He didn’t want to take too much, it was his first time, and he heard it was potent. The store owner had warned him to be careful with the stuff. The recommended dose was only a couple of drops.

He unscrewed the bottle cap and took a few cautious sips. It tasted gross. He couldn’t believe this foul-tasting thing could make him feel better.

He put the bottle back into the cupboard and went for a walk.

The sky was blue and the grass was green.

He waited for the magical elixir to kick in. What would it feel like? When would he know it was working?

He kept walking. Past the daffodils and barking dogs on his street. He thought about his to-do list; his email; his plans for the weekend.

He looked around to see if any of his neighbors were outside.

And that’s when it happened. He started feeling… better. Slightly tingly. A little giddy. 

The magical elixir was working!

He smiled with delight. A deep swell of joy pumped through his whole body. It felt so good.

Was this happiness? Could this feeling finally be his? All it took was a few sips of the magical elixir. He couldn’t believe it. Why wasn’t everyone doing this?

He giggled and skipped the rest of the way home. 

He went into his kitchen, opened the cupboard, and examined the bottle.

There was nothing special about the packaging.

He set the magical elixir back down and proceeded to blast through his to-do list and finalize all of his weekend plans with ease.

At the end of the night, he reclined on his couch and smiled a big smile.

All I’ve been missing this whole time was a little magical elixir, he thought.

The next day he woke earlier than usual. He was a little sleepy, but nothing out of the ordinary. 

He remembered the joy he felt yesterday. The magical elixir. What an amazing sensation. He didn’t feel quite as joyous this morning, but he couldn’t be cheerful every minute of the day.

He got out of bed, brushed his teeth, and ambled into his kitchen to make coffee.

As the kettle heated, he opened the cupboard and grabbed the magical elixir.

He didn’t dare take it in the morning. He thought of it as more of an afternoon indulgence, but he wanted to hold it, to examine it, to make sure it was still there.

The kettle hissed and he made his coffee, went to his desk, and started grinding through work.

He sat, typed, and sipped. This was how the day passed.

Every once in a while he would get up and go to the kitchen, open the cupboard, and look at the magical elixir. Even though he wasn’t going to take it during the workday, looking at the bottle gave him a little jolt of energy. Something to look forward to after work.

As soon as he sent his last email, he raced to the kitchen, opened the cupboard, took out the magical elixir, and took a few sips (less cautiously than the day before).

He put the bottle back in the cupboard and went for a walk.

The sky was blue and the grass was green.

He kept walking. Past the daffodils and barking dogs on his street. He thought about tomorrow’s to-do list; his email; his plans for the weekend.

He looked around to see if any of his neighbors were outside.

He waited.

Nothing happened. He felt the same. Sort of tired and shitty. The magical elixir wasn’t working...

He went back home and grabbed the bottle out of the cupboard. Maybe he needed more than a few sips this time. 

He took a small-sized gulp.

He went and sat on his couch.

He waited. 

It came back, the slightly tingly feeling. The giddiness. He smiled. He was happy once again.

All I’ve been missing this whole time was a little magical elixir, he thought.

He woke the next day feeling surprisingly lousy. His throat was scratchy. He looked in the mirror and noticed his face was puffy.

He went to his kitchen and chugged two glasses of water. He was abnormally thirsty.

He was feeling quite despondent about having to work today. He wanted to go back to bed and just lay and watch videos on his phone.

But he forced himself to his computer and started scrolling through his to-do list.

Everything on it seemed impossible.

How could he get anything done today? How did anyone get anything done?

And then he remembered.

The magical elixir. 

It could help.

He went to the kitchen, opened the cupboard, and grabbed the bottle. He knew he shouldn’t take it in the morning, but he just needed a little pick-me-up for his work today, just this once.

He examined the bottle. There was only two-thirds of the magical elixir left.

He figured he ought to take more than he did yesterday to feel it again. 

He unscrewed the cap and took a deep breath.

He closed his eyes, pinched his nose, and took down the rest of the magical elixir in one big swallow.

He felt it almost instantly this time.

A grin spread across his face. He tossed the bottle in the trash, sat down at his desk, and started tearing through his to-do list, whistling some pleasant song he heard once.

The day was his again.

Thank god for the magical elixir.

Over the ensuing weeks, he would walk to and from the store several times a day to buy more magical elixir. 

He needed six bottles a day of the stuff now to maintain the feeling. The joy.

Every time he walked into the store, he felt shame buying more.

The store owner just shook his head and rang him up.

The habit was costing him a fortune.

He wanted to stop, but that would mean no more joy, and that was impossible to accept.

