The souls of everyday objects

At work, I normally keep to myself. I sit at my desk with my red felt tip pens, my stapler, my eraser, my mechanical pencils and my ruler that I use to mark my spot on the page I'm reading. These are the objects I share more time in my day with than real people. These are my tools for work, but other than that, I don't attach much transcendental importance to them.

I share an office with an English bloke that is nearing retirement age. He's nice enough, occasionally chuckling or blurting something out, thus requiring me to interrupt my interaction with my tools and crane my neck around his computer monitor and find out what he's on about. I usually reply with something along the lines of "Ain't that the truth" or whatever it takes to let him know that I'm politely responsive but that I don't care to continue the conversation as I have 500 pages in front of me that need to be proofread by next week.

I have lunch and share coffees at times with the authors that I proofread for, and we exchange pleasantries and talk about the weather and shit. But in general, I keep to myself; my working life and personal life don't intermix. In fact, the office just adjacent to mine is filled with nice looking people whose names I do not even know, because I stay in my shell, huddled over my pile of documents, and when I leave work I go home as opposed to partaking in the BBQs and movie nights and pub crawls that are organized by the more social co-workers among us.

For this reason, I didn't really know Don, whose office is directly in front of mine; office number 76. I only know Don by name because it is written right on the door which is the first thing I see when I look outside my office. Don's door is usually open and I can always see him click clacking away on his keyboard or speaking to someone loudly on the phone, causing me to quietly get up and shut my door. He always shoots me an apologetic look. I shake my head and mouth, "No problem" before closing my door gently.

But today his door is closed and his light is off because Don died of a heart attack over the weekend.

Please don't say "I'm sorry" or "my condolences" which would imply that I had exchanged more than ten words with Don in my life, all of which were obligatory niceties such as "G'morning", exchanged with the most hastened of eye contact imaginable in the hallway to and from the shared printer or the restrooms, like I do with all of the other 200 people in this office that I don't know. It would imply that maybe we had cigarettes together, or bumped shoulders in the café downstairs while updating each other on our weekend. It would imply that we informed each other of office gossip from time to time or included each other in work-friendly email jokes. We did none of that. I don't even know Don's marital status or if he has children.

I'm certainly not upset. But I know somewhere, some people are very upset.

I know that someone will go through the things in his office and empty out the physical remains of Don's professional life, shortly after the remains of his physical life-- his body-- are dealt with and probably long before the remains of his personal life – his clothes, his aftershave, the half-used bottle of roll-on deodorant with a straggling armpit hair still stuck to it– are parted with painfully when the stomach can be mustered up to do so by the people closest to him.

The remains of his professional life must be the items given the least importance. Maybe the person that cleans out his office after his family has picked up his personal items will think nothing of returning his pile of paperclips to the general office supply room to mix and mingle and become indistinguishable from the other paperclips. That bottle of White-Out that Don used to carefully correct his work that later became smudged with his shirt cuff will be carried away to its proper place, perhaps finding itself on some secretary's desk within a week's time. A half-used pad of post-it notes will be placed on top of the stack of unopened ones in the supply room and someone will pick them up not knowing that the used post-its from that particular pad had been used to jot down Don's grocery lists, meeting dates, deadlines, birthday reminders. Maybe the pens that Don preferred - the black Pilot Vball 0.7 pens - will thoughtlessly be cast into their appropriate box without a thought to the fact that one of them in particular was actually held by Don himself when blood was still pumping through his living hands, who never imagined that he would be dead before he himself chucked the pen into the waste bin or before he patted his breast pocket to find that it had become lost. Maybe he never looked at these items and wondered if they, with their plastic flimsiness and Made-in-China cheapness, would outlive him. Perhaps these things that carry no sentimental value were the objects that had the most physical contact with Don during his waking hours. They intimately melded with Don's day to day life and will now be dissolved into the ebb and flow of impersonal, sterile office life and reincarnated onto other employees' desks without even their knowing.

I'm stopped in the hall on my way inside my office from the water cooler and am asked for clarification regarding some of my proofreading work, and I see that I am responding and explaining but I feel far away from myself and my voice becomes a hum inside my head and my eyes can't keep from darting towards the closed door to office number 76 with no light coming through underneath. I imagine Don's desk and all of this meaningless office supply shit among papers that look disorganized but that I'm sure had some system that only Don could explain, were he here to do so. I imagine the coffee mug with a ring of dried back-washed coffee that still contains some of Don's saliva at the bottom that he forgot to rinse out when he left on Friday afternoon because he wasn't feeling well. And my eyes turn back to the tedium of my red handwriting across the stapled page of the document that I'd spent hours poring over that is being held up for me to look at. I notice my coffee smudge at the bottom corner of it from Friday's desperate afternoon latte, and I think about all the stupid shit that we touch that remains in the world after we disappear that nobody gives a thought to when we're gone. And vulnerability punches me hard in the gut.

Suddenly I remember how when I was very young and in love with a boy, even the pencil he had chewed on became a relic for me to hide in my jewelry box and flush over when I'd pull it out and examine the tiny bite marks in it, knowing how ashamed I would feel if he knew how I'd saved it. And I remember the first time I ever saw Luisito's bedroom, allowed in as a platonic guest before we had ever shared a bed and I remember very clearly how my eyes scanned his room and lingered on his pillow and how I felt a pinprick of jealousy and wonder towards it for sharing more intimate contact with him than I ever had.

Just objects.

And I felt a deep sense of shame for carrying on just outside Don's closed door, behind which seemed to me to still contain part of his remains.

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