I am sitting in my car in the driveway and the engine is still cooling down. It makes that clicking sound, that clicking sound every single night. It’s 2:14 AM and I’m staring at the garage door of my parents' house in this subdivision where every lawn is exactly the same height. I’ve been home for twenty minutes but I haven’t moved my legs yet. I am observing a distinct lack of physical sensation in my hands. They are just resting on the steering wheel, looking like objects that don't belong to me. I think my brain has decided to stop communicating with my extremities for a while. My father told me that dirt doesn't pay a mortgage. He said it at dinner when I was nineteen, and then he said it again when I graduated, and he says it every time I look too long at a history book. So I did Logistics. I learned how to move things from Point A to Point B with the least amount of friction. I am very good at friction-less movement. My degree says I’m an expert in supply chains, which is just a fancy way of saying I know how things get stuck. I am currently stuck. Every day I am stuck. Now I’m a floor manager at the big box store near the highway. My day is a series of predictable increments. I clock in, I check the shipment manifests, I tell people where the sweaters go, and I clock out. There is a high level of efficiency in my movements. I have analyzed my own workflow and found that I can complete my primary objectives in approximately six hours, leaving two hours of sustained performance where I am essentially a ghost. I walk the aisles and I look at the barcode scanners. The scanners are red. Red light, red light, red light. I used to have these books about the Levant. I had maps of archaeological digs in Israel and Jordan tucked under my mattress because they didn't fit the "professional" image my mom wanted the neighbors to see. I wanted to touch things that hadn't been seen in three thousand years. I wanted the dust and the heat. Instead, I touch plastic. I touch cardboard boxes. I touch the same polyester blends every single day, every single day. The sensory deprivation of this life is measurable. I can feel the lack of texture in my soul, like everything has been sanded down until it’s perfectly smooth and perfectly boring. There is a specific physiological response to my commute. As soon as I hit the turnoff for the suburban parkway, my heart rate slows to a point that would likely concern a medical professional. It’s not relaxation. It’s a shutdown of non-essential systems. I am maintaining a baseline level of functionality to ensure my parents don't ask questions when I walk through the door. They like the title. "Manager" sounds good when they talk to the people next door over the fence. It sounds stable. It sounds like I’m not going to end up covered in dirt in a trench somewhere. I remember the day I changed my major. I sat in the registrar’s office and the air smelled like old paper and floor wax. I felt my chest tightening, a clear sign of acute stress. I deleted "Intro to Near Eastern Archaeology" from my screen and typed in "Introduction to Global Supply Chain Management." It was a five-minute transaction that effectively neutralized the next forty years of my existence. I walked out and the sun was too bright. It felt like a chemical burn on my eyes. I didn't cry, I just noted the increase in my breathing rate and went to buy a different set of textbooks. My phone is at 4% battery right now. I am looking at my reflection in the darkened screen and I don't recognize the geometry of my own face anymore. I look like a person who manages a retail store. I look like a person who understands logistics and shipping lanes. I have become the thing I studied. I am a unit of cargo being moved through a suburban landscape. I am being shipped from the store to the house and back to the store. The transit time is forty-four minutes. Forty-four minutes every morning, forty-four minutes every night. I should go inside because if I stay out here much longer, the motion-sensor light on the neighbor's garage will trigger and they'll see me sitting here. I don’t want to be seen. I just want to sit here in the dark and think about the bones I’m never going to find. There are entire cities buried under the sand that I will never see because I have to make sure the inventory for the home goods section is priced correctly by Monday morning. Every single Monday, every Monday. The weight is just... it's just there. It's a physical weight on my shoulders that doesn't go away even when I'm sleeping. I’m typing this so it’s outside of my body for a second. I am looking at these words and they look like someone else’s problems, which is the only way I can handle looking at them at all. But the battery is going to die and I still have to get up at 7 AM to do it all over again. I’ll walk into the store, I’ll check the manifests, and I’ll pretend I’m not a person who died in a registrar’s office three years ago. I am very good at pretending. I am a professional at it. Every single day.