Temporary

by Hilary Leichter

With trusty carpal alchemy they knead my resume into a series of paychecks that constitute a life.

I worry about those poor, abandoned mugs. How sad they must feel, how lonely, left to sit in their own filth. I worry about living the life of an unwashed vessel. The mold that fissures the leftover coffee, floating like a lily pad on forgotten dregs.

I consider my deepest wish. There are days I think I’ve achieved it, and then it’s gone, like a sneeze that gets swallowed.

There is nothing lonelier than lights extinguishing themselves at the end of a long day, no one left to do them the simple kindness of snuffing out.

I just don’t love giving anyone the wrong idea, or even the right idea. I don’t want to give any ideas at all.

At first I considered this a kindness, a way of manufacturing work when there was none. I now understand it to be a sort of game, the kind of constant undoing that leaves no actual accomplishment, that makes a person question her very existence.

When Farren says to answer honestly, it really means to please be more comfortable lying. I try to feel comfort with this skill every day, practicing mostly on myself.

“Sometimes you have to leave home to earn permanence. There are opportunities for diligence and efficiency in many realms. This is your chance to find the steadiness. The world is infinite, and the work is, like, endless, am I right?”

What looked blank was actually cluttered with microscopic tendencies toward life.

“There are only a few kinds of jobs in the world, it turns out,” says the captain, who is the type to pontificate and listicle on subjects varied and profound. “Jobs on land,” he continues, “jobs at sea, jobs in the sky, jobs of the mind, and working remotely.”

“In human resources,” he says, “we provide resources to make sure you’re as human as possible.

It takes an aggressive empathy to accurately replace a person. A person is a tangle of nerves and veins and relationships, and one must untangle the tangle like repairing a knotted necklace and wrap oneself at the center of the mess.

I think of my many available selves, coagulated and discrete, compromising themselves for one another.

I haven’t seen him in a while, but he assures me that time multiplied by distance equals the square root of affection and long-term achievement. He has an infographic illustrating this very point, and it hangs on the wall above his bed.

“Is it dangerous?” “Of course,” she says, “but in the wrong hands, so are staplers.”

This is the way someone looks when history lodges in their throat, and I know I’m now meant to hear a story, specifically, hers.

I’ll never be anyone until I feel the steadiness. All I can do is try to convince you that I’m successfully inhabiting the current target of my approximations.”

If I can separate myself from the crime by several degrees, the crime feels less criminal. I try to feel comfort with lying every day, practicing mostly on myself.

No one is ever exactly who they claim to be, but some people are closer than others.

More than being good at my jobs, I’m good at procrastinating. I’ll find any way to put off a task. Indefinitely.

“I’m just filling in. You’re just filling in,” my mother explained. “See?”

Just because something is familiar does not mean it is mine.

It’s nice to be wanted. It’s nice to be needed. It’s nice to punch a card with the world every morning, to let the world know you’re still alive and punching and kicking.

Life is a stranger in a crowd whose intentions are unclear and, come to think of it, so is death.

and she suddenly hated the word potential, because it’s either wasted or lived up to

The universe doesn’t subtract, it just replaces. Matter isn’t created or destroyed, it’s just replaced, it just changes, it’s just misplaced. And if nothing is ever really lost, how can we ever mourn?

“Maybe the banks are all the same bank? Just one big bank,” Carl hypothesized, and Laurette let this idea sink in for a minute: Maybe the banks are all the same bank. Maybe the people are all the same people.

One doesn’t want to be gauche when administering poison, Carl says. Don’t overdo it. It needs to look pleasant, accidental.

We would fall asleep on a pile of papers and I would wake up with a headache and a stomachache and a bitch hangover, which is the kind of hangover you get in the morning after spending the whole night talking shit, saying crap, acting like a huge and massive jerk, allowing all the horrible things in your head to somehow make their slimy way out of your mouth.

This is like a surprise party where they forget to invite the surprised party.

My mother was checking facts, and what she found was mostly poetry.

It wouldn’t be the first time I’d worked a job with no discernible impact.

“This is preposterous,” the supervisor says. She’s pacing around the blimp, arms clasped behind her back. “I’ve never heard of such a thing—morals!”

I can’t help but feel angry with him and the way he shows his appreciation for my hard work, my dedication. I’m shocked to realize I expected more, more than what I was promised, more than something short term. I feel silly for expecting anything at all.

I feel her loneliness like a stalactite stuck to the roof of my mouth.

And though you’re not certain of the pamphlet’s use, you know the pamphlet is useful. You know it’s important. You’ve felt it working on your life, a silent sacred work, a life guided by possession of the pamphlet. And though you’re not sure why, you know you’ve been changed by the presence of this slip of paper, this slip that somehow hurts, that cuts, that has no use except to remind you of something (what?), of someplace (where?), of your first husband sitting on the porch the day the pamphlet first fell into your hands.

There is certain work that cannot be done well and cannot be done poorly. It can only be done or undone. There is no success metric for a job that simply keeps me busy, so I ignore her empty praise.

I notice a nodule of boredom hiding in my mind, and I want to pick it. I pick it until it bleeds. Other times, boredom blossoms in my chest like a lush chord, an empty schedule, the luxury of freshly fallen snow.

Getting older is the difference between solving mysteries and studying to become one.

She softens herself daily, in preparation for receiving love.

It’s not for me, this kind of moment. Something inside me can’t be contained by the shape of her house, her life. Something about me does not and will not fit. I feel myself protruding like a broken bone, breaking through the skin. Perhaps it’s a matter of qualifications, the way they both certify and prohibit, the way I find the fullness of my life constantly halved, constantly qualified. Could I someday be qualified for happiness, for steadiness?

She lived in the space between who she was and whom she was meant to replace.

She noted the fallacy of permanence in a world where everything ends and desired that kind of permanence all the same.

She could not help but understand where they were coming from, because it was where she came from, too, because she was meant to begin where other people ended. She lived in the acute angle that forecasted the world’s limitations. If they had locked her in a room made of ice, she would have probably seen their side of things, shimmering in her own reflection.

It’s like nothing happened, like nothing changed, like I’ve been sitting here all along, right where I started. My world, done and undone.

I’ve never felt qualified for anything other than lacking qualifications.