmation, the one that makes everything official and nothing salvageable.

She'd been taking vitamin D supplements since winter began, her doctor saying something about seasonal deficiency, but she knew the real deficiency was something no pill could fix. The orange she'd brought for lunch sat untouched on her desk, its bright color an accusation against the gray of her office, the gray of her life.

"Everything okay?" asked David from the next cubicle. He was thirty-two, with that terrible optimism of people who haven't yet had their heart properly broken.

"Fine," she said. "Just thinking about pyramids."

"The organizational restructuring?" He lowered his voice. "Word is they're eliminating the entire middle tier. Flattening the pyramid."

Maya laughed, a sound that surprised her with its bitterness. "Funny how that works. You spend your life climbing up, only to find out the structure itself was designed to make you expendable."

Her iPhone lit up. His name. Again.

She thought about the vitamin C in the orange, how your body can't store it, how you need it daily or you get sick. Some deficiencies show up immediately—scurvy, bleeding gums. Others take years. She'd been deficient in something for a long time, she realized. Not vitamins. Not love either, exactly. But the particular quality of attention that says: you are the person I want to build with, not just someone I'm currently building beside.

The orange's dimpled skin reminded her of his knuckles. How she'd held his hand in Paris last spring, before everything started feeling like performance. Before she realized she'd been cast in a play she'd never auditioned for.

"Maya?" David's voice cut through her reverie. "Meeting in five."

She picked up her phone, stared at his name one last time, then pressed delete. Not the message. The contact.

The corporate pyramid would restructure tomorrow. Today, she would eat her orange in the sunshine of the breakroom, letting the juice run down her chin, letting herself feel something real. She was thirty-eight years old. She was done climbing structures that weren't built to hold her.