Two Minutes in the Breakroom

January twenty-fifth.

There was a flyer on the corkboard. There are always flyers on the corkboard, the corkboard is a municipal landfill for notices about potlucks and shift-swap requests and one very old reminder about labeling your food in the refrigerator that nobody has ever actually followed. But this one was different, or I was different, or it was a slow Saturday and I had eleven minutes before I had to be back on the floor. I stood in front of it for what I later estimated was two full minutes. I did not take it. I did not even read all of it. I just stood there.

The thing about the itch, and I've mentioned it here, not by name, but I've mentioned it, the vague forward-facing feeling that something is forming just past the edge of what I can currently see, is that it doesn't like being looked at directly. It's like trying to see a dim star. You have to look slightly to one side. So standing in the breakroom with fluorescent light doing what fluorescent light does to everyone's complexion and Simone's voice carrying in from the floor, I was not looking at the flyer directly. I was just near it. And what I noticed, standing near it, was that the itch had gotten more specific without my permission. It was no longer just forward-facing. It was forward-facing and outward-facing and probably involved showing up somewhere new and learning something with my hands.

The mug and the thinking that goes with it.

I put my mug in the dish rack. I went back out. I did not take the flyer. I thought about it for the rest of the shift, specifically during the slow stretch between three and four when the restaurant is half-empty and time gets strange. I thought: I know more precisely what the thing is now. Which is different from knowing what to do about it. Both feel important. Only one of them requires doing anything, and that one can wait a little longer.