Disappointment does not ask permission to enter one's life; this was the irrefutable truth with which I was comfortably familiar. What I had forgotten was its stoic disregard for any pleasantness that may have entered before it.
Later that morning I had trouble focusing on anything besides the conversation that had transpired during the meeting with my supervisor.
She had smiled continually to the point that her face no longer appeared amiable. "We're asking you and a few others whom we have not yet chosen to be moved to the offices in Fern Hill. This branch has taken on a few new senior-level employees and we're short on room. You'll have six weeks to prepare, and relocation costs will be accommodated, of course."
Work passed slowly today. It marked the first time in recent memory that I had even glanced at the clock before lunch. Late-morning hours normally spent careening through paperwork were chained down by the unsettling nature of our exchange.
"Thank you," I had said. "Thank you so much for finding a place for me. I appreciate this opportunity."
The thought of waking each day in a small town four hours from the city, removed from all of this fantastic mayhem, proved difficult to digest. Six weeks would allow plenty of time for digestion, but a new and strange impermanence had already crept up over the edges of my desk and anchored itself there so that my job as I knew it, my livelihood in this city, that which I had finally trusted enough to hold onto, had transformed into something only temporary.
In a sense it was not unlike my summer abroad, constrained by two dates, bollards bolted into stone, one marking the birth of an experience onto which I would tether myself, the other signaling an inevitable end. I now had my another ending date, the terminus of next month, to ponder in quiet contrition during the days leading to its arrival.
I'm certain my productivity for the rest of the day could have been measured as inadequate, but I would imagine given the circumstances that no ruler was held up against me. I drifted through the final hours in lazy irresolution. Of course I would go. It was the natural path forward for anyone whose career was as young as mine. However, to assert this change as necessary and valuable not just to my career, but to my personal growth and wellbeing-once I discovered how to do that, I speculated, I would find piece.
I exited the building and made my way among the boundless flock of commuters, beneath a jungle of towering glass, steel and concrete, and came nearly to the bus stop before I remembered. Were my problems so immensely important that I had almost forgotten? Frustrated with myself even more than with the latest developments, I sat gloomily on a bench near where he had dropped me off and waited.
I couldn't have sat longer than a minute before his silver Honda halted at the curb just feet from where I rested. His wild-haired form and broad smile, visible through the passenger window, compelled me into motion. My whole self desired simply to be back in the car, returned to that shared space with him.
And I was. The roar of the city died away and we were alone.
He shifted the car into first gear and turned to me. "I'm Mikey, by the way. Sorry I didn't introduce myself earlier."
Mikey-such a fantastically handsome name, and somehow it fit him perfectly.
The car began to move and he steered out into traffic, so I did not try to shake his hand. "I'm Wyatt," I said, "and don't worry; I didn't either."
"Wyatt," he said. "That's a good name. Guess I can't call you Chickadee forever."
"You can call me whatever you want. It's just a name," I said in a tone more downtrodden than I expected. In this moment, still fettered by the idea of endings, forever sounded like a beautiful, superb length of time. Feeling a bit reckless I said, "Actually, I like it when you call me that."
He was quiet for a few seconds, long enough to have me worried that what I'd said sounded strange. "That's good to know." He downshifted as we approached slower traffic. "So, how was the big meeting?"
"It was pretty good," I told him. "Anyway, it's over now, so there's no more wondering what's going to happen." I paused for a second before saying, "But I want to know what a day at work is like for you. How is it to run your own company?"
He brushed back a group of course, black strands from in front of his eyes. "I guess there are a lot of ways to answer that. But today it was like operating some big, noisy machine that is not in very good repair. As the machine runs, it's like some component of it stops working, and when you fix that component, it affects the functioning of another, so that becomes broken instead, and so on. It sounds awful," he said, "but it's really pretty great."
"I don't think it sounds awful," I said. "Are you talking about fixing someone's software?"
"Yes, exactly," he said. "For me, running the company is ancillary to all of the actual work, like finding blocks of code that aren't serving a good purpose, or database structures that are poorly organized."
"Ah, okay," I said. "It sounds like you still do a lot of the hands-on work yourself."
"Yes, I still do. And I hope I always get to," he said, smiling. "That's where all the fun is, for me. It's so nerdy, I know."
I laughed. "Yeah, because accounting is so much more glamorous."
"Hey, that's right," he said. "We're not done talking about your job. What did they tell you in the meeting?"
"Well," I said, "it didn't go how I thought it would. Not at all, actually. They want to relocate me. I don't think it's permanent, but I'm pretty sure it's for a while."
"Where?"
"Fern Hill," I said.
"As in the resort town? How far away is that?"
"Four hours," I said.
"When you you go?"
"End of next month."
"You're serious?" He put a fist flat against his chest and made small seizing sounds, as if he had been physically wounded. "And just after we become friends. You're killing me, Chickadee, you know that?"
"I know, I'm sorry," I said. He had no idea how sorry I really was. And already he had called me his friend.
"I've heard it's beautiful up there," he said. "I've never been, though."
"It really is. It's a great place to visit. To live there, though, I'm just...I don't know." I stopped and looked at him. His eyes focused on the road, but I could have sworn that all of his attention had been diverted toward me. I looked away.
He turned and glanced at me for an instant before looking back at the road. "If I were in your shoes, I would be very upset right now," he said. "How do you stay so calm?"
"I'm not calm. I mean, I definitely don't feel calm," I replied. "It must just not show."
He took his time responding, staring ahead and making small adjustments to the car's path of travel as we crossed the bridge out of downtown. "You know, even though we just met and all, you don't have to hide that from me."
"I don't know if I'm hiding anything," I said, although I suspected he might be right. "I am upset, that's true."
"So," he said, "what do you think you're going to do?"
"There isn't much I can do," I replied. "This is my career. In the whole scheme of things, like, later in life, ten years down the road, I think I would look back on it as a small sacrifice. A year or two away in exchange for long-term stability. I mean, that's nothing, right?"
I sat in thought for a minute. He must have sense that I wasn't finished, because he stayed silent.
"It's just...this doesn't feel like a small sacrifice. It feels like a massive sacrifice, if I'm honest. That's how I feel right now. I can't be me in ten years. I can't get into that headspace."
He started to say something but only a small amount of air escaped his mouth. We rode along without speaking for at least another minute before he moved his hands to the bottom of the steering wheel and said, "But the you in ten years isn't a real thing. It literally does't exist."
