The Dell
What my body still remembers
I woke up to tingly fingertips.
It’s an odd and too specific thing to say. It was the feeling of fingertips gliding over embossed plastic, one of those velvety plastics that IBM laptops with the red dot used to have.
This time, it was a black Dell. I should have known it was a dream right there and then, but I guess I thought I deserved a non-compatible operating system — who gives out a Windows laptop when you make Mac? Unless you’re really screwing someone over.
As I was hovering in that 2am haze after getting up to use the bathroom, I couldn’t figure out what I was feeling. Is this a dream? Is this a memory? Why is the memory so specific? And why do I feel like I am in trouble?
Then I started to remember that I had that laptop in my drawer, a drawer that suddenly looked awfully like my parents’, and inside it there was a laptop, an ID card with a lanyard, and a couple pages of Excel printouts.
My old boss hired me for a “special project,” and I was calculating a commission structure that I had created that was way too complicated to exist in the first place. I had to ask an MIT math major if I was doing it right. He said, well, why are you making your life more miserable than it should.
But then why would my boss tell me to do this by myself, without my work spouse Teresa? We were joined at the hips. She is yin when I am too yang, she is calm when I bring chaos. We worked well together, although I thought she would do a much better job than I would on this.
I was not supposed to be in the main building, so I was in this offshoot office that, now that I think about it, looked awfully like my first ever job at an accounting firm. It was dark, with half-finished, flickering fluorescent lights, musty from all the paper around us, and segmented by tall, impersonal partitions that cut off any sense of human connection (not that I wanted any).
I wasn’t worried about the math-driven puzzle-solving part of this special project. That was actually the fun part. I usually struggle for a while but eventually finish the puzzle. Tada! The problem was that I was supposed to go into the office every day, which I stopped doing so. And at some point, I stopped going in completely. And no one noticed that I wasn’t there.
I didn’t care about the lack of work or communication from management (it’s classic), as if I were some kind of corporate spy tasked with inventing a secret formula — I don’t know — the best commission calculation? But I did care about returning that stupid Dell. Something I didn’t want anywhere near me, sitting in my house.
At this point my body was drifting back to sleep, but my fuzzy brain said: text Teresa — and say what? Perhaps, “Did you know that I have your company’s laptop that I forgot to return?” At 2am in the morning? No. Go back to sleep.
When I woke up for the second time at 5am, I felt confused with more confusion.
Now I was at a corporate gathering, and it felt like a mixture of a yoga retreat and a networking event. A tall woman asked me, how did you get here, who do you know — and I looked around the room and realized I knew no one. I responded that I don’t have many friends, which was an odd but honest thing to say.
I’m a quirky introvert with English as a second language. Back then it was, where are you from, and then, oh. The kind of conversational dead end where neither person knows how to proceed. Nowadays people cite K-dramas that I don’t watch and K-pop groups that I don’t follow — again, another dead end.
I started running through a mental inventory of where I might have put that laptop, a dull Dell (ha!), and thought about messaging internet friends — people who had listened to my daily miserables on Twitter — maybe they would remember this. Maybe they would remember that I started going back into the office. And maybe they would know that it was real but bogus simultaneously.
Why did they make it a secret? Was it to punish AND isolate me? By giving me something unsolvable. Or fruitless. Or not worthy. The constant need to prove my worth drove my decisions, all fueled by a scarcity — sounds exhausting just by typing those words.
Then I realized I had to write this down in order to make sense of myself. That was the process all along.
Sensations I couldn’t explain. Thoughts and fragments that didn’t line up. Like two part dream that is too real and too fake. Too much feelings and too little logics.
Why I felt shoved into a shape that didn’t fit. Why I felt like I had to be someone I wasn’t. Why my authentic self was something to hide. Why my writing and reading suffered so much. Why things now felt so vague, yet more magnified at the same time.
I don’t have the Dell anymore — but my body still thinks I owe something.
