I shouldn't even be writing this because it’s so small and silly really just a little secret I keep in the bottom drawer of that heavy oak desk at the firm where I've spent forty-two years watching the skyline change from my window—it's 2am and the sirens on 5th avenue are screaming again and my hip is doing that throbbing thing that feels like a dull serrated knife is working its way into the joint—I call it my chronic somatic manifestation but really it’s just being seventy-six and still having to file quarterly reports for partners who weren't even born when I started here and don't even know how to use the letter opener I've had since 1988. It’s not a big deal but I keep this little green Altoids tin tucked right behind the spare stapler and the box of paperclips I haven't used since 2004 and inside isn't peppermint at all but my "little helpers" which sounds so cliché and grandmotherly but they’re actually quite sophisticated pharmaceuticals for managing the nociceptive signals my body keeps sending to a brain that is just so tired of listening—I remember when I used to drink three martinis at lunch with Mr. Henderson and that was considered professional but now I’m hiding five-milligram oxycodone tablets like I’m some kind of criminal in a beige cardigan just to get through the afternoon filing without weeping. The office is so quiet when I do it because I wait for the young ones to go down to that expensive salad place across the street—they all wear those little white earbuds and look through me like I’m a ghost or a piece of office furniture that’s just slightly out of date—and I take the tiny brass key I keep pinned to the inside of my slip and I unlock that drawer and the sound of the metal sliding against metal is the only thing that makes me feel like I have any control over this situation where my rent goes up six percent every year and my bones seem to be dissolving into dust while I type up memos about corporate synergy. I remember 1982 so clearly when the air in the office was thick with cigarette smoke and we used Selectric typewriters that hummed with a specific frequency that actually felt grounding—now everything is silent and digital and cold—and I sit there with the pill on my tongue and wait for the chemical dissociation to kick in so I can keep smiling at the interns and telling them no the scanner isn't broken you just didn't plug it in—it’s a performance of competency that I’ve perfected over decades but sometimes I think the mask is fused to my skin and I don't know who the woman underneath even is anymore or if she’s just a collection of aches and old filing systems. People talk about the opioid crisis in such clinical terms like it’s something that happens to "other" people in "other" places but here I am in the heart of the city with a PhD in literature and forty years of administrative excellence and I’m just trying to mitigate the neurobiological impact of existing in a world that wants me to disappear—I look at the tin and I feel this strange bittersweet affection for it because it’s the only thing that asks nothing of me—it just provides a brief pharmacological window where the pain is a muffled echo rather than a direct shout and I can pretend I'm thirty-five again and my knees don't crunch like gravel when I walk to the breakroom. Last Tuesday the cleaning crew almost caught me because I had the drawer open and I was just staring at the pills—the white ones are for the back and the yellow ones are for the days when the sadness feels like a physical weight on my chest—and I pretended I was looking for a lost earring and the young man just nodded and kept emptying the trash bin without a second thought because why would he suspect the senior admin with the pearls and the sensible shoes of having a stash of controlled substances—I felt so small and clever and ABSOLUTELY DEVASTATED all at once because being invisible is a superpower and a curse. It's the cost of staying in the game I suppose because I can't afford to retire and live on social security in a city where a loaf of bread is seven dollars and my building is being converted into "luxury lofts" for tech bros who think I'm a relic—so I take the tin home at night sometimes and just hold it while I watch the news and think about how many secrets are buried in the desks of this city—thousands of us probably—elderly women holding the architecture of the business world together with scotch tape and pharmaceutical intervention—it’s stupid to feel sentimental about a tin of mints that aren't mints but it’s my only friend some nights. I wonder what would happen if I just left the drawer unlocked one day and let them see the truth of what it takes to be me at my age in this place—the pharmacokinetics of my survival laid bare for all the twenty-somethings to see—but I won't do that because the shame is also a habit I’ve had for seventy years and I’m too old to learn how to be messy in public—so I’ll just go back to sleep now if the hip allows it and tomorrow I’ll put on the pearls and the perfume and the smile and I’ll listen for the little RATTLE of the tin in the drawer and know I can make it through one more afternoon of being invisible... it's just what you do.