The Poem I Wrote on My Last Day of Work
Twenty years in the same office. The poem was the exit interview.
I worked in the same office for twenty years, and on my last day I wrote a poem. Not a speech, not an email, a poem. I wrote it on the back of a printout, the kind of paper that is too important to be thrown away.
The poem was about the way the office had changed me, the way the work had shaped me, the way the people I had worked with had become the people I was. It was about the specific way the light came through the window in the afternoon, the way the coffee machine sounded, the way the carpet was worn by twenty years of the same footsteps.
I didn't read it to anyone. I put it in the drawer of the desk I was leaving, the drawer that had held my pens and my secrets and my lunch for twenty years. The poem is for the next person, the way the desk is for the next person, the way the office is for the next person.
I don't know if anyone found it. I don't know if they read it or kept it or threw it away. But the poem is there, in the drawer, the proof that twenty years of a life were lived in that room.
I have a better job now. The poem is better than the job.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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