The Pyramid of Lost Appetites

The papaya sat on my desk like a small sun, its orange flesh weeping onto the paper towel. You would have loved this, I thought. You always had this theory about tropical fruit — how it was the only thing that made sense in a world that had stopped making sense years ago.

I'm a zombie now. Not the Hollywood kind with brains on the menu, but the corporate variety: the walking dead who shuffle through cubicle mazes, responding to emails at 11 PM, believing the lie that if we just work harder, we'll finally feel alive. The irony isn't lost on me that I make six figures to feel this dead inside.

The spinach salad I'd packed sat untouched in the breakroom fridge. Three weeks ago, you told me you were tired of being my friend. Tired of listening to me complain about a job that was slowly hollowing me out while refusing to leave. "I can't watch you choose the pyramid scheme over your own life," you'd said, and I'd wanted to scream that corporate America was the only pyramid scheme that required an MBA to join.

Now I eat lunch alone, staring at the papaya's seeds like a galaxy I'll never visit. The building's glass walls form a perfect pyramid around us, trapping the light, trapping us. Somewhere on the thirty-fifth floor, someone is probably giving a presentation about synergy while their mother dies alone in a hospital three states away. We're all just climbing, grasping, reaching for something we can't name.

I take a bite of the papaya. It's sweeter than I expected, almost cloying. The juice runs down my chin, and for a second, I remember what it felt like to want something real. Then my phone buzzes — another meeting invite — and I wipe my face with a rough paper towel and return to the pyramid, where the zombies keep climbing, and the spinach keeps wilting, and no one notices the absence of anything worth missing.