Oh, memory! You are so easy to manipulate. Proof: one might've enjoyed too many lychee martinis at last night's office cocktail mixer and gone home in a taxi feeling too sentimental about one's nearing departure. One might've too fondly recalled London in the spring, fall and summer and the pleasure of taking black cabs to QVC to sell lipstick to women in Dover. One might've too easily confused London in the spring, fall and summer with her actual work in New York, which mostly amounted to shuffling papers from one side of her desk to another and occasionally meeting clients for breakfast. In a moment of appetizer-induced abandon, one might've thought, I'll never have a good meal again. Shamefully, one might've also confessed to her mother over the phone that if it hadn't been for this job, she wouldn't have had a good meal for all of last year. Oh, if only appetizers and lychee martinis, black cabs in London, small plane rides to Halifax, occasional glasses of Veuve Cliquot and business-class hotel rooms could be the spoils of real work.
If only there hadn't also been days when one went home to one's husband and spent near hours coughing up blood-colored tirades. Or, mornings when one ambled down the hall to the office door in a state of total spiritual apathy, having surrendered to the limits of the ceiling one had hit years before. If only this job hadn't been the job that it actually was.
And after tomorrow, neither will it be again. Nor will I, my friends, nor will I.
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