These packed days, fueled with thoughts of further disappointment. A cubicle of work and load, rooms with eyes around. A screech echoes through the whole floor, a head bang goes unnoticed, the tensed nerves flicker and no one sees it. The weight of it all settles without announcement, the kind that does not arrive all at once but finds you slowly, in the small things, in the waiting, in the nothing. What gets through is the urge to escape, and that too only in the mind. The stickiness of the ticking clock holds everything in place, movement slow and forced.
Everyone thinks that it will not be them, but when the time comes it is them. Callum thought as well. A cube with no rest, time does not seem to pass at all. Hell holes which are not the pits in the sense that escape is not thinkable but the fact that knowing you can leave and still you cannot. To get some kind of experience, he clocked in. He is reading files but that is not supposed to be his job. Nobody seems to care what he does and the same is true for them as well.
Callum sits at his desk, eyes on the screen, not really reading. The office carries on around him, phones and footsteps and the low sound of someone's lunch being heated. He is somewhere else entirely.
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Sebastian stood there waiting to see if Callum would notice him. Callum is in his own head, seeing, inferring, making of things whatever he sees fit.
"Did you read through the urgent document I sent you?" Sebastian does not wait, he just walks in.
Callum is startled, a small twitch before he turns to face him. They say a sudden reaction shows the true feeling underneath. He has none.
"No, which one? I didn't get any."
"Because there is none." Sebastian sharing a smile.
"Don't you have anything to do." Callum with a face that says he is beyond that smiling.
Callum turns back to his screen. The hum of the office swallows the moment whole.
"I think I am going to leave this," he says, not looking at Sebastian, as though the words were meant for the air between them rather than the person standing in it. As if this were the experience he needed, the one he had clocked in searching for and had long since confirmed was not here.
Sebastian's smile moves away. Not quickly, not dramatically, but the way light leaves a room when a cloud passes. Something behind his eyes that he does not put into words.
The silence sits for a moment. Neither of them moves. The clock on the wall ticks the way it always does.
"Should we go eat somewhere, the timing is upon us," Callum says, glancing at the hour, the shift loosening its grip. How naive of him, acting like he said nothing before. Callum knows what he is doing, invoking Sebastian's emotions.
Sebastian does not answer what was asked. He stands with a straight face, something turning in him.
"You know I don't like working here either," he says. "If you are going to leave then leave. You could have told me before. You could have asked."
Callum looks at him with a steadiness that carries no apology.
"I think you have mistaken me for a friend. I want to make my time here as easy as it could be, and you were part of that."
Sebastian leaves. Not in anger, not entirely. But knowing. The kind of knowing that does not need a door to slam to mean something.
The Inkwell Combined Writing Prompt #34 ~ Fiction or Creative Nonfiction
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