Once, walking the path along the bay, I saw a family of ducklings paddling after their mother. I stopped and watched as they neared the water’s edge. For a moment, I felt chosen by a greater force, as if a hand of light had reached through the clouds to reveal this miracle of life specifically to me. I couldn’t take my eyes off those baby ducks, their small hearts beating new and wild in the world.

Out of nowhere a crow descended and snatched one of the babies. It didn’t look real, but it was: the duckling in that black beak, in the air, then slammed against a rock until it went limp, the ruthlessness of nature horrifying me.

The office churns on around me. The receding water reveals: the bones of fish, rotting wood, empty chip bags, bright crushed soda cans. It feels good to see ugliness on the otherwise immaculate campus, where everything is polished to a sheen. The truth of the world bares itself when the tide goes down: devoured, used, rotting.

Now, meaningless conversations buzz around me about softball leagues, Pilates, bridal parties, tee times, electric cars, protein powders, stock options.

I pull out my pen and paper. In most meetings with the CEO, we are forbidden from looking at phones or laptops. We are only meant to gaze upon each other, our minds bursting with new and innovative ideas, data exchanging through the air between us.

Our bodies moved closer. We continued speaking in low tones, until the kitchen shut down, until everyone went home. He brought down bottles of wine, and we whispered about who we were, where we were from, what we wanted, our secrets.

Eventually, his hand found my thigh beneath the table. We didn’t sleep together that night, but his mouth did find mine, later, out on the street, and the kiss felt like two galaxies colliding.

Jealousy reared up in my chest at a series of scenes my mind created of him with this woman: mornings in bed together, drinking coffee in the kitchen, him with his arm wrapped around her waist. A woman with an eyeless swirling whorl for a face perched on a lithe body with perfect breasts. I hated the thought of their intimacy.

There are moments in which a certain level of pain is chosen in order to avoid another, deeper pain. I leaned over and kissed him with a deliberate hunger, desperate to prove nothing had changed between us. I didn’t want the mirage to disappear.

Below my window, the people who sleep on the streets are gone. In the weekend daylight, it’s another city entirely. People chat with friends, stroll hand in hand with their lovers, buy armfuls of flowers. Everyone else seems to know what to do with their free time: shopping, getting high on a blanket at the park, going to yoga, slacklining between palm trees. I can hear the fullness of other lives through the window, a party I wasn’t invited to, a distant parade.

I do nothing. I sit on the sofa, paralyzed by my own mind, my apartment walls a coffin. The black hole gets closer, opens wider, blotting out most of the living room.

I didn’t know it then, but the cycle would continue for years: job after monotonous job, title after title, commuting back and forth on an endless highway, promotions and small bonuses, two weeks’ vacation, slowly losing motivation with each job, the black hole never far away.

But for a moment, before the first job, the bright light of an escape hatch flashed before me. In those early days, I believed that there was another way to live and I just had to figure out what it was.

Isn’t that always the way adult life begins? You think you’ll become something different, something new. At first, you swim violently against the tide, your body straining until your muscles give out, until you can’t push any harder, until you stop fighting and float, letting the water take you back to shore, where the rest of the world is already at the office, typing on their computers beneath buzzing fluorescent lights, toiling away in the glare of permanent productive daylight.

This last scene sent me into a profound depression for a long stretch of days. With each horror, a new slit is cut into my brain. The way wild amounts of wealth brush up against extreme poverty and displacement here is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Maria and I are somewhere in the middle: neither wealthy nor displaced, just suspended in the air, writhing, having our little panic attacks.

Up above us, the sun blazes, that almost-perfect sphere, which will one day consume us, all of us, me, him, everything, engulfing the whole world in an endless white light before cutting to pure black, to absolute nothingness.