The slide

Today is the first day of my new job. Today is the last day of my new job. I remember one while the other happens. Or is it the other way around? There are worse things than being stuck in a dream. But that depends on the dream.

My dreams are memories. They skip in beats. They slide through action to hit anchors in my knowledge. I am allowed a vignette. A scene clear and on task for real time. Then I get a deep dark liquid slide through a tunnel to the next scene.

I am upright and whole and awake. I am in Jo’s office. The clock on the computer reads 12:10. I should be eating pho at the Thai place I go to every day. But I am not. I am here. Or I was here. The next slide is coming.

I can hold onto set scenes. In my mind they are each a box, like the shoeboxes we had to make into scenes in primary school to describe a book or a play. They had paper cutouts in them and layers. We created scenes with story and action frozen in a shadowy rectangle.

When I think back to yesterday or to last week or last year, I am offered a room of these shadow boxes. I approach them. Each comes into focus and I assess, discard, and sort. I can play them out. But I don’t get to keep the slides. The slides are the roads between boxes. These roads are permanently under construction. I imagine I enter a limousine with darkened windows and I am driven to the next box. This is the slide.

Today is the last day of my new job. Today is the first day of my new job. Today is a day of action and in acting I will move to construct a new box. I will only know if I have succeeded much later.

What I do for work is irrelevant. It is a part of the slide. But the moments where I shine I have taken with me. Here is one:

I am in a conference room. I am in a black and chrome leather work chair left over from a 1960s basement of discards, perfect for an modern funk office style. There are 10 people at the table and 7 more in chairs like mine at the edges of the room. We are pressed against the walls. The wall people are relatively unimportant. We are observers to the real people. Real people sit at the table and contribute to movement and opinions.

The speaker is tall and looks like he hikes with his dog in an REI jacket. He is serious enough to have a clean wardrobe of sport themed clothing just for work. He has a semi military haircut and a bushy bird’s nest beard. He describes a push for expanding inclusive practices for design. He uses a number of expressions that work well in the commercials that are hip to young people and their causes.

I know what I want to say. I find the perfect segway to talk and I start a sound in the back of my throat. Then someone else dives into the space. I swallow my sound. Later another person stops talking and this pause is longer. The sentence in my head comes out of my throat and the room is mine for a brief minute.

“As a minority, it often feels like the options for representation are designed by people observing and cataloguing types of us. It comes off like objectification. We could have focus groups that come up with some of these phrases to avoid it looking like this.”

Military cut guy looks down at his laptop. He doesn’t look at me.

“Sure. That’s part of the overall plan”, he says. “Anyone else?”

Murmurs. My shine is over.

This box closes and drifts back into line in my memory. It has replicates elsewhere and likely will repeat again.

The box next to it is out of order:

I walk into the new lobby of an old building. I came here before for my interviews. I recognize the doors and the placement of the windows. But I don’t recall where the bathrooms are. The large windows are rectangular and man sized, set at regular intervals along a warehouse length room. The windows are surrounded by a wall of raw brown brick.

A door opens and I walk toward it with this wall on my left. I feel eyes on me and I feel the pinch of my laptop bag digging into my shoulder. My shoes squeak even though they are not new. I look at my phone as I walk and try to remember which room I am supposed to go to. I walk through the door. I don’t remember if someone held it open for me.

The box closes.

But this right now is right now. I think. Today IS the last day of my new job.

Jo is my boss. She is younger than me and has short blonde hair bleached at the ends. Today she wears a tight plaid blouse with a set of black beads at her throat. Her pants look like jeans with a tailored crease and wide bottoms. Her mouth is open and red.

She is telling me that I did not show up for work for several days in a row. She is upset but confused. When I am nervous I blink a lot and I don’t sit down. I am standing in front of her while she speaks with her red mouth. The room is dim. The only light is from the window and at noon it is cloudy.

I speak.

“I called in last Friday and said I was sick. I’m sure I emailed Tory about the meeting on Monday. I only started feeling better yesterday and was working from home so I didn’t think I need to call.” The truth is that I don’t remember calling anyone or emailing anyone. From last Friday night to yesterday is one of the longest slides I have had. Maybe I did call. I’m not necessarily lying.

This isn’t the first time, she says. No one could reach you. You have missed over a week of work in the last 3 weeks.

I’m sorry, she says, but this just isn’t going to work for us. We hope you find a better fit somewhere else.

“Thank you”, I say.

I hope you feel better, she says.

“I do too”, I say.

This, I think, is the truth.