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really didn’t care because I also realized that I was in the midst of a panic attack. These days my “occasional anxiety” was a little more frequent than occasional, and the pills my doctor had prescribed for it had become kind of a crutch for me to get through an average week of my life with work, paying bills, and dealing with being a young, broke, single woman with 20 pounds to lose. I didn’t know if these bouts of anxiety would ever fully go away, but according to my expensive therapist I “stifled my emotions,” so my anxiety attacks were a physical manifestation of some deep-rooted problem that I was choosing not to deal with. Now, my heartbeat was pounding so hard in my chest that I felt like it was constricting my throat and I couldn’t get a breath. The harder I tried to breathe, the more I panicked, and the harder my heart beat, creating a vicious cycle. I leaned against the dirty alley wall next to a dumpster fighting off the nausea that had suddenly gripped my tight chest and tried to slow my heart rate by forcing myself to take a few deep slow breaths. My palms were sweaty and I worked myself up even more because my internal dialogue was on repeat, it’s happening again, it’s happening again, it’s happening again.
    I decided that the only option was to get myself to the office to grab one of my emergency anti-anxiety pills before I completely lost it. Even though the date had seemed to last for hours, the sun was still shining brightly, but there was hardly a soul on the streets. Using the deep breathing my therapist had taught me, and anticipating taking my meds, I managed to walk the couple of blocks to my office building in relative calm. 
    When I entered the lobby, I passed the night watchman and shuddered. Martin had renamed this guy “Chi-Mo,” which was short for “child molester.” I know, I know, it’s completely terrible, but in Martin’s defense, this guy was irrefutably uber-creepy. Beginning each day at noon, Chi-Mo worked maintenance in the building, washing the glass doors, performing basic maintenance work and re-stocking the bathrooms with fresh toilet rolls. He was a skinny, shifty-looking bald man who was probably in his late forties. He had a habit of constantly and menacingly glaring at the different office workers while quietly mumbling obscenities to himself. Every time I saw him I walked away quickly and avoided eye contact. I didn’t know if it was true, but my co-workers and I often recounted the office lore that he was actually an ex-con, currently on probation for a nasty, violent crime. I think everyone in the office was scared of him, which probably served to isolate him further, causing more extreme behavior, making people more afraid and so on. I kind of felt bad for talking all that crap about him and practically running every time I saw him, because I knew from the hours and hours I’d invested watching reality TV that most likely the stories weren’t true and in fact, he might be fighting some horrible disease or have a heartwarming story about saving puppies that no one knew about. Even so, I didn’t have the time or willingness to evaluate the social dynamic of the building at the moment, so I rushed by, feeling his beady, blue eyes on my back.
    When I’d exited the lobby and gotten to the elevator bay, I used my keycard to call one of the twelve elevators and took it up to the twenty-ninth floor to reception. By this time of night, the office was dead quiet. Most people don’t realize that there’s artificial white noise pumped in to the buildings where they work to help drown out the endless chatter of office phone conversations and to wipe out the creepiness of an empty floor during those deadline days when you work hours past your colleagues. I’d heard from co-workers that the white noise in our building abruptly shuts off at 7:00 PM, but I’d never stuck around long enough to experience it for myself. Now that I was in the office without the