Turn 8 of 12
Go home and spend the weekend not thinking about it
Your apartment is small and warm and smells like the dryer sheet you forgot in the lint trap. You drop your bag by the door, hang the lanyard on the hook by the microwave — badge facing out, RECORDS catching the kitchen light — and spend twenty minutes making pasta that you eat standing at the counter because sitting down feels like committing to an evening you don't want to have. The badge watches you from across the room. You don't look at it. You wash the pot. You brush your teeth. You go to bed.
Saturday is good. You don't think about the cabinet. You clean the bathroom, you return a library book, you meet your friend Dana for pho and she tells you about a man she's been seeing who communicates exclusively in thumbs-up emojis and you laugh until your jaw aches. The badge stays on the hook. You don't bring it up. Dana says you seem distracted and you say you're fine and you are, mostly, except that twice during lunch you catch yourself staring at a handwritten sign on the restaurant wall — DAILY SPECIALS — and wondering about the handwriting, whether it's round, whether the loops are deliberate. You stop. You go home.
Sunday is harder. You sleep late, which is unusual for you, and when you wake the apartment is very quiet and very still and the badge is still on the hook where you left it but it looks different somehow. Not moved. Not changed. Just — present, the way a phone you've silenced is still there. You try to read. You try a show. You try calling your mother, which is how you know you're losing. She asks how the new job is and you say 'fine' and she says 'just fine?' and you say 'it's a temp position, Mom' and she says 'temp positions are just positions that haven't decided about you yet' and you hang up feeling like someone has read your folder.
Monday morning you get dressed and the badge is cold when you clip it on. You stand in front of the bathroom mirror and you look at your face and you look at the badge and you think: I wrote on the page and the page didn't change the tab. And then you think, quieter: but I wrote on the page. The bus is the same route, the same driver, the same six-forty-five smell of coffee and wet nylon. You get off at your stop and the tower is there, beige and ordinary, its lobby already busy with lanyards and travel mugs. Stand-up is at nine. Chad will be there. You wonder, with a feeling like pressing your tongue to a bruise, whether Chad will be the same.