The Parking Lot Exit

I had a beer last night, the night of the "letting go". I had to go to the store to get one because I don't drink beer except occasionally when going out with friends and certainly not in the middle of the week. But yesterday was shall we say unusual, and I suddenly realized, I didn't have to worry about getting up on time, or going to bed at a decent hour. I could do what I felt like doing. In essence, last night, a Monday night, was like the first Friday night, if not for the rest of my life, at least for the immediate future. I had a devil of a time picking out a beer. Probably because this is the first time I have gone to the store to do just that. I noticed I felt incredibly numb and even though I could read the labels on the bottles the letters were really not forming words in any coherent pattern. If this is the way I am before a beer, I wondered what it would be like afterward, I thought to myself. I may have not actually thought it, but rather said it out loud given the look I got from a Bermuda shorts wearing man in the wine aisle. I treated my taste buds to a high end craft beer-- the last beer I remember drinking a few months back because the bottles had a blue label and a pretty picture of a moon.



I had one beer when I got home. I had this after I sat in the parking lot at my work for almost an hour after I was told I was eliminated. Well, not me personally, the position, but it felt like I was personally eliminated and removed from this place I had worked at for over eight years. All those years of overtime, committee and volunteer work were now contained in the manila folder I was given by human resources and now held in my shaking hands. I walked back to my office to get my keys and purse. I started to clean off my desk. I was just picking up things and putting them into a bag. The same bag I had used earlier in the day to bring in donuts for the staff. The staff that was no longer mine. Because I was no longer. I stopped clearing my desk when I realized I put a full cup of coffee into the bag. I walked out of my office said good-bye to those I saw and then walked to the parking lot.

The sky seemed unusually blue. And a hawk was following my movements from a tree as I walked to the parking lot and to my car. I did indeed feel like prey. I felt like a rodent slinking to my car. What had I done to deserve this? My director said I had done nothing, it was economics and restructuring. My position was being eliminated. I had done nothing wrong, so then why did it feel like I had? Why did it feel like I no longer mattered, why did it feel like I was the one being eliminated and not my position?

I called a friend and my sisters from that parking lot. I sat there, with the manila folder now on the passenger seat, until I realized that I was now sitting in the parking lot of a place in which I no longer worked. Would security come by in their white pick-up truck and ask me what I was doing, still sitting there? The thought of having the further humiliation of a security escort off the property was more than I could bear. I found the keys, turned on the engine, and slowly left the parking lot. On the way out, for the first time I noticed a new exit to the parking lot that would have made getting in and out so much easier. I could get to work earlier, if only I had work to get early to. The irony, of course, is that I found it on my last day of work.

© pranaknits