Unmotion

He sat there in confusion and bit his lip, a grimace and a smirk fighting to paint themselves across his eyes. While usually a fan of self-deprecating humor even at inappropriate times, Boy just couldn’t accept that the humor of this irony would be worth the story it would spawn, at least not in the short run. It had actually happened; he didn’t get the job. Wanting to somehow believe he had misheard it, Boy decided to listen one more time to the message.

“…sorry to inform you that we’ve gone with another qualified candidate. Thank you for your interest in working for [Health Food Grocery Chain] and good luck in your future endeavors.”

The message was as curt as it was damning. Suddenly Boy realized that he had actually been denied a job working at a grocery store, a joke he’d been making in the weeks since he first sent in his application. “Wouldn’t it be hilarious if they rejected me? Could you imagine how terrible you’d feel if you couldn’t get hired at a f***ing grocery store?”

It feels this terrible, he thought to himself, the smirk winning out, tinted with self-hate. It feels exactly like this.

Not wanting to be idle, Boy immediately begin sending in a flurry of additional job applications, sitting on the one piece of furniture in the apartment he’d just secured. Girl is going to f***ing kill me, he realized when he checked his bank account to see if the check he’d written for rent and deposit cleared. It had, and the double-digit balance remaining was all the more terrifying in the shadow of the voicemail he’d just heard. ****ing **** ****-****, ****.

It wasn’t the end of the world, but it felt like it. Boy’s face was flushed and red, and he began to sweat, but it wasn’t because the laptop was beginning to overheat his lap.

***

This begins a journey into the world of rebooting my life. Stories of a twentysomething who helps not only to vent his own personal woes as he attempts to claim his stake in society, but to give a space for voices of anyone else who wants to learn, to speak, or to be heard.

Instead of a page with a thousand flashing gifs mocking the life of us twentysomethings, maybe it’s time someone provided a space for some actual development. Let this be a journey to discover the velocity of success.