"Loren."
"Nice to meet you, Loren. I'm Monroe."
His name rolled around in my brain, and I liked it, it fit him. Awareness of feelings I was unaccustomed to slammed into my mind, reminding me I couldn't like him. People required effort, and I had none to give. My walls slammed back up. Acquaintances were better anyway. This way, I didn't have to care. Caring had only ever led to pain.
"You too... Monroe," I stumbled, my walls preventing it from sticking. "Though, if you really wanted to be ‘neighborly', you could trade me spots and save me from Stinky Steve."
"Ha! Sorry." He fake pouted, touching his chest. "I'm nice, but I'm not that nice. You'll have to suffer the torture and be quicker next time," he quipped, a small smile replacing his pout.
Narrowing my eyes, I wasn't happy with this development. He could at least follow the unspoken rules of elevator courtesies if he was going to make me talk to him. The quiet descended around us and my upbringing had my ingrained politeness kick in, asking a follow-up question.
"So… " I started until I realized I'd already forgotten his name. Quickly, I tried to make it less obvious, "how long have you lived here?"
I leaned against the wall facing him, my arms crossed with a frown in place. If he wasn't going to help me out with the stinkfest, then I didn't have to be that polite, I decided. It was the first time in months I'd felt anything other than numbness or sadness, and I was grasping hold of it.
Chuckling again, he shook his head before answering, "Just a little longer than you, I believe, about a year and a half now."
I nodded, not sure what else to say. His stupid laugh kept disarming me, and it was throwing me off my internal brooding. Turning back to the front, I surprised myself when I asked another damn question.
"Um, so what do you do?" stuttered out of me.
His demeanor made me feel relaxed with the ease of how he took things, but annoyed it was at my expense. Everything in my life had always been dissected or calculated. The situation was odd but not necessarily unpleasant. I hadn't been prepared to navigate this on an elevator ride, allowing him to lower my guard one laugh at a time. My neighbor was more dangerous than I'd given him credit for.
"I'm an attorney for a pharmaceutical company. What about you?"
"I'm a trauma therapist."
Silence descended upon us as we watched the numbers decrease. I despised telling people my job. They either began to tell me all their life problems or acted extremely uncomfortable, like I could somehow read their minds and knew all their secrets.
Newsflash, I didn't, nor did I want to unless you were paying me for an hour. Hate to break it to you, but I was as self-absorbed as the next person when I was outside my office. I only had time to think about my own problems.
He cleared his throat around the fifth floor, Stinky Steve's floor, and we both held our breath to see if he would be joining us today. A sigh of relief flowed from us both when it didn't. However, I was still pissed he hadn't given me my spot.
"That sounds intense," he finally uttered.
"It can be."
Wow, I broke our cordial agreement for the world's most boring conversation. Go me, I sure knew how to pick them!
The ding of the elevator reaching the ground floor echoed in the close quarters, and we both breathed another sigh of relief. Awkwardly, I smiled goodbye and hoped this meant we could return to our anticlimactic races to the elevator with no more chatting. I was convinced small talk would slowly kill us all in a vat of niceness.
The blistering cold hit my skin as I exited the condominiums. One of the best things about living in downtown Chicago was the commute. With the variety in public transportation available, it made getting anywhere simple. I hadn't driven my car in months, and it mostly sat unused in the parking garage, only taken out when I had to deal with my parents.
I wondered if I should make sure gasoline didn't go bad or something. It would be my luck that the one moment I needed my car, it wouldn't start. These were the types of things Brian had taken care of for me. He might've been a shitty man in the end, but he'd been a good husband for most of our marriage. Some days, I felt utterly helpless when I had to take care of something like this, something he was so good at just doing.
Grief was a funny thing that way, making me miss him for just a minute before I remembered the raging asshole he'd been in the end. Pulling up the collar of my coat, I hedged my way through the crowd, getting lost in the sea of bodies. It was comforting being just one of many.
The coffee shop loomed ahead, and like a true addict, I was already craving my fix. Coffee might not be the elixir of life, but it was my drug of choice. Getting coffee before work was part of my new normal, and as small as it was, it was something that kept me going some days.
The ding of the bell over the door announced my arrival as I trudged forward to join the line. Immediately, the heat of the place hit me, and I began to swelter. Buildings needed to figure out how to regulate temperatures from outside to inside better. There was nothing worse than overheating, then removing all of your articles of winter warmth, only to add them back a few minutes later to face the weather. Especially while jostling cups of coffee.
I liked Bean Paradise because it had excellent coffee and didn't ever have a long wait. It wasn't overpriced, making it easy to indulge multiple times a day. The fact it was adjacent to my practice, New Horizons, didn't hurt either. Ordering my usuals, I quickly redressed myself in my winter apparel before grabbing my tray of hot beverages. It was game face time.
Putting my mask into place, my escape was officially over. I wondered how long I could keep this up before it ultimately splintered me? My smile seemed to slip a millimeter each day, and before long, I wouldn't even be able to force it, my muscles revolting against me as well. I just hoped I had something figured out before then.