A Corporate Corpse
It’s 9pm on a Monday, and there’s 5 more days to go for the work-week to end.
But you’re bound to feel the corporate devil’s grip in your soul: you’ve sold it with no cure, and to despise yourself takes too much effort. Exhaustion’s coded into your bones, running deeper than blood in your marrow. You sleep standing up on the train at 7am & 9pm. A work-horse, every morning and every evening. Black coffee sachets in your front pocket, no sugar.
You crack open your eyes when a ding pulls on your eardrums: there goes your train station.
The world starts with a platform announcement and ends with a blurring crowd of people jostling and packing themselves beside you until all that is left is a collective sigh to ride along with you: not home, but to the end of the city to take a ride back.
You swear you shouldn’t be forgetting so many things.
You blink and another train station passes.
You swear that you shouldn’t be remembering about the work you’ve left back at your desk.
You blink, and this time, your eyes don’t open.
Bedroom ceiling, 10pm.
You’re somehow awake, and the darkness that permeates your eyes reassures you that your mind is still functioning — though at a bare minimum level. There should be a lining of exhaustion left to pull you into the deep end of sleep, but there is no cure to the insomnia that one brings upon themselves.
So you turn to your side, turning from darkness to more darkness, realizing how big and empty your bed is. It was peace for the first week: a fresh house rented with your first three months’ salary, parents left behind with ample insurance and mortgage payments shared. They wanted to find you someone, but you’d rather wait for love to visit your apartment and knock one day, as slowly as it could, until all was left to accept it with your open arms and parted lips and rocking hips.
Your parted lips only breathe in silence now.
And you thought you’d feel the solitude — it tends to bite, in the form of fast-marrying friends and baby showers. But it strikes you more as the speedy ascent to death than as the next step of life: you’d rather stay static as the world wrinkles around you. Rinse and repeat your days: 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.
You turn onto your back. You remember, a little too late, you haven’t called your Ma.
When’s her next round of chemo? You forgot. Probably next week.
Next week’s project proposal. Fuck.
You turn to your side, tasting that thought at the back of your throat. This time, you don’t turn back to face the ceiling — you get out of your bed. Your legs are stiff, head pounding with a thousand sledgehammers, but the laptop waits for you.
The desk seat becomes your bed — and your bed, a desert.
Your black coffee doesn’t taste nice. No, it used to taste decent even without the sugar.
Just my tongue, you convince yourself. But you know goddamn well that coffee shouldn’t be poured in your mouth: acidity’s eating you alive from inside out. You’ve even charted out your antacids’ expenses on the monthly calendar: 16 tablets for SGD10.50, half a tablet each day, 32 days. It’s been 7 months, and your acidity is still the same, and your boss isn’t gonna pay you extra for your medications, right?
But the nap on the way to work wasn’t that great.
You still drink your coffee, anyways.
You can’t fetch your Ma back from her chemo. She’s out alone.
You’re supposed to feel undilated fury — but all you do is sigh when the boss hovers over your shoulder, his words sickly-sweet enough to make you throw up a little at the back of your throat. You’ve told him once, twice, and a thousand times: Sir, I need to get my mother home from the hospital. But he acts as if you’ve never mentioned it to him, not even once — the greed, the disgusting desire to wring out work all dripping from his face. You hyper-focus on the screen to avoid his gaze: it ties up your insides.
You don’t hear what he says — your head is whirling and your ears are buzzing.
The coffee mug meets your lips again.
It’s 9pm on a Tuesday, and there’s 4 more days to go for the work-week to end.
Your hands are clasped tight around the metal railings, and your mask keeps slipping — you’re tired of pulling it up, and breathing feels like a stab to your lungs. But you ignore everything anyways: a trip to the doctor would cost so much that your eyeballs would pop out, and you’d rather leave it at that.
After all, that approval for citizenship would have cut costs by half, but it’ll never come. Just like that lone love you wait for, just like that time you’ve lost with your mother, and just like happiness. All measured up against ghosted applications, refused proposals, sales margins, and production costs.
Your body, a machine. Your mind, a computer.
The world around you repeats, like your version of Groundhog Day — people dragging themselves into cabins and slotting themselves like bank cards in a wallet, jackets rustling like dollar bills. The train dings, a arcade-machine chime, and your eyes drag closed.
You crack open your eyes, and there goes your train station.
You try to remember — nothing makes sense. Your eyes close. It hurts. The world around you doesn’t only wrinkle — it melts, it blurs, it screams, and it wounds around your throat.
You blink, another train station passes. You swear, you swear, what is it that you swear by? Lines of code?
Your eyes feel swollen. The train moves forward but you’re in retrograde.
You swear that you shouldn’t. Shouldn’t? Shouldn’t.
You blink, and this time, your eyes don’t open.
Mittu Ravi writes poetry, short stories, and opinionated essays on the writing life and industry. Find more of their work and their socials here.
