“Anything You Want To Be”

Jeremy arrived at work a few minutes before 8:00am. The young man was good like that. In one hand he had a bag containing a donut and a small coffee, breakfast, paid for with quarters and dimes. In the other hand was a fresh notebook that he used for his job, paid for with the few bills he had. He was at his desk by 8:10 and watched the sun scrape the buildings from a small solitary window in his office.

The building he worked in, had worked in for nearly a year, was a large warehouse without any wares, untouched by re-development that had so-far plagued the rest of the city. It was quiet, dry, and–unlike his last office–you never had to worry about police. That job had had too much paranoia and fear, as the building next door was undergoing renovation at the time and there was a constant sense of movement, like a giant clock ticking. But this job was much better, he’d only his own hunger to worry about now. God, he’d lost weight.

During the morning hours, he doodled on the brand new notebook: stick figures went to war with one another, the letters of his name took on increasingly fancy fashions and styles, and monster’s faces popped out from all corners of the page. Without even meaning to, he realized, he had spent hours drawing every morning for years two years now. Maybe I’m supposed to be an artist, he thought, as he saw the complexity with which he drew the words “Fuck Off” in the center of one of the pages.

When noon came, he decided to go for a walk around the block. No lunch today because he’d gotten the notebook, so he’d use the walk as the midpoint between morning and afternoon. It wasn’t very nice out and the streets here were some of the most quiet and deserted in New York. On the corner of the street was a tiny Deli manned by a cute young Latin girl who was now outside smoking a cigarette. As usual, she smiled at him and said “Hey, Jeremy”; he replied with a formal nod. She went to open her mouth again, but he quickly cut her off, saying “Sorry, I need to get back.” And he did, before even a half hour had passed.

The next few hours he spent pacing around the tiny office, whispering plans and plots to himself, telling the air his opinions on politics, telling the wall the wonderful jokes he could have made to his Latin admirer; the walls didn’t laugh, but he did. As usual, around 4:00 his Mother called from the other side of the country. “Work’s going great,” he told the woman, adding a few more notches to her sense of pride. When the call was over, the clock on his phone told him that he had reached the home stretch. He let out a sigh of releif and sat back down at his desk.

But the last two hours went by as slow as hell. He
used
his hands
to create music
on the
old wooden desk,
but it wasn’t very
good or melodic. He used his hands to create music on the old wooden desk, but it wasn’t very good or melodic. Then he tried to fix one of the desk’s crooked drawers by tightening a screw with his finger tip which, not surprisingly, didn’t work. For one entire fifteen minute span of those two hours, he just watched the clock: a emergency technique he saved for particularly slow days.

However, 6:00pm did eventually come. He collected all the pages he had doodled on and ripped them out of the notebook, crumpling them into a ball to be thrown out downstairs in the dumpster. It was nice in the summer, being able to leave when it was still light out because the warehouse didn’t have any electricity. He left his desk, pushing the chair in and arranging the notebook square in the center. He was out of the abandon warehouse by 6:10.

Out on the street, which the afternoon rush hour had slightly enlivened, he stopped for a moment to reflect on another day of work. It was hard sometimes, following your dreams, being, as his parents and teachers said, “anything you want to be”. But, really, he thought, who else can you be? He wondered about this as he walked off into the city amongst all the other people.