jazz
Z. Yasmin Waheed
Before I found work I dreamt of it constantly. Empty manila folders stacked on top of each other and unintelligible emails on glowing screens. Once I had a dream set in an elevator with the doors sliding open over and over to reveal the wrong floor every time. I dreamt I grew increasingly frustrated, dreamt I punched at the buttons viciously. It was my first day and I was so late. I could not afford to be so late. When the doors slid open once again—another wrong floor, an office I did not belong in—I left the elevator and made for the stairs at the back. I walked past cubicles, stout plants growing modestly in their sensible earthenware. Past windows glinting at more than this, when I craned my neck to see through them: blossoms streaked across the pavements outside, like jazz colors the air. A whole world in bloom and me, not there to see it.
After, in the waking world, I stood outside an office building. It was Monday morning—my very first day. I was early, had done everything right, but I had been given no keys and was therefore at the mercy of whichever stranger would open the front door for me. Up and down the street, the tabebuia trees bowed their dew-heavy heads and swayed meaningfully in the wake of no breeze at all, as though listening to the notes of a song I could not hear and would not have placed even if I did. The vague grid of sheet music, a map of some other city shimmering beneath this one, just out of reach. Thinking these things, I lifted my hand to knock again. I had learned I could not afford to be late. And then the door swung open—finally—and I stepped over the threshold, in out of the sunlight.