Yesterday I was in an elevator. There was hair in my mouth - I wiped my face with a sleeve, trying to remove it. No use. The hair, the faint, prickly sensation, remained. I looked down at my pants, and there was hair there too. Somehow, dozens of little hairs I had not noticed when I left the house. I pinched the denim between my fingers, then released, again and again. Some hairs floated away, others stayed. A ding, and the doors opened. My floor: number six. I wasn’t given a lot of information - no one ever is. But I knew the number, and I knew I was supposed to look nice. “Presentable” was the term they used. Like I should morph into a gift. 

A dizzying array of small peculiarities that awaited me on floor six. The elevator didn’t open into a hallway, for one. Instead a small office, the kind you usually find hidden in rows of pigeon-gray cubicles. There was one desk in the office, and two towering file cabinets on either side of it. The file cabinets had no labels, no indication anything was in them. Overall the office was almost completely barren - whereas a longtime employee might put up pictures of their family, there wasn’t even a rug on the wooden floor. One person sat behind the desk. A woman, with hair the same shade of gray as the cabinets. She tied it all up in a ponytail, and wore a suit. Not a particularly nice one, but it didn’t have any hairs on it. 

We went through the usual identification processes. I showed my ID - it was the shiniest part of me. She never said her name. “I can see you’re Emma Gables, and you live about a mile away. Did you walk here?”

“Yes I did.” I clasped my hands behind my back, trying to force myself into a permanently upright position.

“Well it’s good to get some exercise. Fresh air, whatever. No more use in dragging this out - your husband is cheating on you.”

She said it in such a tired way, like that was her whole job. Sitting there, telling women their husbands were cheating. Maybe that is her whole job, I don’t know. I didn’t ask, and I doubt I would’ve gotten an answer. In movies, the betrayed wife will cry, or scream. Her mascara will run and her head will sink underwater. In songs, she will set fire to houses, she will destroy her pathetic ex-love with a twist of phrase. I was Emma Gables - five foot two, wearing pants that don’t fit. I only checked the time - six o clock. “Do you know who it was with?”

“Next door neighbor. The one that just moved in. I think you sent her a lasagna. Point is, she and your husband have been going on little dates for three months now. April, June, and July he’s spent with her. They go to a different bar every time - they flirt, they, well - we keep it PG around here. We found them at one called the Golden Gopher. That’s all.”

I suppose they told me this way so I wouldn’t become a movie-song scorned wife. So I would be poised and return to work. We’ve split our whole lives into tiny tasks, more and more jobs made for the sake of something to do. They needn’t have worried. I’ve gotten used to the vagueness. When I leave the house, I let my muscles rot. While I stare into strangers’ eyes and nod, I become nothing more than skin. My job is being a processor of Rants. Machines can clean your car and cut your hair, but they cannot murmur in agreement with every careless thought made audible. So I go from house to house and watch fists clench. 

One time, a woman who couldn’t have been older than forty started yelling a minute in. “I’m just so sick of this bullshit world and it’s bullshit people. Twenty years ago, I was fucking happy. That’s how long since I’ve been fucking happy. Do you get that? Do you even get that? Or are you not allowed to talk?”

“I can talk,” I said with a clipboard against my chest. “It’s just not my specialty. If you want to have of a conversation, a Therapist can--”

“Oh fuck therapists.” She talked with a bit of sand in her tone, the fits and starts of the receding tides. “I’m sorry, but fuck ‘em. They make me feel bad for my sailor mouth, and they tell me I have daddy issues. That’s it, that’s all they do. I’m sorry.”

We didn’t turn into a society that hated anger, hated sadness. We just learned to love compartmentalizing. I put my soul into my breadbox and walk so far away from it, I begin to forget it’s there. My outfit is the same every day - white dress, white tights, white bonnet. In the summertime, it deflects heat. In the winter, snow falls and I can pretend I’m invisible. The woman apologized because she was tired, and had nowhere to put herself. Her visibility was her downfall. We didn’t turn into a society that killed. We just learned to love disappearances. 

