How To Pay All Of Your Bills At Once

It’s 8:30 am. I have the heat in my car full blast, 60 is cold for LA, the radio turned to the news. They are talking about the shooting of an unarmed boy. My job feels very inconsequential. I answer a lot of phones. Last week I stamped one hundred and eleven envelopes. I am not helping anybody. Some days I take solace in the fact that I am not hurting anybody, either, but in this world I am not sure you get points for being neutral.

All of the women in my office are married. This makes me very uncomfortable. I think I am jealous they have someone to commiserate with at the end of the day.

Diane will only call her husband “Mr. Feldman”, as though she is not allowed to call him by his first name, as though she calls him this at home.

I am a Receptionist. I take notes. Order supplies. Men in the office squeeze my arm playfully.

I have very small arms.

They told me at Christmas they gather in the conference room to sing carols.

I hope I am not here at Christmas.

There is a security guard named Ahmed and who every morning hands me the mail I forgot to pick up the day before. He is the only person in the building who talks to me without asking me for something. He is very handsome, older, with these big brown eyes. I learn he has been at the front desk for ten years. I wonder where his life has gone. If he spent it with family, on weekends at the beach, on full days in bed.

I wonder if in ten years I will hand some hapless girl the mail she has been forgetting, and talk to her during my lunch so she feels less alone.