I am never looking forward to going there. But I worked in that fucking town. I guess I had to. It always gave me the crips. There were some weird vibes in this town, and I always felt the strangest feeling telling me that I don’t belong there. I always felt like a stranger in this town, even after three years of working there. This town and this job! They both had me, and I am very much sick with both of them. Now, after the pandemic, things looked really rough out here. I was back in town for business, and it all looked way too desperate and much more depressing. This was a dead town now.

It was never a very populated or crowded town per se, but now it looked almost empty. Cars are driving on the road, but no people are seen walking on the sidewalks. There are very few people around, period. And those people you do randomly meet, they don’t look too happy or too normal either. This is a city full of big corporate offices, parking lots, hotels, and poor, disadvantaged, primarily black locals. These locals certainly did not work in any of these fancy offices. They probably never worked since there was no place for them to do so. They just survived on the government support money. God bless America!

Since the commuters stopped coming in, many of the local businesses shut down. Everyone has been working from home in the last year and a half. This is the death of big corporate mentality or rather the death of the traditional nine-to-five lifestyle. All major corporations were now following the work mentality of those unconventional tech start-ups who allowed their people to work from anywhere in the world. It didn’t matter, as long as the job was getting done. Corporations were firmly against that flexibility since they never trusted people and always wanted to be in complete control monitoring their employees closely. Those fucks!

There was a shit load of work to do for everyone, even more than pre-pandemic in many cases, but the fact that you could do it all at home, no commuting, no in-person meetings, no bullshit, was kind of liberating for the average folks. Corporations worried how in the fuck is this all going to work out. But it did and to their best advantage. I’ve got used to this new work-no-life-no-balance style, but at least I didn’t have to come to this God-forsaken place for so long. It always reminded me of the town which will eat you alive once you are in, and you will never return to where you came from. One will never be the same again. The darkness, the depression, the desperation on the background of tall corporate highrises gave it all a sharp socio-economic contrast.

Walking these streets, I felt like this is what being or living in the simulation must look like. Everything just felt foreign and surreal. The strangest thing was that even in a poor town like this, you never felt in danger. It still felt reasonably safe because of how poor and disadvantaged those people were. Looking at them, one felt compassion and sorrow rather than angst and fear. Occasionally, I’ll see some folks walking down the street, carrying some bags, not sure if those were shopping bags or they just taking some garbage with them around. Poor people always brought some sort of bags with them all the fucking time. They walked somewhere they seemed to know well. They’ve been here a while. Now there is no escape; there is nowhere to go. Maybe they got used to it? Perhaps this is what home feels like to them? Maybe I am the only one who feels estranged being here? No judging the poor folks, but rather feeling sad for them. I am always very sorry for the poor and disadvantaged once. There’s got to be the way out of this somewhere, somehow.

I worked for one of the major companies in town, the major bank institution. There were two significant tall buildings right by the downtown area, which looked very impressive considering its surrounding. They looked like the two tall office buildings packed with people of different ranks, and they must’ve been swamped and very much occupied in those buildings working towards something, working for the system. I knew the truth. These buildings were there for the show-off reason, just an illusion. Even in pre-pandemic times, these buildings were semi-occupied. My floor was half-full back then, now it was one-third of what it has been. There were ghost floors as well, with no people there at all. There were floors where just a handful of people were located. What was the need for it all? Why keep all these buildings if not able to fill them with employees? The answer is that they needed to have the image of “the big guy in town.” The more space they occupied physically, the more powerful the corporation should’ve seemed to be or wanted to look like they were. I knew this all was bullshit a long time ago. I was constantly spinning those ideas in my head when looking at these dead, tall, empty, useless buildings with no soul and not even enough people’s souls to occupy them.

A tax-free state sounds excellent if you are a corporation. They created all those laws to satisfy their hungry needs. These corporate fucks!. When you are just a regular person living here, you probably wish they charged those corporations more taxes so that this town wouldn’t look so depressed. Nobody cared. Even if there were no people left here at all, this city would thrive. They had plenty of offices and companies registered there, that it didn’t matter. They made it all work, just for them. They always do. Overall, these large corporations still employed a boatload of people to their advantage, and no government could tell them anything. The government works with those corporations hand-in-hand. They need each other. Somehow I was employed here. For some weird, strange reason, I was part of the evil of the evilest organization on the planet, the bank.

