All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

A consultant in training. Three toddlers hiding in a suit.

never met a Gantt chart I didn’t like.

Same lol

This is how I felt: alone and powerful. This is what I felt: the shock of how your life’s longing can sometimes be smoothly realized, without great strain or cost, easy as buying a clock.

Work did not seem like fertile ground for socialization, unless I wished to go to wine nights with portly middle-aged Republicans named Susan.

exactly how i felt about my first job out of college

I should have majored in Microsoft Excel.

Some people find it harder to forgive you for not actually being wrong,

Can you think of a time when you’ve felt only one thing at one time? I think crying allows us to midwife our more intense, more complicated emotions, get them outside of our bodies, and then our body feels light and free again. Dance allows me to do that too, but you can’t dance about everything. My boss was a huge bitch to me last week—hard to dance about that.

Subtract the coldness and dislocation that appeared to run through my personality like electrical wiring ran through a house. All this, the very facts of who I was, could be different. I could be a person refigured: warm, charming, loving, loved.

They gave the gig, an entry-level position, to somebody with seven years of experience. Four hundred people had applied.

want everyone to be free, she continued. Free from money. Free from gender. Free from debt.

You still feel like my person and it’s fucking me up.