New Crutches
Seriously, no one at work is going to ask me about my crutches?
I mean, that's fine, I guess. It's not like you guys have to keep up on every little change in my appearance--new jacket, haircut, stuff like that. Who wants pushy, personal observations at work. But, crutches? That's kind of a big, obvious thing that you might wanna point out.
I guess I kinda expected it to be the first thing anybody asked me about today.
I'll admit I had a little mini fantasy where I got off the elevator and everyone gasped and rushed to see what happened. Then, maybe I'd tell the---I'm gonna go ahead and say amazingly life-altering---story of how I ended up on crutches, and everyone would tsk tsk and coo over me. Maybe not everyone, but certainly in the fantasy, Alexis from New Media cooed.
But, now it's 3 o'clock, and we've had three meetings, one of which was about loading paper into the new printer. And, not a word about these crutches. I think, "What happened to your legs?" should come before, "Legal size goes in the lowest tray." That doesn't me a narcissist, does it? I'll answer. No, it doesn't.
I've gotten used to no one asking about each other's weekends. It was weird at first that nobody said "bless you" when somebody sneezed, but I came to accept that. But, crutches and a limp that weren't there yesterday? Let's at least try to pretend that we're still real people in this office.
Then, there's the tuxedo. Nobody noticed that I'm wearing a torn tuxedo and have a black eye? Not one person? What the fuck, people? What ... the fuck?
Excuse me, can you move that recycle bin so that I can hobble away on these new, apparently invisible crutches? ... Hello? Can you move that? ... The bin next to you? Never mind, fuck it.
I gotta find a new job.