If this is what happiness cost, he would pay.

He woke up one morning, about two months into his new habit, barely able to move out of bed. He felt the weight of the world pressing on him. It felt impossibly heavy. He couldn’t sit up.

He turned his head and saw a scattered group of empty bottles next to his bed.

The magical elixir.

He reached for his phone and emailed his boss. He couldn’t log in to work today. He was sick.

And he was.

He checked his bank account from his phone. He ran the numbers. The amount he’d spent on the magical elixir was astonishing. He couldn’t believe it.

He picked up a bottle of the magical elixir from his bed and screamed at it. He threw it across his bedroom. It shattered unceremoniously.

It had started with a few innocent drops.

It had felt so good.

Too good.

And now he couldn’t get out of bed.

He could barely open his eyes.

All he wanted was to go back. To go back to how it was. To a less ecstatic world. To his boring feelings.

The ones he ran away from when he discovered the magical elixir.

He took a deep breath. What could he do?

The bed was swallowing him whole. Hours passed. The light changed angles across his room.

The sky was blue and the grass was green, but he couldn’t see it from his bed.

I quickly drive home, past the conifers and pine trees and other flora I never bother to notice.

The sun is receding by the time I pull onto my street.

I loosen my collar as I park my car. Multiple black marks line the garage from where I’ve turned too wide and scraped paint off my front bumper. It’s always the same spot; it’s happened more times than I can count. I could get my car fixed, but I don’t see the point.

I walk briskly past my building’s makeshift garden—a couple of sad-looking succulents and an indiscernible bush that leans in a slow-death type of way—up the grey-stained stairs, and into my apartment. I drop my keys absentmindedly on the entryway table and sling my jacket over a stack of clothes on a faux leather chair. The interior of my place could best be described as spartan. I haven’t bothered to decorate much. Plain walls suit me better.

I open the fridge, grab a beer, and unwrap an old package of pork chops.

I’ve been cooking pork chops for dinner going on six months in a row. They do just fine; not as tasty as steak, but less bland than chicken—some sort of palatable in-between state, like most of my days. 

I slide the patio door of my apartment open for some extra light. That’s when I notice it.

The hole.

There is a grapefruit-sized hole in the cushion of my patio chair.

It’s confusing. It’s out of place. It doesn’t compute.

I stare at it for a while. I take a picture. I look at the picture as if a digital version of the hole will somehow make more sense. It doesn’t. I turn my phone sideways for a different angle.

The hole is a perfect circle. Who did this? Aliens? A rabid hole-puncher? Sharon from 6B? (Sharon might be an alien, I’ve always assumed…) It’s as if someone took a cookie cutter and made a cushion cookie from my chair.

I walk outside to examine the hole closer. I gently touch it and the surrounding area—maybe a den of mice made a makeshift encampment. Nothing stirs.

I go back inside my apartment—away from the hole—and quickly season and sear my pork chops. 

As they finish cooking, I get an idea. Whoever made the hole might be back. I need to be patient. I need to sit, wait, and watch for them. I’ll catch the hole-maker when they return for more.

I take a chair from my kitchen table and slide it over to face the patio sliding door. I grab a plate and sit down with a too-hot pork chop—balancing it all awkwardly on my lap—and slowly eat.

I watch the hole.

I wait. 

Eat, chew, gulp. Eat, chew, gulp. I wipe my mouth. Nothing comes. I look out at the rest of the patio. There are some dead leaves piled up around the corners of the concrete slab. I really should sweep them. When was the last time I did that?

My eyes drift across the rest of the outdoor space. It feels odd to be staring at my patio so intently. I always eat my pork chops in front of the TV. Looking out my back door waiting for something to happen feels disorientingly peaceful. A sort of serenity only lifeless patio furniture can provide.

The sun starts to set. It’s the color of cotton candy. Palm trees sway in the foreground as the colors shift from orange to pink to purple to blue. It’s a nice place where I live. I never really think about it. Most things in my life have a certain blurred quality as I move from home to office and back to home, delivering report after report and manically answering emails on my phone. When I’m not racing from place to place, or frantically keeping up with messages, I’m ruminating on the various unfinished tasks that need to be done—there’s never time to sit and stare at patio furniture or watercolored clouds or paper mâché-looking leaves.

But now, with my pork chop and chair and the sunset over the back patio, things are quiet. There’s a dilated quality to the moment—a stretching of time. It feels like if I sit still for much longer I’ll get swallowed up by the spaciousness of it all.

I hear a twig crack. 

I turn my head.

Something moves in the back corner of the patio.

