Sacrificial Salad

the price of my day off

I didn’t wanna go to work today, so I didn’t. I did, at first, against my better judgment, but I only lasted eighty-four minutes. Eighty-four minutes of glaring overhead lights shooting florescent rays into my eyeballs and making my stomach turn. Eighty-four minutes of pages uploading and documents downloading and clicking from tab to tab without remembering why. Eighty-four minutes of It’s gonna be fine, I can’t take this, It’s gonna be fine, I can’t take this. Frankly, I’m impressed I made it to ten before packing it in. I left my lovely salad in the shared refrigerator, but I didn’t remember it until I was already down in the parking lot. Sorry salad. It would’ve been lovely to eat you. Maybe I’ll go get you tomorrow, but you will likely spend the weekend sitting in your purple container on the top shelf, wondering why I didn’t eat you, having spent the time to make you fresh this morning. Who knows, you could last until Monday, and maybe I’ll eat you then! After all, I didn’t use any leafy veggies, just carrots and cucumbers, grape tomatoes and avocado. Oh no. The avocado won’t last, and it’s inevitable brown mushiness will taint the rest of you. Alas. Sacrifices must be made on the road of avoiding meltdowns witnessed by coworkers, and a martyred salad, however lovely, is a cost I’m willing to bear. It’s won me the prize of this, this right here. Sitting on my blue sofa with no electrical light, just gray clouds filtering soft light through two small windows on either side of me, the distant bass vibrations of a brewing storm. The washing machine rhythm, the sizzle of ground turkey in the pan two tiny rooms away, the voices from Andre’s podcast bouncing up and down just underneath these sounds, oh - and now the air conditioner joins in and drowns out all of these. I sacrificed a salad and six hours of PTO for this moment. A small price to pay to remember that, no matter how many unpaid hours I spend paralyzed at the choice between picking one fig and twenty others, that the fig will rot, and it’s the writing itself that’s sustaining.