Metafields

It begins slowly, often with the sense that some unfixable entity is approaching you from a distance. You hum jolly seasonal tunes while drying your dishes. You place your clean mugs in their rightful place. You smile at the simple joys of unpaid productivity in the physical world. But during in-between moments, you find yourself growing more concerned by the indescribable nature of a void you can’t pinpoint, a fortress you can’t defend.

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For one, the viewable window is always slightly too small for the information being rendered, the full picture always impossible to take all at once. You often become so disoriented that you accidentally close a window most important to executing your deliverables, losing at least several hours’ work, which does not autosave, as part of the new Productivity Initiative designed to require you to complete your assignments in one sitting. Get your time back! The pitch deck promised, Procrastination is the enemy to your productivity: let’s destroy it!

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The surveillance camera shows you getting sick all over the floor, for which you are reprimanded in the following hour, mainly due to the 15 minutes of documented inactivity registered as a result of you running to the bathroom in an effort to scrape the bile from your pre-approved Monday workwear. This, of course, is your only viable outfit for the next several hours because you didn’t submit your form OF-25 Alternative Backup Outfitting approval form, which requires a notary appointment at headquarters, and is therefore largely counterproductive.

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If you are left enough time to think about the grand scheme of things, it becomes unclear if you are influencing or being influenced. This is concerning, as you’re painfully aware of the disparity in outcomes for both parties. You scrape your attention like a rake through your affiliate links, video content views, mentions, tags, numbers, growth, forgetting midway if you are selling or already bought, unclear which minutes of your time are investments in imagined future payoff and which could be considered already profitable. You are older suddenly, and feel you may have missed some crucial warning.

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Strange music is auto-playing from an imprecise location, overlapping with your 12-hour multi-level interactive training module S-4. You can’t seem to find its origin window. You poke desperately at all devices, all tabs, all screen dividers both digital and physical.

Help, you think, calling out to no one in particular, since all accessible help is automated and inapplicable to your current situation. When you think you’ve found the source, the music crescendos and you click hungrily at the uncovered pause button. An ad pops up instead, DISMISS, you hit, DISMISS, while the unsettling autoplay continues behind. The third tap registers, taking you back to the pause button, which you hammer until finally the earned silence arrives.

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During your enrichment time, you spend 30 minutes reading various terms from the Dictionary of Indescribable Dissappointments before becoming overwhelmed with the fear that you’ve taken in earnest this writing that may have been meant in irony. You perform several targeted web searches to answer your question, finding equally compelling argumentation for both sides.

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You catch yourself chanting nodus tollens, nodus tollens in moments of existential fear. You feel deeply connected to the meaning of the phrase, though you can’t quite place its definition word-for-word in your memory.

You catch yourself leaning ever-forward into the future, ever-closer to the screen, your captor, urging yourself into a time when it’s over—a time when you have finished and won.

But there is always just one more thing to fix, to improve, so that your arrival in accomplishment is forever postponed. Victory is always just out of reach. Instead, you begin to believe that the constant striving is what will finally make you holy.

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You spend so much time with the screen that real life begins to feel more excruciating. Always, you’re running the numbers and the cost never quite seems worth it. You fantasize about that old lasse faire attitude you once employed at dinner parties, that once-divine feeling of being in exactly the right location.

On a whim, and to prove to yourself you are not a prisoner, you accept the first invitation you receive for a holiday gathering, gritting your teeth through catchy updates and rehearsed questions. In a moment of refuge, you feel yourself growing close to the person next to you in the seating chart. You identify Potential. Your gestured lingoes are complimentary, feeding off one another in an unusually effortless way. Your eyes meet in a shared expression of wordless and eternal entrapment, but your smiles bloom easily, prompting a selfie request that delivers convincing levels of joy and soft, liberated lighting. You become elated at the prospect of growing your network.

It feels impolite to ask where the photo will end up, but you know that your Corporate Supporter can deduct pay for miscellaneous energy expenditures in personal ventures not pre-approved by HR. These types of impromptu plans are dangerous to your overall success, given the impossibility of their approval process. Most normal people get around this by avoiding all forms of digital documentation unless attending a Pre-Approved Event. It seems one of you has committed some presumptive faux pas but you can’t decide who.

In the end, you walk away sweating and polite. You begin to plan your incident evaluation response letter just in case the photo surfaces. Instead of beginning your nightly lavender oil routine when you return to your enclosure space, you spend hours researching your updated team of Evaluators, cataloging which content might elicit compassionate responses in their decision.

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What arrives at night usually isn’t sleep, but something else. A fantasy in-between, which is sometimes comforting and sometimes horrific. Your favorite is the image of a field, which feels like a memory turned into a dream. After so many iterations, you can’t be sure if it’s a real thing that happened in your distant childhood or an experience you’ve fabricated. Either way, It’s summer at the preserve, wildflowers spotting the tall waving grass. A joyful sensation arises warm in your stomach knowing you’re about to run through it. The small voice left in your chest whispers thank you thank you thank you for letting me.

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Emily Stokes’ work has appeared in SLICE Magazine, Nimrod, The Westchester Review, and PANK. She received her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She currently lives, works, and writes in Philadelphia.