We knew this was coming, this move from a building of our own to a cramped little store front down at the other end of town, a panic move by two incompetent owners, who figured out if they sell the wreck of the building, they can stave off shutting down the business – at least for a while.
This may explain why the owner wouldn’t give her a raise – or fired other people even for asking for one, they are squeezing every penny then can from this dying business and don’t want to share what little wealth there is.
The move isn’t the end of the world. I’m still in exile regardless of which place I work out of.
Truth be told the old office is a disaster zone, something left over from another era, leaking pipes, poor heat, worse air conditioning, so it’s frigid in winter, scalding in summer, and dripping like crazy whenever it rains or anybody in the apartments upstairs flushes a toilet.
Yet for some reason, I still like the place, even when I’ve plotted to get out of it, something pleasantly funky about it, and safe, a haven against everything when things got very bad over the last year.
I could always come here, hide in this time warp from the 1970s, and not have to confront the bullshit that went on in the main office except on Tuesdays.
Now, with all of the furniture gone, this place feels like a grave, less safe, one more victim of the strange things that have gone on over the last year.
I can’t help thinking how ancient the place feels, and I old I feel being in it.
It didn’t feel agent when I first snuck in here during the Christmas season a decade ago, after the owners talked me into coming down here to work, the people unaware of the disaster that was about to befall them, the take over they didn’t expect, the betrayal by the previous owner that sold out the business overnight without telling any of the people who worked there.
I snuck in to look around, a spy if not in the house of love, then in a house of good feeling, all of these strange figments of another era working together to get their product out, nothing corporate, just people thrown together for a common cause.
It felt so utterly attractive; I felt so ashamed of coming there in stealth and had the urge to warn them, give them a few weeks in which to abandon ship before it all sank.
But I didn’t. Standing here now, after all that has transpired since, I wish I had.
Seeing it now, abandoned, only made my betrayal seem worse, as if it has taken a decade to finally bury the beast. Without this place, without the people who worked here (most fired or let go except for the three people moving to the new office with me), the institution that once was, will never be again, regardless of how much we pretend.
During the worst of the last year, during those times when I felt most exiled here, I often imagined somehow taking back this place from the two owners who owned it and turning it back to what it was before – impossible then, now even less possible, having gutted it like a fish.
I thought things would get better when she resigned, somehow things would go back to what they had been in that period after the takeover. But now, I realize nothing will be the same again, and that this is only the beginning of the end.
Perhaps fate has been kind to her by forcing her to resign when she did, not witnessing this slow death the rest of us must endure.
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