Georgia

                What’s hidden are her motivations and emotions as she makes her life into a career. Evelyn thinks of the ways people have told her to be more assertive in the workplace, as if being female and nice automatically placed her in that realm of commentary. ‘Audacity,’ her manager says, is a trait she can work on.

                Politics in the office can be painful and sometimes the stereotypes have held true.

                Sometimes it’s the way Chase sort of lingers around the kitchen area after she’s done getting her coffee. She knows, or she thinks she knows, what he’s checking out.

                It’s the hours spent before work contemplating where the outfit she’s wearing is too bold of provocative—all she wants is a day without a remark on her appearance. So she dresses modestly—some would say boringly. So the attention doesn’t come biting back in the form of condescension and rolled eyes when she speaks up in a meeting.

                Sometimes she doesn’t know whether to take a comment personally or not. Did you lose weight? No, I haven’t. You look pretty today. ‘Thank you,’ following a blank-faced stare.

                ‘Can you do it? Do you understand?’

                She wants to say: ‘Yes. You don’t have to explain twice. I’m perfectly capable.’

                Each swirl of the coffee stirring straw, each blink of the timestamp’s colon on her phone, and each sip of tea remind her how lucky she is to have an office job. No waiting on tables, no bending and lifting packages, no handling wrinkled bills. But it also means: little to no interaction with people. No particularized suffering—no customer-induced frustration—but no excitement in the dalliance of everyday life.

                What’s left are the awkward office interactions about length of commute as she fills up in the break room. And then the obligatory ‘Have a great rest of your day’ as they go separate ways, to each their own domains to accomplish the mission-critical business objectives of the day.  

…

                She starts to walk the path surrounding the lake. A good day to bring flats. Peering at the glimmering surface of the water, she contemplates what her life has become.

                The lights outline the sides of the lake and the vastness is projected like the sky.

                “I miss hanging out with you.”

                “Yeah, I know.”

                “But you can’t say the same about me.”

                “…”

                “…”

                “What she did to you was a little messed up.”

                “Yeah, but who’s going to believe me?”

                “Me.”

                “Because I was with you.”

                “Which is the problem.”

                “The problem is that I was in the right—I did nothing wrong. I’ve been by her side for years. And what does she do in those years? She sells coffee to dreamers and businessmen, to artists and Wall Street traders, to the young and the old. I mean, I thought something would become of it, like a nascent dream of opening her own bakery. Instead, she puts a smile on and doesn’t seem to notice people are trying to flirt with her. I know because she tells me everything, or used to tell me everything. 

                Nothing happens. That’s the problem. There’s no story, nothing to go off of, nothing to get mad about. And here I am getting mad about nothing.”

                “Are you looking for an excuse to be mad at her?”

                “Yeah. I mean, I don’t understand how we were able to be in the same room for so long and talk so little about anything of substance. The crazy thing is that we could have gone on forever. We could have had a life in that house until one of us died.”

                “Until signs of life evaporated.”

                “Until something like this happened,” Tom sighed.

                “Sometimes I wonder if Cory has feelings.”

                “She does. But it’s—it was all toward me. But on everything else—furniture, having kids, vacations, it seems like I was making the decisions for her.”

                “She really invested in you.”

                “Yeah. And I feel bad, because maybe I was just making all these decisions without any input from her. I mean, we usually discussed them beforehand, but sometimes I’d go ahead and buy a table and she’d be home, saying ‘I like it. Thanks.’”

                “She’s really one of a kind.”

                “They both are.”

                “Her and Evelyn?”

                “Yeah.”

                She stares down at her red dress, and contemplates the last time that she felt like this. College, maybe. When she’d trek across campus with a heavy-ass tripod and manual camera with film. When her fingers would smell like silver nitrate after a developing session and she’d be afraid to touch her face.

                Georgia thinks, and a world envelopes in front of her eyes. A world of wonder and science and the poetry of nature, the songs that birds sing that cannot be falsified. Faith and irrefutable logic—chess moves that unfold themselves like origami. The universe in a nutshell.
                How to convince people. It is not through 2+2=4. It is through 2+2; show them the equation and they will find the answer. The most important thing is the question. The river of human intelligence can only be filled by an ocean of emotion. Stories—storytelling—will save the world, because the world can only be saved through relational thought.

                Love—it is why men will wait in traffic for hours to get back home, to read to their children. It is why mothers at the table will insist on their children eating first. Here, eat.
                It is love that drives every emotion, every thought and every action. Hate is the absence of love—it is like a cardboard box that is closed and taped up. But while hate takes up empty space in a human heart, love opens that box and fills it with a child’s blanket, teddy bear, and a mother’s embrace. Observe and keep in mind: even a teardrop of love changes the color of water, pushing molecules into activity.

                Her mother died early, and she was acquainted with sadness at an early age. But she credits this with teaching her happiness. She remembers the empty afternoons finishing math homework while watching TV, wishing that someone would tell her to turn it off and focus, for once. It always took her longer than necessary to finish her problem sets. When she had her brother to cherish, all they could was watch cartoons.

                Ellen Degeneres filled the void of motherhood in her adolescence. She was the voice of comfort in her ubiquitous humor and therapeutic way of talking. Behind those gray eyes that always looked a little watery, Georgia liked to think that there was a deep well of sadness in Ellen. She looked the type to cry easily, and thus reminded her of her mother.   

                She’s forgot about the prospect of a happy ending—all that matters is a hearty chuckle at the end of the day. Ellen’s silliness, then, was a palliative.

                Sometimes having nothing is okay, because you start to fill it with memories.

                “Do you miss it? When she was there?”

                “No.”

                “Why not?”

                “Because I’ve come all this way without her. Somehow I made it work through high school and through college even when it got really lonely in sophomore year. I used to sit huddled up in my chair waiting for night to come, just sad about things. I wrote a little poetry but sometimes even that got depressing after a while. I really came to understand what it meant to cry yourself to sleep. I don’t think I’ve really slept well since my teenage years.”

                “I kind of remember that period in your life. You were… sort of hard to meet up with, actually.”

                “Yeah. I wanted to stay in my room. I had skin problems.”

                “Oh, it wasn’t all that bad. You looked okay. What were you sad about?”             

                “I thought it was bad. The weird thing is I couldn’t tell you today if I tried. Probably not feeling adequate in terms of academics or social life. Here were all these people partying and working on group projects, and I was struggling to put words together in sentences in my essays. And I just—I just felt so lonely after breaking up with Paul. I don’t know how I made it through that fall sophomore semester. I even got good grades.”

                “Why’d you feel lonely?”

                “Who knows?”