Before the phone line could even click, another call rang. He wasn’t surprised anymore. By now, he and the ringtone were like a middle-aged couple—no excitement, but no breaking up either.

“Customer service, please.” The thirteenth woman that morning. Sweet voice, but sharp in its last syllable. Like shaved ice left too long in the freezer.

He took a quiet breath through his nose, his hand reaching for a glass of water that was warmer than his skin that morning. He replied with the script he knew better than every password he had in his life.

“Hello, MonoCare Company, happy to serve you…” The caller immediately cut him off. “I’ve been on hold for ages! How much longer do I have to wait?”

He smiled. It was a “Sure, I’m the human blast shield for this system” kind of smile. A smile that didn’t show on his face, but instead came out as a series of “Yes, I understand. I’ll check on that for you,” with not a single word emphasized.

He counted in his head that this was the fifty-ninth time he’d said “yes,” but the zeroeth time he’d felt “okay” with life.

…

Lunch break began like any other day. No music, no changing lights. Just a cold, round aluminum tin chilling in the back of his drawer—thanks to the leaky AC.

On the tin, it read: “Twist clockwise and pull up.” He read it every day like a mantra, not because it held any power, but because it sounded “too easy to be true,” like a self-help book on sale at a book fair.

He didn’t “twist” anything. He just twisted, pushed, pried, and tugged it open, the same way you’d open an old paint can, with no tool in the world perfectly suited to the task.

Pop!

The sound rang out. A single candy bounced up quickly as if it had a mind of its own. It ricocheted off the edge of the table, then confidently rolled onto the floor, as if it knew that was its freedom.

The floor was a dark green carpet. The candy was a dark green menthol mint, dark enough to instantly disappear.

He looked down at it with the same feeling a person watching a silent, sad movie might have, quietly dabbing away tears. Then he slowly sank to the floor beside it, not to pick it up, but to be on the same level for a moment—with something he’d always tried to open, and it still kept escaping him.