A/N: I'm not quite a first timer, but it's been something like seven years since I last uploaded a story here. So many of the LtM authors inspired me to kick my own stuff up for perusal.
Hopefully this will turn into a series. The titles are taken from Andre Kukla's book of the same name. Same with each of the definitions. The book is worth the read!
Disclaimer: I disclaim any ownership of the characters n' stuff.
Mental Traps
Persistence: to continue to work on projects that have lost their value.
One morning as she is getting into her car, Gillian feels a sharp clench in her stomach that quickly travels up her spine and settles around her shoulders. The feeling is not unlike dread, only there is a resignation that dulls it, like shackles that have become worn down after long use. The absurdity of the image startles a laugh out of her: a ball and chain with The Lightman Group engraved into it. More like just a chain…just a long, long chain, Gillian thinks, one between me and Cal. And then the chain turns into a leash, and the thought is so bondage-bizarre that she has to laugh again – really, what other choice is there?
When she gets into the building Loker is there at the front desk to inform her that Cal had been in for maybe thirty seconds before he'd disappeared into the city. Gillian does not ask where or why – she collects her messages, asks Loker about one of his projects, and tries not to focus on how sharp her relief is, almost like a bite.
Gillian tends to her messages before turning to the administrative work that keeps appearing on her desk each day. And she keeps up with all of it, with a diligence that borders on mindless. Forms are filled in, invoices done up, and bills are paid. Then the case work – hers and Cal's, naturally – has to be written up and filed. After which Loker wants her attention, then Torres. Then back to her desk again, where another set of forms has collected, needing signatures. It is like she is on an endless looping ride, wishing with each pass of the gate that her turn would be over. By lunch she thinks, Wishing for someone else's life is an excellent indicator that something to really wrong with yours.
Is this a virtue, this dedication to seeing the end of things? Gillian wonders if there will ever be a time when she knows that she is done. Done with stacks of papers and finishing his work on top of her own. Nothing has dulled the lifelong resentment she feels for the paradox of competency: somehow the capable ones only accrue more work, while the rest of them get to slip off knowing someone else will tend to the details. It might be that her fear of failure is greater than his: that it is the impetus that keeps Gillian returning to her desk each morning. Cal believes he failed his mother; Gillian believes she failed her marriage, her daughter…but now she's finally beginning to wonder who might be failing her.
At home there is wine and all the rooms are quiet, but only for a moment. At this point work has bled so much into her life that her house is really just another office. Gillian looks around at the tokens of her life, feeling a dogged sense of okay, that mellow sort of ennui a kissing-cousin to melancholy. Her life is not a bad one – she is by most measures very successful. She just needs to stop seeking an answer to a question that was never asked – by her.
Cal asked, or ordered: tell me we're okay. And okay would be good enough for him, sitting right where it can be nudged to either good or bad. He does not like to be tethered to the expectations of others, so if things were good, he would only find some way to ruin that state. And if things were bad – well, Gillian believes that Cal does not truly think that things could ever be that bad between them. Her ability to put up with him is perhaps his greatest weapon: he knows that she will bend and bend and bend, and he does not see the cracks that indicate she will break – is breaking, right now.
That determined desire to keep going is between them too. Just like how Gillian must finish the paperwork so that it will be done, she must follow behind Cal and put back what he leaves in disarray. And once, this was a pleasing sort of system, to be the one he needed to fix things, but now it drags and drags, and the only motivation she has to keep going finds its genesis in a throwaway comment someone made once, when she was a little girl.
Gilly here, she always finishes what she starts.
That phrase has followed her throughout her entire life. No matter how joyless the pursuit of the end, once she has started, Gillian will see the project through. And her work, The Lightman Group, Cal…have become projects she desperately wants to see the end to, but she cannot make herself quit them. Gillian always finishes what she starts.
Only now…Gillian has done enough cost-benefit analyses to understand that there comes a point when one must quit. She wonders if she is approaching that point, and if she will recognize it when the time comes. That morning in the car, with the dull ache in her stomach and back, and then the lancing relief after learning that Cal was not in the office are problematic moments. Gillian pours herself another glass of wine and ignores her phone when it rings. It is only Cal. It is only ever Cal.
The next morning Gillian does not go into her office. She does not go into the building at all. She stays home.
At noon she realizes that calling the pursuit of an end that no longer has any value a virtue is the most insidious lie anyone ever told her.