The Last Living Person in Accounting

The first thing I noticed about Sarah was how she stopped caring about her hair. It used to be this wild, beautiful auburn cascade that she'd tame back with colorful scarves—each one a small rebellion against the corporate dress code. But lately, it hung lank and unwashed, pulled into the same functional ponytail every morning.

We'd been work friends for three years, the kind who'd meet in the breakroom and exchange careful truths about our lives between sips of stale coffee. But over the past six months, something had changed. Sarah's light had dimmed incrementally, like a bulb with a loose filament, until one Tuesday I realized she'd become what we all secretly feared: a corporate zombie.

Not the flesh-eating kind. The other kind—the ones who shuffled through cubicle mazes with eyes glazed over, responding to emails without reading them, surviving on vending machine snacks and the hollow promise of weekends that never felt long enough. The cable management under her desk, once neatly organized, had become a tangled mess of充电 cords and ethernet cables—physical evidence of her unraveling.

"You okay?" I asked one afternoon, finding her staring at her monitor, unmoving.

She turned slowly. "I got that promotion, Rachel."

The words hung between us, heavy with unspoken implications. The promotion meant more money, yes. But it also meant longer hours, deeper entrenchment in a system that slowly consumed whatever parts of yourself you'd foolishly believed were yours to keep.

"That's... great," I lied, feeling my own soul erode. "Congratulations."

Sarah's smile didn't reach her eyes. "My therapist says I need to set boundaries. But then I look at my cable bill, my student loans, the rent increase notification on my counter..." She shrugged, a motion so slight it barely registered. "Sometimes I think we're all just zombies who haven't figured it out yet."

I wanted to argue, to offer some platitude about passion or purpose or the small joys we'd supposedly find outside these gray walls. But staring at Sarah's dead eyes, at the hair she'd once loved now neglected like a houseplant she'd forgotten to water, I couldn't.

"Maybe," I said instead, turning back to my spreadsheet, "but at least we're shambling together."

Her laugh was short, surprised, and utterly human—the first real thing I'd heard from her in months. Then she picked up her coffee cup, already cold, and went back to work.