The Palm Reading in HR

Maya was running on three hours of sleep and a espresso that had long since stopped working. She was twenty-nine years old and already felt like a zombie — not the flesh-eating kind from movies, but the corporate kind: shuffling through open-plan offices, answering emails that could have been meetings, and attending meetings that could have been emails. Her soul had died somewhere around the third quarter of her fourth year as a project manager.

She pushed through the glass doors of the office, her palm sweating against her phone. Today was her exit interview. She'd finally done it — quit without another job lined up, without a plan, without anything except the crushing weight of five years of spreadsheets and the realization that her life was happening to someone else while she watched through a screen.

"Maya," said Brenda from HR, gesturing to the chair. Brenda's smile was too bright, her teeth too perfect. "Please, sit."

The air-conditioning hummed. Maya sat.

"So," Brenda began, flipping through a folder. "You've been with us almost five years. That's significant. We're sorry to see you go."

Maya looked at Brenda's hands — manicured, with a small gold band on her left ring finger. She wondered what Brenda really thought about when she went home at night. Whether she felt like a zombie too.

"I need a change," Maya said, because that's what you said in exit interviews. You didn't say: I'm hollowed out by work that doesn't matter, chasing metrics for products that don't make anyone happy, renting my time to build someone else's dream.

"Of course, of course." Brenda made a note. "Is there anything we could have done differently?"

Maya almost laughed. Instead, she looked at her own palm, at the lines there — life, head, heart. She'd never believed in palmistry, but she'd gotten desperate enough last week to see someone. The woman had told her she was at a crossroads, that her lifeline showed a major transformation coming. Maya had paid sixty dollars for what she already knew.

"Maya?" Brenda prompted.

"No," Maya said. "I think everyone here is nice. The problem isn't the people. It's that I'm thirty in six months and I don't want to be running in place anymore."

Brenda's smile slipped for the first time. "I see."

They finished the paperwork in silence. When Maya stood to leave, she extended her hand. Brenda took it, and for a moment, Maya considered telling her everything — about the panic attacks in the bathroom, the Sunday dread, the way she'd started forgetting what she enjoyed before this job. But she didn't. That was for therapy, not HR.

"Good luck, Maya," Brenda said, and for a second, Maya thought she meant it.

Outside, the sun was already brutally hot. Maya took a deep breath, checked her palm one more time — ridiculous superstition, she knew, but she needed all the help she could get — and started walking toward whatever came next. She was terrified and exhilarated and finally, finally awake.