Office Spaced

Placeholders mark the times of his life. They stand tall and straight, great pillars of solid stone. They also, however, limply flop over to one side like a poisoned flower. All he does now is show up to his little cubical and slowly die, just like this poor flower. He is it, flushed with color and doomed. Flower him, bowing further each year as his back takes the shape of a modern day wage slave. His eyes burn into a monitor and his ass cushions the entire wreck of this strange human/machine hybrid. Built perfectly to enrich those above him, this form would be unrecognizable by Shakespeare. His mind is failing too, and being less sharp it can no longer vividly project onto the black walls of his head a future worth living. Not that his soul would care much if it did manage to pull off this feat, because an optimist show being played in his mind would merely bring scorn from his bitter inner self. He’s fuel by a trick, and more tricks would only flare the process further. The propaganda works to keep his heart beating. The blood moves around his body and some strange science keeps him from jumping out the window. Those place holders are all he has left, the only remaining thing that makes him human. Some of the newer ones are fake, mere mirages painted in haste by an overstimulated fight or flight mechanism. The older ones though, those stone giants cut so perfectly, white in the sun of his mind, unmoving and a constant source of comfort, well those are real, and he lifts his head up from his plane of misery often, just to look upon them. Things have happened to him. He has lived a life. He can see- no, he can FEEL, that the real world existed, and that he was a part of it. Placeholders as high as mountains formed from his first kiss...glorious. Formed from a scored goal to win a game, from a love tried that broke a heart, from a dangerous deed done recklessly, these were true marvels. Placeholders so big that it doesn’t matter how far away they are. His human life is small, after-all, so decades mean nothing. He simply lifts his head from the plane of misery, sticky with the foul slime of disgust, and he squints hard while glancing back. Without fail those towers stand strong every time, and a small joy seeps into him.

What does such a creature feel just then? How does this help him? And why does he lower his head again? Perhaps we grant that he cannot simply lift himself completely, and in so doing free himself from the bonds the plane straps against him. He cannot then turn around and face these towers squarely. He cannot then step towards them, and wading through the plane, chest high, steady stepping towards the shore ahead. He cannot claw his way onto some distance beachhead out there near the towers, and he cannot come to a place right up against them. And he most assuredly cannot lift them, between his two pinched fingers, and drop them into his mouth. He just will never be able to swallow them like that, and that impossible pill can never flood his body with healing stuff. Yes, we will grant him this. He, out there, is not a caged animal bashing against the cage’s door, hoping for freedom. He, the one we see now, is more the animal in a cell, who wakes in the morning so that he might peak out the window when darkness breaks to light. This one we speak of is hopeless in the true sense of the word—contently doomed.

Enter her. Her existence immediately manifests a placeholder (so oddly placed out ahead), which shimmers golden—the size of a middle school set on edge, and rimmed with pearls at its base. This small size is offset though by how freaking close it is. Right there! He peals his body off the surface to reach towards it. His body is so twisted from countless years of looking back that the angles don’t work out, and his hands fall well short on each attempt. But alas, this matters not at all. Because of the nature of its placement out ahead of him, in the future, he need only wait. This placeholder is real, and it is nearing!

Next day, after an entire night of joyfully flailing around on the sticky plane, obviously too far away for contact with the gold goddess, but laughing like mad all the same, he eased into his coffin chair and let his bosses lay into him. He has seven bosses, and each of them loves to berate him. At least they outwardly convey a love and passion for the dehumanization they unleash. He did not care this day though, and would not care after lunch, and that night he would not peak back, would ignore for once those ancient mountain placeholders for something closer and straight ahead. He would start to straighten out, and his skeleton would crack and cry at his attempts to take on his old form. He would eat the shit of his masters and lick up every bit of mind-fuck propaganda spit down onto him from above. He’d be liking her, and waiting for that gold glow to inch nearer. Nearer and nearer and nearer. His broken form would be reaching out, and one day soon his gathered strength would hold an extra beat, and instead of splatting back down onto the sticky plane of horror, his outstretched fingers would land in mercy on that golden placeholder. And then the gold would become him. This, he figures (poor creature), is what life is.