At 2:15 PM, I removed the extra “haha” that I had written on the work group chat.
Earlier that morning, at around 10:00 AM, I had found out that Khaled got promoted.
Khaled.
My coworker who does, more or less, the exact same job I do.
Apparently, he “needed the opportunity more.”
Which, translated loosely from corporate language meant: Khaled has been looking emotionally exhausted lately.
And he also laughs at all the manager’s jokes.
Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Khaled; he is simply making the best out of the opportunities available to him – mainly private therapy sessions with the boss during lunch breaks.
At 12:00 PM, I requested a meeting with the boss, which quickly turned into something between a performance review and a sitcom episode.
I had spent almost forty minutes preparing for it beforehand.
Entire paragraphs written in the Notes app on my phone with bullet points and keywords.
Calm and professional sentences that sounded significantly more intelligent in my head than they eventually did out loud.
By the time I sat down in her office, my voice had already started shaking slightly, which was unfortunate because I was trying to present myself as “future leadership material” and not “man arguing for fairness while actively panicking.”
After twenty minutes of me asking why I wasn’t even considered for the promotion, or at the very least informed about it, and carefully implying that my supervisor may occasionally confuse management with favoritism, she laughed.
Laughed.
“You know Adnan,” she said, “Khaled is just going through something with his family at home, it’s been really difficult for him.”
I was too stunned to respond.
I thanked her for her time and left her gray office with the aggressively uncomfortable chair.
By 3:00 PM, I had stopped sitting up straight during meetings.
I answered “hanging in there” when someone asked how I was doing.
Khaled, meanwhile, looked thoughtfully out of the window once and got told to “take care of yourself.”
After years working here, I discovered that Khaled likes to suffer collaboratively.
He sighs at the right volume, throws his phone onto the desk when he is “angry” about something, and occasionally says things like, “I don’t know… it’s been a difficult week.”
By 4:00 PM, I stopped replying quickly to emails.
And by 4:45 PM, I had developed an entirely new workplace personality. Slower blinking.
Longer pauses before answering questions along with deep reflective sighs.
Somewhere around 5:00 PM, as I was leaving the office, I saw Khaled standing beside the manager smiling. A big, wide smile.
Probably healing, professionally.
At 5:15 PM, I got into a taxi with a driver who spent the entire ride loudly arguing with someone on speakerphone about sunflower oil prices.
Thankfully, my mom called, which meant I now had two people yelling in my ears simultaneously.
She asked how work was.
I told her it was “fine.”
I could hear the television in the background and my father coughing somewhere far from the phone.
At 6:00 PM, I unlocked my apartment door.
No voices, no television, no shoes near the entrance that didn’t belong to me. Just the refrigerator sound and yesterday’s rice waiting for me on the counter.
At 7:00 PM, I ate standing in the kitchen while scrolling aimlessly through my phone.
Engagement picture, gym selfies, somebody’s blurry photo of coffee with the caption: “healing.”
Khaled would’ve probably appreciated that, professionally.
At around midnight, my mom sent me: “Did you eat?”
I reacted to the message with a heart.
The strange thing is, I then spent most of the night tossing and turning in bed, thinking that I probably would’ve gotten the promotion too if somebody had seen me eat dinner alone.
