I Am With The Workers

She approached the seaside restaurant with the same capacity she brought to everything: the problem announced itself, and she solved it by moving toward it. The new director asked if she had worked in kitchens before.

"Never," she said. "I have never peeled a potato."

"Sous chef then," said 0027. "Perfect. The chef is good anyway."

There was no transition. She moved from three nights in the station directly into a kitchen running at maximum capacity, carrying the exhaustion of a neurology that had been running on empty for months. The young chef was talented with strange things and catastrophic with meat, which was ironic in a beach restaurant built on serving meat. The director was Zen. She loaned Me clothes, shoes, scarves, money, as though she had been expecting exactly this kind of person and had prepared accordingly.

The roommates were vipers.

The landscape was perfect: rock, flowers, pine forest, and sea. Me never entered the water. It was April. It would be May soon.

The job deteriorated with the predictability of a system collapsing under its own weight. The recently fired chef maintained total control over the current chef through a mechanism so complete that the current chef had no capacity for anything else. The more the meat quality declined, the more she blamed Me. The more she blamed Me, the more Me's neurology prevented her from performing the psychological autopsy that might have helped the situation.

But this was not the actual problem.

The actual problem was this: thirteen hours of continuous kitchen work at full intensity cannot sustain human function. Eighteen hours divided into three six hour shifts would accomplish the same work. Instead, one person was being destroyed by duration.

Me, having reorganized everyone's thinking to this effect or at least having tried to, left.

The lake hotel materialized in her memory. She sent her CV. The owner seemed to need exactly the kind of person Me was. "Find a room in the city nearby. Call me when you are settled."

Me found a bed in a dormitory. On her first circuit of the small city, she located a bar. For the next two weeks, she would spend her evenings there.

The waitress was a revelation. Me had just finished reading a book about women's emancipation from post-war to present. The book mentioned doctors and lawyers who had contributed to the movement. It mentioned, specifically, one doctor. The waitress was his daughter.

Two weeks of easy movement. Time to take a train four hours away for a ten minute appointment with the psychiatrist. He said he could mediate with her brother. He said the seaside house was repaired now. He said she would have a place of her own.

"You will have your share," he said.

"I imagine," she replied. "Given the family fraud scheme that collapsed."

Ten minutes before this appointment, the hotel owner had informed her they no longer needed her services.

Before leaving the city she passed by the bar to say 0789 goodbye and she named her “ the asphalted flower that keep re growing”. An email arrived with an interview offer. The subject line contained a flower growing from asphalt.

She chose asphalt instead and moved to the sea.

The house was repaired but contained no hot water.

From May 25 to July 28, she walked. Like a trnsiberian train.

Two hours every day along the beach. The same circuit. The same distance. The same exhaustion and irritability accumulating like sediment. She won the world championship of rumination. The activity left her incapable of solitude and hostile to anyone who offered companionship.

One day, thirty seconds of social media exchange with a stranger led to an invitation. The next morning at six she was on a train. By eleven she was in the sea with two people she had just met, in a speedboat crossing water with waves running two meters high. They stopped briefly near a reef. They dived, they turned around, they went home.

Only later, as the boat held position in the heavy swell at dusk, did she consider that this had not been a sensible choice. The universe, however, proved kind to the bold, or at least kind enough. The next morning she was back in the house with cold water.

They were not even likeable, these strangers. This did not prevent her from spending five hundred bucks to reach one of them at a rave held in the mountains. The universe attempted to prevent this outcome by every mechanism available. She arrived, fought with him, and was ejected from a camper at three in the morning.

She saw the psychiatrist regularly. In these sessions, she described the quality of her suffering with precision. The disquiet was unbearable. Death seemed preferable. She thought about it constantly. The days held no tolerable texture.

"But do you not see how well you are doing?" he said. "You are making progress. You will reach the point."

She recognized the point he was describing. A year earlier, the same medication had produced the same messaging. Computers speaking. The algorithm transmitting. Networks of protection and threat coordinates. The point was not stability. The point was the system's comfort with her compliance.

She stopped the medication. She did not tell him.

A month she spent in the mountains with a herder and the goats.

The goats were affectionate. One hid always, concealing itself in the bush when the herd moved toward the forest. When she climbed the hill to observe their emergence and confirm all had entered the tree line, the hidden goat would wait until the others had disappeared, then move from the bushes and follow her up the slope.

The love was unmistakable.

After five weeks without the medication, the psychiatrist saw her and spoke immediately.

"You appear to be a different person."

"I am," she said. "I feel substantially better. But I remain catastrophic with everything and everyone, including myself."

"Then I will prescribe an antidepressant," he said. "To lift your mood."

"I am not low," she said. "I am a geological event. The problem is not the height of my mood. The problem is the magnitude of my disruption. Serotonin is not the solution."

He considered this.

"Dopamine and noradrenaline then," he said.

"Agreement," she said. "See you in three weeks."

What the narrator observed:

The medication designed to treat her had blocked the specific neurotransmitter system her neurology required to function. The psychiatrist, operating from a framework that treated depression as universal, had not listened to her actual report. The institution had offered an unsustainable work schedule. The family had refused to fund housing. The director had loaned her clothes without question.

The goats had understood her better than the doctor.

And Me, unmedicated for five weeks, had performed the most useful clinical assessment of her own neurology that any professional would attempt. She had identified not what was wrong with her but what her particular brain needed to operate.

Dopamine and noradrenaline.

Not rescue. Not revelation. Just the specific chemistry that would allow her to be less of a catastrophe.

The medication that followed would change everything. Not because it would make her normal. But because it would give her the apparatus to distinguish her own signal from noise.

And that distinction, once made, could not be unmade.