I held it together until twenty minutes after five.

My last day in the office was rife with commemoration. It began at the workplace of a client, who had prepared for me a flattering going-away presentation.  This was followed by a brief off-site (IHOP again, this is a nasty trend of ours) meeting with my boss, filled with an embarrassing level of adulation, almost to the point where I thought she was going to ask me back. She didn’t. After lunch and thoughtful gifts from coworkers, it was nearly the end of the day. Pretty soon it was only Carmen, the most senior staff person under my boss, and I left in the office.

“I should probably take your keys now,” she said.

Fuck that, I thought, I’m never giving up my keys. My attachment to the office, I’ve learned recently, is significant. The office is my structural home, but it’s much more than that. It is the place where I grew out of my relationship woes, my financial troubles, my creative doldrums. Everything. It became the source of the rebirth of my happiness. And part of me wasn’t ready to leave.

“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “How about I drop the key in the mail slot after I leave? That’ll give me a few minutes to finish cleaning up. You can get out of here.”

Carmen accepted. We hugged and said our goodbyes, and she disappeared through the entranceway of the building.

I walked over, locked the door, and turned around to face the now-empty office. The place looked ordinary. I guess that’s the irony of familiarity. You become so habituated in its embrace, so sheltered in its predictability that you grow comfortable, casual. Yet what breeds the absence of remark is the enduring dependability that familiarity provides. Think about it. A simple flip of the switch illuminates every corner of the room, yet we don’t rejoice in its revelation. Rather, our mood is contingent upon its delivery. We become immediately negative upon its failure. Angry, afraid, inconvenienced. This marvel of human invention! And we scoff at mere imperfections! Not even just a detail it’s become, but an expectation. This is the risk of familiarity.

I thought about this for a moment, and was soon overtaken with emotion for the splendor before me. Each breath turned into a gasp in acknowledgment for each extraordinary detail of this room. Each feature that had collectively acted as my sole shelter of respite for the past 500 days. 500 days! To the day!

I accounted for each detail of wonder that allowed for such a feat of space utilization, from the upwards-rolling blinds of the front window to the forward-facing desk situated in the rear corner, that sole obstacle from my being seen laying prostrate beneath its fortress-like teak panels. The desk drawer storing my hair clippers. The hidden storage knob that hung my suits and the dusty cranny that concealed my auxiliary shoe bag. The impractical, too. A curve in entranceway wall that always caught my imagination during phone calls, losing myself in its strange angular dimension which seemed more fit for a bike ramp than commercial sidewall. Or an unexplained divot in the flooring near the water cooler, crater-like in its mystery, like a sandcastle moat many times washed over by the incoming tide.

I sat down in my desk chair, overcome with sentiment. Unspectacular as the place was, I had grown to love it. But my relationship with the office was hardly a symbiotic one. All of the listed details were benefits the place had given to me. Without them, I would be left without a structural home. Without me, however, the office retained its identity. The imbalance was not lost on me. What the office had given me was far greater than what I had given back to the office. I felt a surge of gratitude, and a distant and not completely understood desire to somehow honor the place. Not knowing how to achieve the solitary honoring of an inanimate series of objects that comprised this structural location, I did what any person who truly loves another would do: I allowed myself to be vulnerable in its presence.

It was 5:20 on this final day in my office and there I was, tearing up, strumming my guitar with my legs hanging off the desk. I don’t weep often, but there is nothing quite as liberating as letting go in a purely honest way. A good cry is like a purging of excess, a release of weighted droplets of water that throw our bodies out of balance. The beauty of the act itself is striking. Our eyes, arguably the most compelling features of our body, become swollen with sentiment, literally blinded by feeling so strongly that this inadvertently self-inflicted phenomenon stops us dead in our tracks and commands the entirety of our attention. How beautiful is that! It is the act that we first learned, as little humans, wailing wildly, eager for the suckle of our mother’s breast or the warmth of our father’s embrace. It is how we first connect with the ones we love. Before we can speak, before we can communicate, we cry.

It was exactly the release I needed. One last bonding with this place that was so strangely dear to me. What I had sincerely intended to be a few lingering minutes has since turned into three hours. It is 8:00 now and I am still here, stretching out my farewell, spending the last moments at my desk doing what the last 500 days taught me to do. To write again.

In a few moments I will close my laptop, gather the last of my belongings, and lock up the office for one last time. Only this time, I’m ready to give up the keys.

-TOH