I'd always looked at work as somewhat of an inconvenience-the stuff that gets in the way while you're busy having a life.
The past two weeks, all of that changed.
The short version is that it began with a minor abrasion that rendered me blind in one eye for six days, climaxed with the death of my grandfather, and roared to its conclusion whereupon I flew home from the funeral to discover my apartment (and all its contents) covered in raw sewage from a toilet disaster. And as if fate were playing a cruel cosmic joke, I turned around moments later to discover a very angry cat peeing in my luggage.
I knew how he felt.
But somewhere in all this madness, I managed to go to work. I took a few days off to pay my respects in California, but otherwise I was at my desk, blind eye covered against the bright florescent light, squinting through seven-year-old glasses, blinking back tears against an overwhelming sense of loss, body aching from a night on the floor after tossing a sewage-soaked mattress into the front yard.
Yet these moments on the clock proved to be, unbelievably, a tremendous relief.
I'd never fully appreciated the pleasant distraction of the day job. The series of challenges that I could handle. Problems that weren't exactly mine. The tasks that made hours fly by until I was ready to tackle reality again. No one was forcing me to be there; my managers were extremely understanding when I once chose to leave abruptly in the middle of the day. But the fact that I had somewhere to be--a stack of assignments on my desk, customers and co-workers awaiting my results--made it easier to navigate through my days. These were things I could focus on: a copy machine jam. A new temp to train. The leak that sprung in my kitchen ceiling last Tuesday paled in importance and it, too, was something I could handle. A poorly-timed argument with the spouse--that could wait until later. I had phone bill payments to process.
This formerly meaningless temp job has become a life-raft in a suddenly shifting and angry sea. I hang on until my feet touch bottom. I'm grateful that I can stop kicking-can bob for a time on its familiar surface. It's the time-out buzzer in a game that's gone into multiple overtimes. It's what I think of at midnight as I scrub sewage-stained paw prints from my kitchen counters: tomorrow I will go to work. And all of this, if for just a short time, will go away.
My husband dropped me at the bus this morning. He's taking the day off to deal with the apartment. To replace items that had been destroyed. To give each surface a final scrub. He asked me if I wanted to take the day off.
For the first time in my life, work was the only place I wanted to be.
