The Last Supper Before the End

The spinach sat wilting in my desk drawer, a pathetic testament to the healthy lunch I'd planned but never ate. Instead, I spent my hour watching Marcus—that silver-haired fox of a VP—work the room with practiced charm. He moved through the quarterly review like he was gliding, while I felt like a zombieanimated only by caffeine and spite.

'You've got to stop being such a bull in a china shop,' Elena had warned me three months ago, back when we were still sleeping together and I still believed passion counted for something. Now she sat three desks away, carefully not meeting my eyes, her new promotion announcement still glowing on her monitor.

The cat waited for me at home—the only creature who didn't want something from me. I thought about him often during these endless meetings, his warm weight the opposite of this fluorescent purgatory where enthusiasm was mandatory and exhaustion was a character flaw.

Marcus was speaking now, something about synergy and paradigm shifts. I watched his mouth move, wondering if he believed his own bullshit or if it was just muscle memory, like asking 'how was your weekend?' to people you hoped wouldn't actually answer. The zombie numbness crept up my neck—that particular feeling of being alive but not living, present but not there.

My phone buzzed. A photo from Elena: her new office view. The caption: 'Wish you were here.' The old inside joke, now poisoned with whatever this was between us—regret, resentment, the uncomfortable truth that we'd been using each other to survive this place, and now one of us had moved on while the other stayed stuck.

The spinach would be slime by midnight. Tomorrow, I'd bring another container, make another attempt at being the person who packed healthy lunches and believed in things. For now, I nodded when Marcus finished his presentation, clapped when everyone else clapped, and let myself feel exactly nothing at all.