Returning (Blakeslee)

I am fortunate to have a job that transitioned well to working at home, so I have not been in my physical workplace since mid-March. I had left some personal effects behind, like my coffee mug warmer and the light therapy box I use during the year's darker mornings - things I figured I'd need as autumn closes in. So today, I drove the old commute and key-fobbed my way into the fifth-floor office with only the afternoon sunlight to guide me through row after row of empty cubicles.

There was an eerie Pompeii quality of suspended animation to the space. None of us knew when we left in March that we still wouldn't be returned there by September. The office manager's winter shawl was slung over her chair. My colleague's poor little succulent had long since withered to nothingness next to his mail tray. The nearly-drained bottle of hand sanitizer on my desk stood like a weary harbinger of the times that were to come.

Erin Blakeslee is a content developer for Tooling U-SME in Cleveland. She earned an MFA from Purdue and is a doctoral candidate in English at Case Western Reserve.