Two Months and Nine Days

I lost my job yesterday. I had it in the morning, but by the afternoon it was lost. I poured three years into that job. I learned everything I could about it. Did things with it that nobody else had ever done! I cleaned up its messes. I even got up earlier than I ever thought I could just to be able to spend time with it. And still, it is lost. Never to be found again. It should be a simple thing to take care of, clean out the desk, take the pictures off the wall, make sure I take my multicolored staples home.
But, there is a problem. Every day for the next two months and nine (well, eight now) days I have to go and sit where my job was. I have to still provide for it, do things for it, even though it is gone. How will I do that? It’s like sitting beside a coffin at a funeral home, desperately wishing the person wasn't dead. It wasn’t true. The person in there will surely start moving again any minute and it will be a big joke. Right? Wrong! My job is as dead and gone as that corpse in the coffin. Yet, here I am, and here I shall be every day, working half-heartedly at a job that no longer exists. Half-heartedly because I know that it is useless now. All my hard work has been deemed dispensable. Its impact has been negated. The job doesn’t care. This is the second day and, already, I can tell it is going to be a miserable 69 more. But I must prevail if I am to reap any of the benefits I have worked so hard to earn. Because you see, my job didn’t run away, it was stolen from me by greedy people who don’t care about anything but the bottom line.
So yes, I had a job. Not good, not bad, just a job. Necessary things, jobs. And even though people around me were falling by the wayside every day, I somehow didn’t think I would join their ranks. So my time with my precious job seemed to stretch out in front of me to the horizon with no end in sight. I began to see myself in 11 years or so, sitting on the front porch while my job just kept going. Suddenly, I was told I had 70 days and my job would be no more. For the first time in 3 years, the clock started to tick.
Funny thing, time. (Please forgive me if I’ve written these same things before..) 70 days of sitting at this desk, actually 50, if you don’t count weekends and holidays, seems like an eternity. How can I even pretend to care what happens to it, now that it has left me? To get a paycheck? Sure, but even then..it’s like being stuck on a merry go round. You are getting sick of going nowhere, but it won’t stop. Do they expect me to jump off, maybe? Make it easier for them to say, see? I knew she wasn’t worth the money. See how easily she gave up working on that dead job? NO! I will not do that. They do not deserve that satisfaction! They deserve to have to continue paying me for the job I am no longer doing! Two months and 9 days is such a long time, but I will prevail!
You know, if I was told I only had 70 days to live…those days would seem like just a mere moment. I would scramble to live every day to the fullest. 70 days to be in a locked cell, only allowed bread and water…an eternity. See what I mean? The TRULY precious things are the ones that you want to hold on to. To make last. Not this dead job. These 70 days cannot pass fast enough, because when they are done, I will begin a new life. New possibilities. New job (I hope). I will be able to look toward the horizon with new eyes and, hopefully, will see a future where my job cares for me as much as I care for my job.
70 days, 69, 68, 67…..and counting….