Letter 8: On Escape
In the grey cold of January, we shuffle back to work, unmoored by the sudden end to festivities.
Office life: stagnant air, fluorescent lights, the din of cyclical workplace conversations (weather/weekends/family/complaints/repeat). The best hours of the day spent in a shuttered existence. Beginning each morning where you left off the night before, the sense of déjà vu so strong you wonder if the time separating the two existed at all.
We’re released into the outdoors a few moments at a time, fresh air on our faces as we dash from door to door, home to transit, transit to office, maybe out for a coffee break, but never very long before we’re ushered indoors again by the matron of daily routine, beating back the kinetic energy that’s stirring within ourselves.
But there are times as you’re herded through your routine, its passages narrow and unbending, that you find some extra space in which you can stretch out. One day, you’re moving in formation with your fellow subway passengers, and as you near your stop, you feel the automatic propulsion within your legs pushing you forward toward the door. But a temptation sets in, trying to reverse the gears, and as you’re caught between the tension of these two forces, you think to yourself, “What if I just stayed here and rode onward forever?”
You take a walk at lunch for the necessary respite, moving through a veil of mist, breathing crystalline air into your lungs. The sky is charged with impending rainfall and has ensured that everyone else has kept to their warm offices for their lunch hours. You have the world to yourself, feeling the fullness of wandering without the distraction of passersby.
You walk to the nearest park, foregoing the cement walkway for the expanse of grass, the frozen ground emitting satisfying crunches beneath your footfall. The plummeting temperature allows you to abandon the obliviousness to your own body that exists indoors and to feel the texture of your existence, the sharp cold against your skin, the warmth of the pulse of blood, the awakening of sore muscles from their fatigue.
You walk in a circle around this grassy field, like a caged animal, but every step is a moment of freedom because it is of your choosing, slits razored into the fabric of the mundane.
As your lunch hour comes to an end, you notice a rope extending from your belly, held by an invisible hand, and there’s only so far you can go before it becomes taught and pulls you back. But each time you venture out, the rope slackens just that little bit further for the next time.
Thanks for reading. See you next week.