There’s an outline of something. I stare at the shadowy silhouette for a second. Neither of us makes a move, as if moving would make the situation more real, and neither of us really wants that—it doesn’t want to be seen and I don’t want it here.

The hole-maker.

As it moves closer, I have to marvel at its girth. 

It’s truly a well-fed squirrel. It hasn’t missed a meal in some time (my patio furniture cushion, clearly a part of that balanced dining regimen).

I place my pork chop plate on the ground, slowly breaking the trance, and gently slide the back door open. Things are still for a few seconds. I can hear my ears ringing. The chubby mammal-demon twitches. I don’t move. It turns its head ever so slightly to the right. I go for it and run out onto the patio screaming and flailing. I don’t know what I’m trying to do, (exert Darwinian dominance over a lesser being?) probably scare the thing, scare it so bad it won’t come back.

It feels good to move. To scream.

I stop flailing and look around. The portly bandit is gone. I walk back inside and sit down at my kitchen chair. I take a deep breath. The uncoordinated tirade worked. 

Things are still once more.

Then, just as I start working on my pork chop again, a head pops up over the patio fence. 

The squirrel.

It hadn’t run off; it was hiding. And it had been waiting. The moxy of this creature.

Another idea comes to me. I will make a weapon. A club. Out of an Amazon box. With a cardboard club I can strike the little vermin, and at a minimum, make even more noise—show it my strength.

I run to my recycling and come back with a broken-down box and fashion it into a club. The squirrel is already on the patio chair taking more stuffing from the hole. My stuffing. I bolt back outside and start blindly swinging. I yell tribal noises. I don’t make contact with the squirrel, if I’m honest I didn’t want to, but it does the trick; I scare the furry trespasser away once again.

I walk back inside, sit down, and continue my watch. I won’t be fooled twice. I keep the cardboard box club in my hand. I grip it tightly. I watch the hole until the sun fully recedes behind the trees; until the night bugs start their croaking and the neighborhood birds return to their nests for slumber.

I look up at the stars above my patio. I feel a cliched connectedness to them at this moment—the squirrel-battle stirring up something primordial within me. Something that has lain dormant for a long time. Some sort of uncomfortable aliveness.

I shake the feeling and finish my pork chop, clean up the dishes, and tie up all of the patio cushions outside, making their surface area as small as possible. If the squirrel comes back, it’ll be near impossible to get at the stuffing meat of the cushions now.

I admire my handiwork. Squirrel: 0. Me: 1. I head upstairs to bed. I dream of ancient wars.

I ended up in trench warfare with the squirrel for over a week. It made several more holes in my patio cushions; nothing I did seemed to deter it. I contemplated buying a cat, buying a pellet gun, developing primitive rock contraptions and other complicated snares, chemical warfare, the list went on.

As I devised battle plans, I forgot about my overcrowded inbox, my incessant clients, and my unending list of to-dos. In the week the holes first appeared, my day job didn’t seem to exist. Things slowed down. I could feel my chest expanding in and out in a more visceral way. I bought salmon instead of pork chops and took the time to properly season it. I somehow had more time. Time to sit, wait, and listen. Time to watch the palm trees sway and listen to the wildlife that congregated around my patio. My life moved at a more human pace. I noticed things. So many things.

I noticed what it felt like to prioritize a sunset over a deadline and to interact with the nature around me instead of lobotomizing myself in front of a screen each night.

Things started to feel, dare I say it, good.

But I wasn’t ready to sacrifice all of my patio furniture for this feeling.

So after a week of fighting with the squirrel, I took all of the cushions from my patio and hid them in an extra storage space in my apartment. This made it impossible for me to sit on my patio furniture, but the cushions were safe from the squirrel. I’d chalk the squirrel war up to a tie.

A few weeks after pulling the cushions inside, the squirrel stopped coming around.

I sort of missed the little guy. A respectable foe. A worthy adversary compared to the faceless enemies within my email inbox. Hell, maybe not an adversary at all, but a sort of furry-tailed teacher.

With the squirrel gone, things sped back up.

I stopped sitting facing the sunset at night, watching the stars, and enjoying the late birdsong transition to the sound of crickets.

I returned to eating my pork chops on the couch watching TV.

A familiar color of grey slowly crept back into my life. My chest felt tight again. I stopped noticing, not just my patio furniture, but all the small things around my apartment I had communed with for the past month. Work got in the way.

Time passed as it did before the hole—hurried, frenetic, and abstracted from the physical plane around me.