How did I get here? I wish I knew. I always think about it as a random coincidence. I never thought about working here or in any similar organization at all. But I guess they had a job opening, and I needed a job at some point in time. So we found one another like the two lost souls in the lonely, desperate poor-man’s world. It wasn’t the best match for me, but it was something. Compared to anything I made before, the pay seemed great, and the short-term commitment certainly worked for me. It started as a short-term contract, and I never hoped it to last any longer. I was wrong. Three months of the initial contract got “extended” now into three years and counting. Fuck, I’ve got myself deep into this hellhole. I also have a family to support, and oddly enough, I am the only supporting member of my family. I have no choice but to grind. I am the primary provider, and that is what you do. I am fucking grinding at this, struggling and suffering for my sake and my family’s sake. Looking at the not-even-two-year-old, I couldn’t take too much risk. It was easier to stay, to be part of the system. The man is as good as the choices he makes. The man always has to grind to live.

I never knew what the soul-crushing job actually was or felt like until recently. Until I got involved with this organization, which probably still seems like a prestigious job to many, I never knew how miserable I could be. This one got me and got me real bad. The depression, the stress, the anxiety, the bullshit were endless. The workload or the sense of the work I have to do is less and less, and the mindfuck is overwhelmingly accumulating with the speed of light. There is so much a man can take. There is only so much tolerance, and patience left. It felt like this is the depression talking; this is not me. Shortly, this has become me, the new me, the fucked-up one with no desire to do anything, with no satisfaction received from life, with no personal life at all. All I had was misery. The fucking anguish of mind and soul and sadness that my life gets wasted like that, for that goddamn paycheck, for that goddamn job, for that goddamn security. Was that all worth it?

I’ve tried to find a new job with very little to no success. It seems like there is no place for the wicked. It looks like the gods were not done with my punishment just yet, and I was due for some more. I’ve accepted the challenge. Fuck me up, folks, here I am. I’ve had so much of it already that nothing scares me anymore. Bring it on! At some point earlier this year, when I decided I had to move, I had to escape. I hoped that I would be out even before this time around. I never felt like coming back to the offices again, hybrid schedules or not. I didn’t give a fuck. This is not my shit, not my town, not my passion, not even my life. I have been stuck in this fucking simulation here, struggling to move forward and break through all that corporate bullshit.

I have a free, company-paid-for garage at the hotel garage nearby, and I have about a two-block walk. It is the weirdest and most useless walk ever. These two blocks, right by the courthouse and the police headquarters, are very much uneventful and dull. I occasionally saw some strange people entering and walking out of that court building. There are always some peculiar poor folks hanging around it. I walk this block like I own it, but I don’t want to own it. There is nothing there to own. There is nothing there to look at. As you drive up to the city, taking the exit, there is a sign on the sidewalk “Wilmington. The city where everyone can be somebody.” That is a very indistinct slogan. It looks like you can become as wretched as most of the folks living there. What a fucking bullshit.

There is a cigarette in my hand, the earbuds in my ears, and the black shades on my face as I walk through this little dead town. My senses are getting high, and my heart gets tight as I walk past, and I see the life around me that is tough to swallow. Even after three years, I am still a stranger in this town. Walking to and from the office, I still feel these same strange and weird vibes. I just can’t get used to this misery and social tragedy of this town. I’m hoping the cigarette and the music will make this short walk more enjoyable. I hope to get distracted temporarily while I am walking by. But they only help as much as they do.

The sun is still high up in the sky and burns through every living soul in this dead town as it does burn through me. The air is dense and hot, and the sun in the late afternoon looks like poison. I cross the street with the cloud of smoke high un in the sky. There are some locals across the street walking into nowhere, looking sad and hopeless. I glance at them and then look straight ahead; I walk toward the garage, towards my escape. Some five-six minutes later, and I will be there, sitting in my car, driving off of the garage and out of this city into my life. I will be leaving this fucking god-forsaken place one more time. I hope every time it will be the last one.