🌒 Moon Drama

Linda from Accounting was eaten an hour ago. My feelings are mixed. I’d been a little too open with her about my relationship issues and Linda is—sorry, was—always trying to be interesting to other people. So, on the one hand, the monster devouring her whole, screaming, is a relief. On the other hand, Linda did sometimes have good advice and never got tired of my venting.

“Why are you telling me this?” says Debra, who does get tired of my venting, even though she’s currently stacking office chairs in front of the breakroom door and doesn’t seem to be doing any other intellectual or emotional labor. Maybe that makes me sound like a jerk, but she’s our HR manager and has told us multiple times to ‘bring our whole selves to work.’

This is my whole self: lonely and dysfunctional and lonely because of my dysfunction.

“I don’t have time for this,” she says. “The field crew has awakened some fucking undercrust hellbeast, half of us have been mauled to death or eaten, and you want to talk about your love life?”

She then adds something disparaging about me personally, which just goes to show that you can’t trust HR.

“Have you tried using ‘I’ language?” asks Sanjay. He’s filing pieces of plastic broken off the photocopier against the paper shredder’s tiny blades to make spear tips.

“Yes,” I say. “I’ve said, ‘I feel like this distance is affecting my ability to be truly close to someone. I feel like I’m existing in an entirely different plane of space and no one understands me, or tries to.’”

“You’re treating your lack of a relationship as a problem to be solved,” Sanjay says, gluing the sharpened photocopier spear tips to a broom handle. “Whereas you should see the relationship as something outside of yourself, an experience you build with another person. Have you tried meetups?”

“Don’t worry about that,” cuts in Adrienne as she takes the broom spears from Sanjay and uses her nylons to tie them to her siege weapon, which was a hot-and-cold water dispenser fifteen minutes ago. Still is, technically. I came here for hot water, for soothing, broken-heart chamomile tea.

“This is all you need to know,” Adrienne says. “Just say—”

But then the creature bursts through the door and grabs Adrienne by the skull and drags her away.

“What?” I yell after her, following the bright crimson trail she’s leaving in the short, grey industrial carpet. “What do I say?”

“AHHHHGGHHGHAAAAGGAAAAA,” she replies.

I consider that this might be a metaphor or a reference I didn’t understand. Adrienne majored in the Classics.

Maybe I should read more. Is that the key? Self-improvement?

As the monster returns to slaughter the rest of my coworkers holed up in the breakroom, I walk the office’s long viewing hallway and look out into the pristine landscape, grey with the early-dawn of a never-seen sun. An alarm sounds overhead, and the automatic doors shut behind and in front of me. There, I think, is a metaphor for love, if I could only grasp it. If I only had the words.

Yes, I should definitely read more.

Outside, in the weightless, starry darkness of dawn, Adrienne’s right hand floats by, propelled in a low-gravity arc and spilling a glittering trail of blood. Her index finger is crooked, as though she might still let me in on her brand of wisdom if I dare to venture out and meet her where she is. Like Sanjay said. Meetups. 

But maybe that’s too small a thought, too close, too human. Maybe this is the metaphor for love, the moon itself. Beautiful and bright from afar, but really a cold, dead wasteland full of shredded hearts. Shredded hearts and shredded limbs.

Did I mention we’re on the moon?