I Hope This Finds You Well

by Natalie Sue

today is my birthday, and a last-minute meeting has appeared on my calendar. A poorly disguised office cake party will be my supposed reward for turning thirty-three six and a half hours ago.

I don’t have a life, and I will likely celebrate by drinking alone and going down Reddit rabbit holes researching random and upsetting things like fecal-matter transplants, or the Golden State Killer, while making myself regret everything. I’m not sure that’s relatable, so I’ll say I’m having dinner with friends.

So many office situations show no regard for people with anxiety, yet we’re the bad guys if we can’t cope.

I had no idea yet about things like: working faster than everyone is bad, actually; not talking about your private life with colleagues is suspicious; and you have to be fake nice to powerful people even when they treat you horribly.

We’re all dry flecks of skin turning to dust and breathing each other up. It’s too much.

I didn’t choose a single person here and never would’ve, yet I’m spending my life with them.

“No, I don’t have Facebook,” I say quickly. “I see enough ugly babies IRL.” “Really? I thought all old people had it. How do you stalk your friends from your glory days of high school?”

When I drink, it makes me feel less trapped inside myself. But sometimes, after a few too many, I’ll remember why the cage was built in the first place.

I know what life I’m supposed to live; I have Pinterest. Obviously, this isn’t it.

The problem is people eventually want to know more and more about you. And with time, they’ll find out enough to see what’s always been there. I’ve had one real friend my entire life, and she’s not here anymore. It always hits like a brick wall: Ellie technically doesn’t exist anymore.

when people find out enough about me, they stop wanting to know anything at all.

I didn’t have it in me to explain that I’m not, like, into souls in a weird way, more just unhealthily obsessed with what other people think happens when we die, but also too logical to believe any of it, yet still hopeful that I’ll find some explanation that will make what happened feel okay.

People underestimate how traumatic it is to leave a country because it dramatically changed overnight. How messed up it is to start a new life in a place where a good portion of the people will hate you for simply being there.

When I was a child and we were shopping for school supplies, she told me I didn’t need an eraser, I just shouldn’t make mistakes.

I click the first email: an office-wide notice about some tax form coming. There’s no way this reality was the intended human experience.

My heart almost falls out my vagina.

if I were going to murder Armin, I wouldn’t chop him up. I’d find some kind of industrial liquid to dissolve his body. Only a true imbecile wouldn’t understand that’s the best way.

The thing about annoyance is that once there’s a spark, you can find more things to stoke it.

It’s like walking into a room and worrying everyone was just talking about you; the real power is knowing that they were.

Coming up with ideas is the easy part. It’s the speaking-in-front-of-the-group piece—all their beady eyes and dry expressions zooming in on me—that always sends me into a panic and trips me up.

“You kids today spend more time trying to make people miserable online than making yourselves happy in real life.

So much of what I do here has nothing to do with my actual job, yet these little interactions matter so much.

That should’ve been a nice interaction. But I was a factor.

I open my mouth, but all the words in the world seem to mesh on my tongue and I’m sure I’ll say something offensive instead, because my brain likes to fuck me up like that.

The world needs more people who think they can save it.”

there are the people who act like I intentionally tricked them into not being racist by holding back this crucial info—and

The article says it was determined that she died instantly. But how can that be? How can everything that we are disappear so quickly?

I’ve wanted to be in on the joke with you since the start.”

I’m so embarrassed my vagina hurts.

“When they’re young, we think that everything’s going to be perfect, and it all seems so manageable. We can control the world they live in. Then the world gets bigger and harder and . . .”

It’s like there are these pockets of sorrow waiting to be uncovered right below the surface. But we see them only sometimes, only by chance. Otherwise, we never know.

Even though we’ve already contributed forty hours of our waking lives to this cursed place this week, we must donate an additional two hours of our Friday evening to celebrate the fact that Gregory has wasted the most time here.

Somebody in this crowd might be saying something bad about me behind my back. I’ll do something, somewhere, out of pettiness soon. Somebody might be keeping a secret from me, and it might hurt to find out. But I’m more interested in the parts that people want to show me. And right now, that’s all I can see.