Severance

by Ling Ma

The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.

If you are an individual employed by a corporation or an institution, he said, then the odds are leveraged against you. The larger party always wins. It can’t see you, but it can crush you. And if that’s the working world, then I don’t want to be a part of it.

I could feel a gravitational force inside me, a near dread, a stomachache, dragging me toward him. It wasn’t even a choice.

I wanted to tell them that they had made a mistake. I wasn’t like them. I didn’t want the same things that they wanted, and they should know this. They should know my difference, they should sense my unfathomable fucking depths.

Just because you’re adequately good at something doesn’t mean that’s what you should do.

You’re young, he repeated. You’re maybe under the impression that everyone gets to do what they want for a living.