The Job I Remembered Quitting

First day at a new company, a good job I'd fought for, and I walked into the building buoyant. Then I stepped out of the lift onto my floor and was flattened by a memory of leaving it.

Not déjà vu of the arriving kind — the strange familiarity of a new place. The opposite. I remembered the END. A specific afternoon, grey light through those windows, a cardboard box on that desk with my things in it — a particular mug, a framed photo, a cactus — and the feeling of walking out through that door for the last time, hollow and relieved and sad, after something had gone badly wrong. I knew, standing there on my first morning, buoyant, that I would leave this job in a bad way, on a grey afternoon, carrying a box, and I knew it the way you know a thing that has already happened to you, because it felt like it had.

I took the job anyway. What was I going to do, decline on day one because I'd 'remembered' quitting? I hung up my coat and shook hands and got on with it, and it's been, mostly, fine. Better than fine. I've been here nearly two years now. I like it. I'm good at it.

But I bought the mug from the memory, months in, without quite admitting why — saw it in a shop and my stomach dropped and I bought it. It's on my desk. The framed photo is the one I actually chose to bring. And last winter, apologetically, my partner bought me a small cactus for the office, and I stared at it in its pot and felt the floor tilt, because it was the cactus, the exact one, and I hadn't asked for it, and now the box in my memory is three-quarters assembled on my desk in real time, item by item arriving of its own accord, and I did not place a single one of them there on purpose.

I've started watching the light. It's a job with grey afternoons; there are many. But the memory has a particular quality of grey, and a particular heaviness in the air, and a particular thing-having-gone-wrong that I don't yet understand and can't prevent because I don't know what it is. I only know its aftermath: the box, the door, the hollow relief.

I could leave now, pre-emptively, on a bright morning, and rob the memory of its grey afternoon. I've considered it. But I can't quite believe it would work — I think if I try to dodge the door, I'll only be arranging, by some other route, the exact grey afternoon I'm running from. So I stay, and I do good work, and I water the cactus I never asked for, and I wait to find out what goes wrong, because apparently I already know that it does.