The Pyramid of Empty Rooms

The cat watched me pack with those unimpressed golden eyes, as if she'd witnessed this particular collapse a hundred times before. Maybe she had.

"You're forty-two, Sarah. You're not a kid." Marcus's voice still echoed in my head, that patient, condescending tone he used when explaining why my promotion had been denied again. "Corporate structures are pyramids. Not everyone reaches the top."

I'd nodded, swallowed the bitter pill, and gone back to my desk feeling like a zombie—numb, moving through motions, dead inside but still required to function. Two years of that. Two years of swimming through KPI reports and strategic planning documents while my dreams drowned somewhere in the deep end of missed opportunities.

The apartment echoed now, half-packed boxes marking the boundaries of what had been our life together. What had been my life, period.

My phone buzzed. Marcus again. Another text about how I was overreacting, how his relationship with Jessica—my best friend, my maid of honor—was "complicated" and "just happened" and other variations on that particular brand of bull people sell when they want to keep the cake and eat it too.

I threw the phone in a box labeled "FRAGILE." Let him wonder why his calls went straight to voicemail.

The cat—Bast, named for the Egyptian goddess, another pyramid joke Marcus had made when we adopted her—jumped into an open box and began rearranging the packing paper with methodical precision. At least someone knew what they were doing.

"We're going to Mom's beach house," I told her. "Just for a while. Until I figure out how to be a person again."

She ignored me, too focused on her paper rearrangement. But her tail gave a slight flick—acknowledgment, perhaps. Or maybe she was just amused by my delusion that any of us ever truly figures it out.

The last box closed. The final echoes of a decade packed away in cardboard and tape. I stood in the center of the empty living room, that corporate pyramid finally collapsing, the zombie finally feeling something again, even if it was just the raw, hollow ache of starting over.

Bast wound around my ankles, purring like a tiny engine of reassurance.

"Yeah," I said, picking her up. "Swimming's better than drowning."

And for the first time in two years, I believed it.