Read The Cubicle Next Door for Free Online Page B

India.
    My paternal grandparents denied my paternity, so I ended up living with Grandmother.
    I wrote a letter to my mother when I was 13, asking all of the “why” questions I could think of. She wrote back once. Said she thought about me every day. Sent good thoughts my way.
    And that was it. I’d rarely thought of her since.
    She might as well be dead…except for one small ember of hope that stoked my heart no matter what I told myself. The hope that one day, someday, she’d come home. And then she’d tell me how much she loved me and that leaving me had been a huge mistake.
    Crazy, wasn’t it?
    My church had a series of sermons on legacies right before I had stopped attending. It made me think long and hard about the legacy my mother had left me. And I’d decided then that her legacy was going to stop with me. I didn’t want to curse anyone else with it, so I made the decision to remove myself from the gene pool.
    I decided I would never fall in love with anyone.
    I never wanted to care so deeply for someone, depend so completely on someone, that I would go off my head and end up messing up my entire life. And everyone else’s.
    As the product of premarital sex, I planned to stay as far away from temptation as I could. Because, as far as I could tell, losing your heart meant losing your mind. So I planned to do whatever it took to stay in control of mine.
    I was not, God help me, going to be my mother’s daughter.
    Happy birthday, Mom. Love, joy, peace, and other groovy thoughts .

Five
     
    W e finished dinner in silence. Grandmother went to the living room with the newspaper to do her crossword puzzle while I cleaned up the dishes.
    After I’d finished I hiked up the stairs and logged onto my computer. I knew from experience that trying to go to sleep before 1:00 AM in such hot weather would be a wasted effort. So I changed into the boxers and tank top I would eventually fall asleep in. I brushed my teeth and washed my face in our tiny closet-of-a-bathroom that has never recovered from its aquamarine-blue 1950s phase. I leaned over the sink and poured a glass of water over my head. Evaporation is the poor man’s air-conditioning. I returned to my bedroom, shivering from the droplets of water making serpentine trails down my back. Repositioning the fan, I turned it to high and then sat down in front of the computer.
    I needed to blog.
    I’ve never been one for writing. Ask any of my English teachers. But blogging isn’t really writing. It’s thinking while you type, and I can do that. So the previous year I had started a blog. In place of those clever images people post, I took a digital picture of myself with a paper bag over my head.
    Since it was mostly about work and the stupid things people do, I called it The Cubicle Next Door. I made sure there was no way anyone would ever trace it to me. And I always blogged at home.
    Remember my theory about needing to vent regularly? The blog helped. Posting a blog was like screaming, yelling, and throwing a tantrum without having to utter one word. Same satisfaction, less energy required.
    I blog nearly every day. There are predictable peaks of vehemence in my entries: around evaluation periods when I rant about the futility of overinflating everyone’s performance appraisals and just after the release of new rules that sound efficient but only end up creating more work for everybody. But, generally, I’m a “part of the solution” kind of person.
    That evening, though, I was looking forward to writing about one of my traditional pet peeves: Waste.
    The department was gearing up again for the school year. The new department Snack-O, the designated snack bar stocker, had replenished the shelves that day with all manner of junk food, each sealed in its own shiny, plastic-wrapped package. Said package was quickly thrown into the garbage after the snack had been consumed. It was just wrong. For all sorts of ethical, moral, economic, and health reasons.
    After I