Main Character Vibes

The coffee mug was the salt on a wound of a day

Before Tilly knew it, the clock had struck seven. The fast-paced momentum of her day had not subsided and even seemed to only grow more ravenous, more demanding. This energetic burden slowly chipped away at Tilly's vitality, despite the fact that she had been tenaciously persevering. The young woman's narrow shoulders extraordinarily carried a load that could have broken a camel's back. Tilly was like a resilient ant, carrying five-thousand times her own body weight.

"Tilly, I found a couple of mistakes in what you sent me. You need to redo it and try putting in more effort this time," sneered Sean, the pompous senior lawyer in charge of the interns. Although he himself started as an intern, in the very same gulags that Tilly was now in, the cycle of abuse continued. It was a sadistic rite of passage that built character for better or for worse.

"I'm sorry. I'll pull an all-nighter and work on it... you'll have it in your inbox first thing in the morning," Tilly said as she shuffled piles of papers on her desk in preparation to leave.

"Not good enough. I want it by tonight,"

"But..."

"There are hundreds of hungry law students who would kill to be where you are. Just put in more effort this time and don't even think about complaining."

"You'll have it by tonight," she replied.

This jeering about the lackluster degree of effort as well as heart that she had seemingly failed to put in her work cut Tilly especially deeply because as a general principle, she put so much of herself into everything and anything she did until any rejection of her work seemed to be a rejection of her.

Tilly's drained eyes began to glisten on the precipice of tears. She slowly and stoically got up and headed to the washroom. Standing all alone in front of the bathroom mirror, she began to cry...

She burst into tears in spite of herself as mascara flowed down her cheeks. She wondered if these were tears of self-pity and tried resolutely to regain her composure...but in this moment that was without hope, without happiness, without love, it was all too much to keep inside...

Her bottom lip quivered as she cried and cried while shaking her head from side to side as if she was denying her own capacity to feel this weak...this innately human gesture of denial, of protest, of bewilderment, of sorrow.

Tilly despised feeling this weak ever since her dad had walked out on her and her mom, abandoning them to fend for themselves in a lonesome world. But neglect fostered self-reliance. As a child, she was her mother's shoulder to cry on. Which meant she had to grow up beyond her years. Ever since then, she carried herself confidently on the outside. But in the depths of her eyes, you could see there was an existential terror of an abandoned child or a frightened animal.

Tilly's sobs began subsiding as she washed her face clean. She picked up her phone and began video calling.

"Hi, Mom..." she said with a tremulous voice.

"Hi, baby, what's wrong? Have you been crying?" her mom asked noticing her daughter's puffy red eyes and the inkblots of mascara still staining her cheeks.

"It's nothing, it's stupid. I just miss you and love you and wanted to see you,"

"I love you too, baby. You want to tell me what's wrong?"

"Really, it's nothing. It's just work. Speaking of, I have to go, but I'll call you tomorrow. I miss you."

"I miss you more. Take care, baby."

"Bye, Mom. Love you."

Tilly reapplied her mascara and stared at herself in the mirror for a few moments. It was as if she was attempting to convince the mirror of something. "You got this girl," she repeated her affirmation to her reflection that was slowly regaining its triumphant posture. She walked out of the bathroom as if nothing had happened. The office was none the wiser. She sat down at her desk and soldiered on through what Sean had asked her to do.

It was 9:00 pm when Tilly finally got home after an agonizing day that seemed to have had no end in sight. With global issues roiling, she had always believed that it was the end of the world, but it wasn't even the end of the day.

"Hi, babe," she called out as she walked through the door of the apartment.

"You forgot your coffee mug on the counter again," Elias said as he came out of the shower wrapped in a towel around his waist before he disappeared into the bedroom.

The absence of affection had a sickly presence. Tilly resisted her sudden urge to burst into tears. After all the punches she had taken throughout the day, she wanted to finally rest on the ropes of the day's remaining amiability.

She swallowed that sickly pellet of sadness that ached her throat as it went down. She hung up her coat. And with dejected hands, she took the cold coffee mug that she had forgotten on the kitchen counter earlier in the morning and put it in the sink. Its stale bitterness was the salt on the wound of a day.