The Sphinx in the Breakroom

The fluorescent lights hummed their eternal question, and I had no answer. Three years at the firm, and I'd become whatever the corporate equivalent of a sphinx is—a statue posed in perpetual contemplation of mysteries that weren't actually mysterious at all. Just spreadsheets. Just meetings. Just the endless accrual of nothing.

"You look like shit," Marco said, sliding into the chair beside me. He was the only friend I had left in this place, which wasn't saying much. We'd survived two rounds of layoffs together, bound by the trauma of watching good people vanish into the ether of "strategic realignment."

"Ran five miles this morning," I lied, popping a vitamin D supplement that I knew wouldn't fix anything. The deficiency was existential, not nutritional.

"Bullshit." Marco's laugh was dry, like leaves skittering across pavement. "You haven't run since college."

He wasn't wrong. But I had been running—just not in the way he meant. Running from the conversation I needed to have with Sarah. Running from the realization that I'd built a life I didn't want. Running from the mirror.

"Market's up again," he said, gesturing at the screen where numbers cascaded like green rain. "Another bull market, another quarter of feeling like we're winning while everything that matters gets quietly hollowed out."

The riddle had been staring me in the face for months: What walks on two legs inside a cubicle but has lost its soul somewhere between the performance review and the profit margin?

"I think I'm done, Marco."

He didn't ask what I meant. He just looked at me with those eyes that had seen too many people break, and nodded. Once. Small. A confirmation of something we'd both known was coming.

"Yeah," he said. "Me too."

The sphinx's question, finally answered. We stood up together. The fluorescent lights kept humming, but for the first time in three years, I couldn't hear them anymore.