Orientation

Ruminations on walking into a big new corporate job.

That feeling you get, when a wild, dangerous impulse grabs you - but your pre-frontal cortex pulls you back from the brink? I almost succumbed at the unlikeliest place: New hire orientation.

Somewhere, on another timeline, a shadow-self of me did follow that reckless urge, and she’s living an alternate life now. I wish I could see what she’s writing.

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I could end it now
unhinge myself
flame out calamitously
abort
this calm shuffle forward
from the shuttle to reception
this hushed collective drift
my place in line my flock
of fresh cadets
wafting damp narcotic vapors
hotel hair wash
lobby coffee
morning sprinkler petrichor

I could let loose a jagged howl
piercing the white noise
like a joyful hound that slipped its leash
or a trumpet blasting concrete

The crowd would cringe away from me
a clattering wayward cog
I’d be frogmarched out of line
and into razing daylight
squinting
crossing pristine beds of pea gravel
out through the gate
—expelled

But my mind’s tripwire
holds
against my wild internal whirring
and I slide
unmarked
down the chute
and do not hear a siren
as I badge across the threshold
and I barely feel a pinch
as I sever from
myself

And yet I swear I see
later from the rooftop garden
a figure dart over the footbridge
that threads across the freeway
and set off into the marshland
where the sun exalts the cordgrass
and the edges of the salt ponds rust in fields of pickleweed
color ruddying her cheeks
strands wisping from a weathered bun
hat brim widening like the rings of a redwood
shawl fringe trailing into pluff mud
subsiding into softness
blood returning to her toes
drifting in and out of seasons
cast away
diaphanous
writing lines in a notebook
that I can’t see
from here