Another One Bites the Dust

We are never fully staffed at work. We're always 1 or 2 people down. The last 2 people hired both left. One worked a week and then quit. The newest one worked 2 weeks and then ghosted.

We're never told. It's like working for a serial killer. He brings the victims in and they slowly disappear, never heard from again. You wonder what happened. You whisper. You hypothesize. But you never really know.

The people who stay are solid. Not always solid in work ethic or effort but they show up generally. You learn to work around them and are thankful that at least there's a body in the seat. 

But the ones who are there and working, the ones who still put in the effort because the work is important and some of those patients are really good people... those are the employees who have the haggard expressions. They have tricks to get through the day. They learn how to face a serial killer and emerge mostly okay. 

But it wears on you. And then the conversations around you start to change. Suddenly more and more women like you are talking about the serial killers in their lives. You start to recognize that your weariness is life long. Your exhaustion started when you were a child and you had a serial killer in your house. And he was raising a serial killer.

You start to count the serial killers in your life and as you do so, you realize that your limbs have been missing for a long time. Your killers had chopped off pieces of you and you thought those phantom limbs were real.

And the one at work: you depend on him to provide you a means to live. But depending on a killer is terrible choice. 

The life you've been living is unbearable. But you don't know if it's too late to change it. Or if you've been locked in the serial killer's basement your entire lifetime and now realize there was never an escape.