Sorry Please Thank You Read Free

marriage. I get to see his face, watch him try to keep it together. Of all the types of tickets, this is the worst. Heartbreak. When I first started at this job, I thought physical pain would be hardest. But it’s not. This is the hardest. To be inside here, looking at this man’s face, at the lowest moment of his life, watching him try to keep it together. To be inside here, feeling what this woman is feeling, having done this to him. And then the world blinks twice and my field of vision goes blue and I’m a guy sitting in front of a computer screen and the sandwich cart is in front of my cubicle.
    So I have lunch.

    After lunch, I pass her in the hall. The new woman. Her name badge says Kirthi. She doesn’t look at me this time.

    On the way home from work, I decide to swing by the secondhand shop and check out my life.
    It’s not my life, technically. Not yet. It’s the life I want, the life I’ve been saving for. Not a DreamLife®, not top of the line, but a starter model, a good one. Standard possibility. Low volatility. A kindhearted wife with nice hair, 0.35 kids, no actuals, certainties are too expensive, but some potential kids, a solid thirty-five percent chance of having one. Normal life expectancy, average health, median aggregate amount of happiness. I test-drove it once, and it felt good, it felt right. It fit just fine.
    I don’t know. I’m trying not to feel sorry for myself. I just thought there might be more to it all than this.
    Still, I’ve got it better than some people. I mean, I’m renting my life out one day at a time, but I haven’t sold it yet. And I don’t plan to, either. I’m buying in, not selling out. I want to live, not exist, want to have a life, even if it is bits and pieces, even if it isn’t the greatest product out there, even if it’s more like a life-substitute. I’ll take it.
    I’m not going to be like my father, who sold his life on a cold, clear afternoon in November. He was thirty. It was the day before my fourth birthday.
    We went to the brokerage. It felt like a bank, but friendlier. My father had been carrying me on his shoulders, buthe put me down when we got inside. There was dark wood everywhere, and also bright flowers and classical music. We were shown to a desk, and a woman in an immaculate pantsuit asked if we would like anything to drink. My father didn’t say anything, just looked off at the far wall. I remember my mother asked for a cup of tea for my father.
    I don’t want to sell my life. I’m not ready to do that yet. So I sell it bit by bit. Scrape by. Sell it by the hour. Pain, grief, terror, worse. Or just mild discomfort. Social anxiety. Boredom.

    I ask around about Kirthi. People are talking. The guys are talking. Especially the married guys. They do the most talking.
    I pass her in the hall again, and again she doesn’t look at me. No surprise there. Women never look at me. I am not handsome or tall. But I am nice.
    I think it is actually that which causes the not-looking at me. The niceness, I mean, not the lack of handsomeness or tallness. They can see the niceness and it is the kind of niceness that, in a man, you instinctively ignore. What is nice? What good is a nice man? No good to women. No good to other men.
    She doesn’t look at me, but I feel, or maybe I wish or I imagine, that something in the way she does not look at me is not quite the same. She is not-looking at me in a way that feels like she is consciously not-looking at me. And fromthe way she is not-looking at me, I can tell she knows I am trying to not-look at her. We are both not-looking at each other. And yet, there is something in the way she is not-looking at me. For the first time in a long while, I have hope.

    I am at a funeral. Again.
    I’m flipped to green.
    You can be flipped to green, or flipped to red.
    You can be there, or can just feel the feeling.
    This is the one improvement they have made that actually benefits us workers. There’s a toggle switch on