Exhale

She sat in a soft, peach-colored desk chair that was manufactured in 1974, one of thousands of identical chairs on an assembly line. The chair had rolled around within an eight foot by eight foot space in the same beige cubical since that year. The cube had been erected in a large cubical farm on the fourteenth floor of a building directly in the center of the city. Eleven employees before her had moved in and out of her cubical since the day the fuzzy half-walls had been snapped together into a maze of ringing telephones, clacking typewriters and, later, computers beeping and booping through the longest eight hours of the day. Those individuals had, one by one, boxed up their desk knick-knacks and carried them onto the glass elevator down to street level, abandoning the sounds of office productivity for the sound of their own hearts beating in their chests.

The chair’s worn and coffee-stained upholstery had been marked by those wandering souls who had briefly sat in it. They were souls who came for the security of the meager but steady paycheck. No one comes into a job like this expecting to stay. No one is passionate about purchase orders and spread sheets, really. The peach chair in the beige cube is just a transitory stopping point on the way to greater aspirations. She knew this was true for her own life. She was a writer who spent all of her time making copies instead of crafting her art. But this droning work would pay the rent this month and put hot food in her belly today, and her art would not. Not today, anyway.

Today she would hold her breath. She would start the coffee pot and staple stacks of paper and push the big green button on the copy machine for the thousandth time. Her body would go through the motions of her life in the cold, sterile cubical farm, typing with frozen fingers and nodding at mechanical, obligatory hellos from the stone faces she passed in the hallway. She felt compassion and anger and pity for them all at once. They were trapped here by their own repressed minds. Some of their hearts had been reduced to small glowing embers, but most had been snuffed out completely. Many of the older ones had settled down into the neutral-toned cushions of their swiveling desk chairs for life. They would either retire here or would stay until the reaper came knocking on their temporary half-walls...until their empty shell bodies finally caught up with their spirits, which had been buried long ago.

But she was different. She wasn’t interested in the shifty-eyed clusters gathered every morning in the break room, mugs of coffee in hand, to exchange office gossip in low voices for a tragically false sense of camaraderie and importance. She wanted no part of the budget wars that were erupting in conference rooms on all floors of the skyscraping building, a trickle-down result of the country’s economic crisis. She resisted the fear epidemic that had swept her own cubical farm like a tsunami as her co-workers desperately attempted to convince everyone, but mostly themselves, of their worth to the company. She thought it was futile. She thought it was bullshit. She would not be infected by the fear disease. There was a raging fire inside of her, and her mind spun constantly, fueled by undying hope and beauty and the bigness of the world outside. She was inspired by everything around her, even the beige cubical. The burn of extra hot black tea on the tip of her tongue reminded her that she was alive. She was even inspired by the ugly environment—the incessant whir of the copy machine and the eggshell white walls and the dim fluorescent lights overhead that made her want to puke. She inhaled it all, inspired to make something beautiful of it—determined to use it all for good. To her, there was nothing else that mattered. She poured her abounding positive energy onto pages. No one knew she was using her eight hours to carefully spin the web of her own story, filling page after page with carefully crafted prose. The people who hired her could not have guessed the depths of her creative well. They didn’t care to, because taking time to make something beautiful meant less productivity. One day, she would take her secret words with her when she busted out of the front lobby doors into the sun. She would finally make her words concrete and let the world hold them. She would exhale. She would tell her story. She would give everything away.