A Gray Everyday
One day in December.
Stepping into the office to escape the biting wind, I spotted the Christmas tree set up in a corner of the hallway. A sparse string of lights and ornaments draped the branches, and perched on top was a tiny card.
Merry Christmas!
The card was slightly bent and worn, as if too many hands had already picked it up. Had people flipped it open hoping to find their own name written inside, only to set it back down with a quiet pang of disappointment when no one was addressed?
I entertained the idle thought as I made my way to my desk.
"Merry Christmas in advance, Jun."
A manager passing by offered a small smile and a greeting. Half-hearted as it might have been, just looking at that twinkling tree was enough to put me in a Christmas mood already.
"You too, Maria. Merry Christmas."
I returned the smile, soft and easy.
Christmas.
The truth was, Christmas had always been a hard day for me.
I grew up in an orphanage attached to a church out in the suburbs. Angelus Orphanage. Even after the government rebranded every "orphanage" in the country as a "group home," everyone still called the place what it was—an old, rundown orphanage.
Every year around this time, we were put to work at the church all day as a kind of annual tradition, and at the end of it we always had to force a smile for the camera. Adulthood hadn't changed much. Before I landed this job, I'd bounced between part-time gigs, and Christmas through New Year's was peak season—high pay, and all I remembered was working myself ragged.
Even raised in a church orphanage, Christmas for me had never had much to do with faith. A Christmas greeting was just something you said to be polite…
Still, even a few faintly glowing lights were better than none at all.
Nine in the morning.
A new notice went up on the company intranet. A beta version of the in-house shopping app scheduled for release next spring would be distributed to employees; try it out as if you were shopping, post a review on the internal board, and five people would be drawn at random to receive gift certificates for a nearby supermarket.
A few clicks and a short review for a week's worth of groceries? Hard to lose. With nothing to risk, I downloaded the app, installed it, and opened it up.
Beta Test Ver 1.0
Developer: SVE Inc.
After the company logo and app info loaded, a screen came up that looked no different from any ordinary shopping app. This week's special sales on the main page, popular items sorted by category, a My Page for payment history and accumulated points, personalized recommendations, and so on…
It was all virtual, but the app ran as if it were the real thing. The development team must have gone through hell putting it together. Which left me with no idea what kind of review to leave. "It's remarkably similar to every other shopping app"?
"Oh, they're giving out gift certificates!"
While I was still mulling it over, an excited voice floated over from the desks across the aisle. I was pretty sure they weren't just giving them out—you had to write a review and get drawn at random—but anyway.
I glanced to my right. Two seats over, Cassandra was, as always, starting her makeup the moment the workday began. Mascara wand in her left hand, lashes cranked to the sky, right hand working the mouse as she browsed the intranet board first thing. She claimed it was the most entertaining corner of the whole company.
The real problem was when she suddenly focused on actual work with only one eye done. The half-made-up face was genuinely startling. Once, I'd run into her like that in the break room fetching coffee and nearly jumped out of my skin.
Ten-thirty in the morning.
About an hour and a half into the workday, there was always at least one person who started twisting restlessly in their chair.
"Ah, my coffee's gone cold."
Greg, at the desk next to mine, tapped my shoulder and stood up. I followed him with my own mug, the coffee long since cooled in the frigid office air. In December, no amount of heating could keep the chill out.
We passed the little tree shining alone and opened the sliding door at the far left end of the hallway. The small break room held three microwaves, two employee refrigerators, and three little tables. On the tables, the company's free breakfast offerings—coffee, croissants, bread, jam—were still out.
I took a bite of a dry croissant. Greg set his mug spinning in the microwave, stretched a long yawn, and asked,
"So what are you doing for Christmas this year?"
"Not sure. You?"
I dumped the cold coffee in the sink and started a fresh pot as I asked. Greg let out a deflated sigh and launched into his complaints.
"My mom just got remarried, so she wants me to stop by. Meet the new dad, the in-laws, the whole thing… Which would be fine, except it's a seven-hour bus ride home. Man, if I had a girlfriend, I could use her as an excuse and just drop in for a bit next summer…"
So he didn't have a girlfriend. A little surprising, given he was the best-looking person I'd ever met.
Greg kept up a steady stream of chatter the whole way back to our desks with steaming mugs in hand. He was the only person in the office my age, and we'd gotten along well from day one. He talked a lot, and sometimes he stuck his nose where it didn't belong, but he was clean-cut and well-mannered at heart. As a close office coworker, he wasn't a bad friend at all.
Of course, once we'd gotten friendlier, I'd developed the habit of half-closing my ears whenever he really got going.
"…Right?"