One night after a particularly agitating day of work, I went to my storage space to get a bottle of wine and saw my hole-ridden patio furniture cushions. Instead of getting angry, something odd happened. I started laughing. I laughed so hard I thought I might crack a rib. I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed so much. I let it consume me. It felt good to laugh.

I touched the chewed-up cushions, they were a sweet reminder of the days when I did battle with the squirrel—when the hole problem first appeared. A problem that wasn’t as much of a problem as it was a solution. A solution to something that has plagued me ever since I left the unshakable presence of childhood and entered the eternal future of my adult life—a forgetting to be here now; to pay attention—to my life, to my patio furniture, and especially, to a furry-tailed hole-maker. 

So I did the unthinkable.

I got the cushions from the storage space and put them back on my patio furniture.

I took my dinner from the couch and turned my chair around.

I looked at the bubble-gum sky. I listened to the birdsong. And I waited for the squirrel. 

I needed another hole in my life; something to slow me down once again.

She stirred next to me. Her eyes opened. She smiled.

I have to go, I said.

She lifted the sheets and draped an arm around my waist. Warmth from under the covers escaped like the halcyon summer heat from a distant life.

Stay in bed, she said.

I can’t, I said.

I patted her arm. She didn’t understand. The manic highs and the unbelievably low lows. The deadlines that bored holes in my stomach.

I got out of bed and dutifully raced through the morning routine: brush teeth, take shower, make coffee, chug coffee, pack bag. The morning wasn’t something to be savored, it was something to get through. 

I quickly got dressed, did twenty push-ups, thirty jumping jacks, and a series of neck stretches—my abridged gym workout. To say my neck was stiff was an understatement, but the stretching helped.

I shouted goodbye to her from the hallway as I left the house.

Stay in bed, she said.

I can’t, I said.

I had been working on the same project for over one hundred and sixty-five cumulative hours in the past two weeks: a new database system for an influencer marketing agency that was selling diabetes technology on behalf of a larger pharmaceutical company. 

The project had been my constant companion. I took my first few calls on the commute. When I got to the office, I immediately sat at my desk. I punched numbers into digital boxes. I clicked. I scrolled. I clicked some more. The screen emanated various colors across my face. 

I was helpless to the schedule. This was what was required. Client projects had deadlines and the deadlines were yesterday and why wasn’t the project done yet, my boss asked every morning. 

During my working hours, my phone lit up with alerts like a hyperactive Christmas tree. It used to take willpower not to check my phone. Now, multiple unread messages from my family thread were the norm. My sisters had adapted to my delayed response times by sending fewer pictures of their kids.

Stay in bed, she said.

I can’t, I said.

I sat in meetings about the database system. Some I was mentally present for. Others, I completely checked out of, daydreaming. In one meeting I dreamed of a Smurf army crafting origami frogs en masse. In another, I dreamed of running down my high school hallways chased by an ape-sized hamster. The meetings didn’t matter. Nothing was ever decided. The meetings were to talk about talking about the work, which even in its most constructive form, was often so abstract it was difficult for me to understand what we all did for work.

Back at my desk, I silently created more columns and rows. Occasionally, I would scroll on my phone and read threads about how I could make $30k a month from Bali by creating content, all I needed to do was unplug from The Matrix. 

There was an announcement. Everyone was to come to the conference room. It was someone’s work anniversary. There was a white-plastic cake with crunchy icing in the main conference room. We all gathered. The cake said Congrats On 10 Years. The party felt like a eulogy. I wore a green and white party hat. I took an obligatory piece of cake and threw it away at my desk trash can.

Stay in bed, she said.

I can’t, I said.

After my last meeting, I allowed myself to go for a quick walk around the block.

I thought about the database system. It was the most important project for the company this quarter. And I was at the center of it: I knew all the contours of the data structures; I knew where the bodies were buried; I knew there was an influencer named Becky who charged five grand for an Instagram post and she lived in Canada and she was three weeks late sending her post caption for approval to the marketing agency who needed to forward it to the pharmaceutical company who needed to forward it to their lawyers for red-lining and then all of that information would make its way back through the tunnels of the database and end up in Becky’s inbox for review and revision.

I knew these things and they gave me heartburn.

Stay in bed, she said.

I can’t, I said.

Leaves cracked beneath my tennis shoes. I looked around. I could hear birds chirping. Finches, the color of daffodils. I listened to the wind and the slow hum of traffic.

Something rustled down the block. A car engine started. Distant words were exchanged somewhere. I tried to remember where I was. I grabbed the bridge of my nose and squeezed until everything turned black. I tried not to panic. 

I blinked my eyes open once, twice. I thought of her.

Stay in bed, she said.

I can’t, I said.