The Tethered Living

You'd cut your hair again, I noticed immediately. The dark waves that once fell to your shoulders now cropped short, practical. Another corporate concession. We sat in the breakroom surrounded by tangled ethernet cables and power cords, the server room's muted hum seeping through the walls like the heartbeat of some massive, indifferent beast.

"You look like a zombie," I said, trying to keep my voice light. You'd been working late for weeks, that dead look already settling behind your eyes.

You laughed, but it didn't reach your eyes. "That's the goal, isn't it? The perfect corporate zombie. Show up, shuffle through tasks, go home. Repeat."

The irony stung. We'd started here together five years ago, both so certain we'd change things. Now you were on autopilot, and I was watching it happen, complicit in my silence. That's what friendship had become in this place—witnessing each other's slow compromises.

"My dad had cables like these," you said, gesturing at the mess of wires behind the coffee machine. "In his basement workshop. He'd spend hours organizing them, labeling everything. Thought he was building something." You paused, your thumbnail picking at a fray in the carpet. "He died before he finished anything."

The words hung between us. Unspoken: that's what you were afraid of. That you'd spend your life organizing cables that led nowhere, die mid-project, leave behind a basement full of good intentions and half-finished connections.

I wanted to say something profound, something that would snap you out of it. But what could I offer? I was just another cable in the tangle, tethered to the same system, going through my own motions.

"We're not dead yet," I said finally.

You looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time in months. Something flickered behind those dead eyes—recognition, maybe. Or just acknowledgment that we were in this together, zombie and witness.

"No," you said. "Not yet."

Outside, the sky turned purple with twilight. Somewhere, something had to be beginning. We just had to find it.