I had only heard the legends of the
office nymphs before I met one on the dance floor on a Saturday
night. One by one, my friends had made their excuses of sleep and
homework and work and the rest, leaving me to dance by myself. As if
riding the winds of chance, she blew over to me, asking,
“Are you here by yourself, too?”
“My friends ditched me, yeah.”
They say that by night the office
nymphs take the form of fashionable young men and women who hop from
parties to clubs and back again, always socializing but never making
connections. Traditionally, they spread hope and delusion everywhere
they go, luring mortals with their enticing invitations to believe in
the power of their dreams. Her fey eyes, adorned with glitter and
partially hidden by locks of golden hair that sashayed around her
face, dislodged any importance I put on studying, working,
committing, sleeping. Even now, standing in a doctor’s office on a
bland Monday morning, reading the legal jargon at the bottom of my
clipboard makes me slightly sick when I remember the spell she cast
on me.
“Are you waiting for anybody?” I
asked her as we danced.
She waved a finger at me in time with
the motion of her body.
“I’m not waiting for anything.”
By day, office nymphs assume their true
forms: man-sized pillars of paper, steel, and cardboard. With the
light of the dawn, their blood turns to memos, and they can only
speak in “Would you be interested in…”s and “Have a nice
day!”s. With brooms for arms and woven paperclips for hair, they
smell of grease and sweat, and freeze into the insincere smiles of
excellent customer service.
The receptionist looks at me only as
long as it takes to accept my clipboard, asking me to sit and wait
for the doctor to get me. Her hair is pulled taut into a bun, with a
few neglected curls drooping down to her neck. The patterns on her
scrubs don’t dance; they just sit.
“Do you really
want to be stuck here? In this city?” she asked me just two
nights ago. “Is that honestly the job you wanted when you were a
kid?”
Any normal girl would have left me with
a hangover the next morning; she left me with a painful
dissatisfaction in my stomach.
“There’s magic in the world,”
she told me, “but you have to travel to find it. You have to be
strong enough to be free.”
I cannot imagine the thing sitting
behind the glass saying those same sentences again. Her eyes have no
enchantment. Her lips stretch into a technical smile. Only the clock
distracts her. She sighs.
Man, could she dance. I remember a song
where she took my hands and said, “Don’t be afraid,” and spun
me as fast as she could, belting giggles with every revolution. A
circle of men with drinks in hand stared inward at us like mushrooms
on a forest floor, and we made them whirl. Her glittering,
grass-green dress danced with us, not tied to the nymph’s body with
the tense bindings that the other girls use to squeeze their beauty
into the right shape. The lights fluttered in our meadow of sound,
and I drank her beauty and optimism until the insane notion of
dropping everything and moving to Paris seemed like a reasonable
thing to do.
As the doctor ushers me in, I take a
last look at the nymph as she checks her phone, barely moving. I
still debate whether her criticism of my life was valid, but for this
girl, there is no question: in the daylight, she fades. I hope the
night comes for her soon.
