The Palm in the Corner

Marcus swallowed the **vitamin** D supplement with his cold coffee, his eyes never leaving the spreadsheet that had become his entire world. Forty-two years old and he already felt like a **zombie** — going through the motions, hollowed out by years of corporate optimization and the quiet erosion of his dreams.

His phone lit up with a message from Elena: *"Thinking about that night in Bali. Your hand on my waist, the **palm** trees swaying over us like they were keeping secrets."*

He'd been scrolling past her texts for three weeks. Since she'd found the messages on his phone. Since he'd admitted that he didn't know if he loved her anymore, or if he'd ever really known himself at all.

The **palm** tree in their living room — a fiftieth birthday gift from her mother — had turned brown at the fronds. Elena used to sing to it, joke that it was the only thing in their apartment that was truly alive. Now it stood in the corner, shedding dried leaves onto the hardwood floor, a silent witness to everything they weren't saying.

"Your **vitamin** levels are critically low," the doctor had told him last week. "Your body's forgetting how to be alive."

Marcus stared at the spreadsheet. Rows and columns of numbers that represented productivity metrics, efficiency ratios, the optimization of human beings into data points. He'd helped design the algorithm. He was good at his job.

**Zombie** mode. That's what his team called it when they coded for twenty hours straight, surviving on caffeine and delivery apps, hollowing themselves out for someone else's profit. They joked about it. They didn't seem to realize they weren't joking.

His phone lit up again. *"I'm not giving up on us. But I can't keep watering a plant that's decided it wants to die."*

Marcus deleted the spreadsheet. He stood up, his joints cracking, and walked to the corner where the **palm** tree stood. He touched its brittle leaves, and something inside him cracked open.

He texted Elena back: *"I don't want to be a zombie anymore. Come home. Please come home, and we'll figure out how to be alive again. I'll take whatever **vitamin**, whatever therapy, whatever change. I just don't want to be optimized anymore. I want to be human."*

The **palm** tree's leaves rustled in the air conditioning's artificial breeze. For the first time in months, Marcus thought he saw something green growing beneath the brown.