Folds

In the breast pocket of Roberto’s suit jacket, he carries around a little folded up version of himself. It is about two inches big, an imperfect triangle, paper thin despite the many times it’s been doubled over itself.

He does not remember when this version of himself got to be so small, and, actually, he hardly considers the size of it anymore. Most days he gets home and hangs up the jacket before his cat can get her littery paw prints on it. He rolls a lint roller to get it ready for the next day, but usually forgets to go through all the pockets.

He no longer feels the weight of himself sitting in the pocket, not often anyway. Every now and then when he’s at his desk and has to throw the jacket on (Susan from HR and Bert from Sales have teamed up to terrorize the office into polar conditions), he’ll notice how it exerts the slightest bit of pressure against his chest. He’ll pause before he responds to another email, remembering himself for just a moment. How unwieldy he used to be. And though there’s a pang of longing for being whole again, he’s only got five minutes before the next meeting, and he’d like to pee and top off his coffee in the breakroom. It’s terrible coffee, and though he always brings enough from home, it’s a habit that emerged after a month or two at this job; a necessity to make it through the afternoon, and punishment he feels he deserves. Punishment for what, he doesn’t know. By the time the burnt office coffee has swirled together with the cold dregs of the good coffee from home, he no longer feels the weight in his pocket, and he carries on.

There was a progression, of course. One he can remember if he’s laying in bed late at night and sleep can’t come unless he focuses his thoughts in one direction. He remembers how he used to paint whenever he could. His first paycheck from his summer job before college, and how it went to a canvas and a set of good brushes instead of the textbook fund he knew he’d need. The feeling of getting lost trying to find the right shade of blue, mixing and dabbing until it sang in the right key. It would drive him crazy these days to spend so long on such an unproductive task. But back then there was an unmistakable joy in the act itself, regardless of what he produced with it.

Then came the world and the practicalities of surviving it. Of exchanging time and energy for money in order to spend your remaining time and energy as freely as possible. Just finding his place in that world though took up time, and so he folded himself in half, consoling himself with the fact that it was not an amputation. That part of himself would still be there when the resumes had been sent away, the interviews conducted, the follow-up emails finally leaving the draft folder and into the outbox (could he perhaps send a thankful sketch to follow up instead? It was a torturous time-suck to rephrase what he’d said in his cover letter, in the interview, to convince someone he was worthy in three paragraphs after just having tried to convince them over thirty minutes). He would just have to turn over to the other side and mix the paints there, play with brush strokes, try to capture the light of the world on the many canvases he would be able to afford once someone gave him a job.

Once he did, he’d underestimated how it would feel to get back home. How he would see those canvases still wrapped in plastic, and he would see his couch and the enticing glow of the television, how there were friends to see, new people to meet, plays to watch, travel he could afford, the aching desire for the warmth of the sun after eight hours of Susan and Bert’s A/C tyranny. And so he folded himself in half again, repeating to himself that it was only making space, and not an abandonment. As if to prove it to himself, he bought an easel for future paintings, and he even kept it out in the living room for months rather than storing it away.

At his meeting, Roberto finds his mind wandering. Sometimes he thinks that meetings are a brilliant tactic by the corporate world to work in some mind-wandering time into employees’ schedules. His coworkers all type away on their laptops, but he has adopted the quaint/pretentious affectation of carrying a notebook. He says it helps him stay focused, but it is the margins he cares for.

The way he starts to doodle before he even realizes, like . A cartoon of himself, a sketch of his boss Linda’s pantsuit, a bird perched on the window. It is in these moments that he feels the sharp corner of that part of himself he keeps in his breastpocket. Rather than shifting to ease the discomfort, he finds himself leaning into it, the way he would tongue a loose tooth when he was younger, the way he sometimes still presses on a bruise.

He has brought a pencil today, and it allows him to shade. He remembers spending hours whittling a piece of drawing charcoal away, playing with lines and pressure. Erasing the same tricky corner of shadow over and over again until the paper almost tore. Hands and wrists a mess of black smears that would transfer into the sink as he washed his hands, the dark swirls in the bubbles a work of art in their own right.

When was the last time he cared about something enough to get it wrong over and over again? Had he known when he was folding himself up to fit into the world that he was tucking that away too? The burning urge to create? The patience inherent in fucking up?

In the moments before he knocks on Linda’s door to enter her office, he’s heard her singing quietly to herself. He’s seen Bill in Customer Service working on a screenplay, then click away when someone else approaches. He wonders if they, too, have folded themselves up. All these people around him, the entire office, the building; surely he’s not the only one who remembers a fuller version of himself. Who feels the sharp corner pressing into his ribs for a moment, just a moment before the world returns.