"Yeah, right."
I had no idea what he'd been talking about, but a simple affirmation was enough to satisfy him and send him rolling into the next story.
Every so often, though, he'd cut himself off mid-sentence for no reason and stare hard at his monitor. When Greg went quiet that suddenly, it made me a little nervous. They say when a loud kid goes silent, he's probably getting into trouble.
What Greg, Cassandra, Otis, and I did for three thousand dollars a month after taxes didn't require any remarkable skills. Simple, repetitive accounting labor. Every day, every week, we took the numerical feasts that some hardworking employee at a client company had carefully prepared and reorganized them into a different format. Even that—once you entered the formulas—was finished off by the most basic computer program imaginable. The kind of work that might vanish entirely once technology advanced a little further.
I had no complaints about the job itself. It was hard to make a mistake even if you tried, and even if an error did crop up, you could fix it yourself without ever getting chewed out by a superior.
And yet, every now and then, you still witnessed scenes like this…
"How on earth do you mess something like this up? Greg, how long have you even been working here?!"
"I'm sorry…"
So that was why he'd gone quiet earlier. Once a week at the short end, every other week at the long, he got hauled over and put through that. You'd think making the same mistake every time would eventually fix the problem.
"Are you even capable of learning?!"
Manager Rachel seemed to share the thought, her voice rising.
"Ugh, seriously. It wasn't all my fault today. The client sent over garbage data."
"…Well, coordinating that and redoing the work is kind of our job."
"Then call them and tell them to do it right! Doesn't it feel like Manager Rachel is always way too hard on me?"
Working beside a colleague who grumbled under his breath after another dressing-down, lunchtime would roll around, and a little more work after that would bring four o'clock and the end of the day. All in all, I thought it was a pretty decent job.
Five in the afternoon.
After work, a forty-five-minute bus ride carried me out of the city center, and the streets that unfolded looked nothing like the ones around the office. I got off at a stop that always had one or two homeless people hanging around and walked toward a shabby low-rise apartment building on the outskirts of town, a place of old cement and brick tones.
I skipped the elevator—narrow, easily thirty years old—and climbed the three flights of stairs. In the corridor-style building, among the five units on the third floor, Unit 303 sat dead center. I fished through my pockets in front of the door.
Whether the lock offered any real security was doubtful, but the door had one, so I locked it out of courtesy every morning and stuck the key in the hole every evening on the way home. Fortunately, I'd never come back to find the door forced open or anything of the sort.
Inside, the bathroom was immediately to the right; to the left, past a folding door, was a tiny kitchen. One counter for cooking, a gas range, a small built-in fridge, and a single-basin sink. Everything jammed into a space so tight it seemed to insist that a kitchen wasn't a kitchen without the full set—and I barely used it.
Three steps forward without turning toward the bathroom or kitchen, then a left, and a narrow hallway appeared, just wide enough for two people to stand face-to-face. Five steps down that hall, a door opened to the right. It was meant to be a bedroom, but there was no bed—just an empty room.
Two more steps without stopping brought me to the living-dining area, the most spacious part of this cramped apartment. The kitchen connected from this side as well. There was even a small balcony off the living room, perfect for hanging towels and underwear and other light laundry.
Even on the third floor, a cat sometimes visited the balcony. Whether it came from the neighbor's balcony or climbed up the building's exterior pipes, I had no idea. When our eyes met, we would just look at each other until, always, the cat left first.
Between the living room and kitchen sat a four-person wooden table the previous tenant had left behind. Why anyone would put a four-person table in a place this small was beyond me—maybe they'd scavenged it off the street. Still, it was the only surface in the apartment where I could set a wallet or keys, so it earned its keep.
The only furniture I'd bought myself was a sofa-bed from a flat-pack store. I sat on it to drink coffee and lay on it to sleep. Since I never used the kitchen cabinets, my few clothes and blankets went in there. I never cooked anything elaborate at home, so nothing picked up smells, and the storage was generous enough that I didn't need extra furniture.
There was nothing special about my days. Once a week I took laundry to the coin-op; on sunny days I cleaned. Beyond that, there was so little to do I rarely even turned on the lights. Weekend mornings were quiet enough for sleeping in; nights got a little noisy, but I didn't mind much. Even spending the hours in a blank daze felt peaceful, in its own way.
I wouldn't call it comfortable, but nothing was particularly uncomfortable either. No snow in my face, no rain on my head, no one else's gaze to worry about. There was no ordinary TV or bookshelf like you'd find in a normal family's living room, but I was never bored.
It smelled gray. Not an unpleasant smell, so that was fine.
The house was fine. My life was fine.