I met Harry five years ago. I had just turned twenty-one, and thought of myself as pretty enough. There was a frail glass skeleton growing inside me, one I’d spent all my teenage years shattering. Harry wasn’t my first boyfriend, but he was the first boy I tried to flirt with. I put on black heels and taped my toes so they wouldn’t bleed. From the moment I saw him, there was this all-consuming fear that he would hate my unadorned self. So yes, there were problems in the relationship. Little cracks and warning signs. We met as crooked saints. 

When I moved in with him, I didn’t care about any of that. His friends were nicer than my friends, and they helped us carry boxes. Harry had actually bought a bunch of orange t-shirts the day before, and stayed up late stitching “Elephant” on them with bright red string. A reference to the folktale about twelve red elephants carrying pounds of gold in their snouts. I’d never dated a guy willing to sew for me before. We wore the t-shirts, joking the whole time about how we’d never wear them again, and how unsustainable this was. “Top two reasons the bees are dying,” said a friend. “Number two: fossil fuels. Number one: Harry.”

Harry opened his jaw in faux-outrage. “What? How can you say such a thing? I love bees. No one loves bees more than I.”

“If you love bees so much, why don’t you marry them?” I asked, a joke with a bit of risk behind it. We weren’t married then; we hadn’t even had the conversation. Marriage rates went up after the compartmentalizing. People wanted more of each other, especially if they had one of the No Contact jobs. The senators and governors acted accordingly, talking about how nice it was to come home to the wife, or husband. They talked about a warm meal being the perfect anecdote to a chill office, promoting a solution to the problem they created. But I was never very political - I just wanted to be closer to Harry. Whatever his definition of closeness, I would follow. 

Harry didn’t have a retort to my bee remark, he just kissed me. It took us almost a full day to move all my things in. I’d never thought of myself as materialistic, but apparently I had a million pieces of furniture and clothing. There were two separate boxes for all my skirts, somehow. He never complained. From the day I met him until right now, I remain stunned by his patience. When we lay in bed that night, he cloaked my shivers with his limbs. As the stars came out one by one, he fetched me a melatonin. 

Trying to disguise how badly I needed it, I asked him why he was holding me so tight. “Do you think I’ll float away? Because that’s very silly. The silliest.”

“I’m just happy you’re home,” he said. Held on even tighter. A more steadfast person would view these little moments now with a sinister tinge. Was he really happy I was home? I choose to believe he was. That his words then, and maybe even still, had love behind them.

I told him I loved him a month into dating. A lot of people will tell you that’s too soon. But we had an understanding. He would get jobs that required staying in white rooms only eating white rice and milk. He would dive into fish tanks, open his eyes, and report his findings to the right people for a three-dollar raise. For each person happy to put every corner of their life into a box, there were ten people it had been tested on. No progress without experimentation, that’s their motto. So many rules I wasn’t born to see written, and Harry stood beneath them all. He would submerge himself in this after-ashes world, and I would stay. Sky blue or sky black, I would stay. We never spoke these terms aloud, but they were more solid, more hard to the touch, than any house we lived in.

I’ll never know why they chose to tell me Harry is cheating. What the intent was - why they waited until it had been months. I was never one for politics. I am Emma Gable, five foot two. I check the time - six o clock again. It’s been twenty four hours since I learned. Harry is due to arrive home in half an hour. I try and well up some rage for him, and find I have none. When I came into the world, there was so much nerve in me. I was one of those babies that kept crying, no matter if you fed it or burped it or sang to it. Now that nerve has been emptied out. You can hold me, and you can brush your fingers across my skin. You may come to the conclusion that I am brimming with love, or fear, or any other emotion. You would be mistaken. 

One of the marvels of the world is that you can start walking, and just keep going. This globe is so big and monstrous, and there’s plenty of dirt to cover before you become it. Harry will come home in half an hour, and find me gone. Maybe he’ll catch up to me eventually. I don’t know if he’d want to. Right now, all I want is to walk. Past houses and past sidewalks. Past trees and past surveillance drones. My feet aren’t the strongest, but I suppose they’ll learn to be. I will walk into ruined roads, into fallen cities and nuclear reactors. I will walk into the rising sun.