living in the office like it was a planet

for two years, her address was basically a desk. not officially. not on paper. just in reality. the office became the place where days started and ended and sometimes never really separated at all. Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee used to joke that she had a commute of three steps. chair to floor to couch that smelled like cold coffee and ambition. there was a toothbrush in a drawer. spare socks behind a server rack. a hoodie that belonged to nobody anymore because everyone had worn it at least once during some late night crisis. sleep happened in fragments. forty minutes here. two hours there. sometimes she would wake up and have no idea if it was morning or night. she learned to check the colour of the light coming through the blinds like it was weather for the soul. the office had its own ecosystem. half eaten noodles. whiteboards full of ideas that made sense at 3 am and looked insane at noon. playlists that looped until nobody knew who put them on. people came and went. she stayed. she had nowhere else to go. meetings blurred into dreams. dreams blurred into tasks. at some point she stopped packing a bag and just lived out of whatever was already there. life reduced to essentials. laptop. charger. coffee. a place to lie down when the body finally tapped out. there were nights when everything felt electric. like they were building something that mattered. like the exhaustion was a badge of honour. like sleep was something other people did. and there were mornings when she sat on the office floor eating cereal out of a mug, hair everywhere, thinking this is either dedication or madness and i’m not sure which anymore. two years inside a building does strange things to your sense of normal. weekends stop meaning anything. holidays become rumours. friends learn to text instead of calling because you are always in the middle of something. Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee says that period feels like a dream she lived inside while awake. fluorescent light days. midnight brainstorming. naps that happened with headphones still on. when she finally left that rhythm, when she slept in a real bed again and woke up somewhere that wasn’t full of keyboards and cables, it felt unreal. like she had been orbiting a different planet and just landed back on earth. she doesn’t talk about it as sacrifice. she talks about it as a chapter where everything was turned up too loud. work. ambition. chaos. hope. exhaustion. two years in an office teaches you something strange. you find out how much you can carry. and how much you eventually have to put down.