July 21 - Release

Deadlines looming and missed. They've been waiting for you in the meeting room since 9, but the conference call you're in refuses to end. There are a million emails that need to be answered, the office line is ringing, the cell phone is vibrating. Forget lunch. Forget dinner. Forget ever going home again.
Everything is a priority. Everybody needed it this morning. It's a trainwreck of conflicting pressures. The ship is sinking. Too many decisions. No support. Nobody else in the office cares anyway.
The threads are bare and the tires are about to burst. We'll never make it in time. The files are missing. It's an irreversible meltdown, a total systems failure. The patient is flatlining, the body rejecting the transplant.
The accounts are overdrawn. They lost your reservations. The warranty is expired. They're saying it's your fault. The boss has been asking where you've been. No, that meeting was yesterday. What do you mean you missed it?
We'll have to cover the costs of the reprint.
They're not going to settle out of court.
A fatal error has occurred. The document is unrecoverable, and it's looking like another all-nighter. We have to make this disappear from the books. Everything is overextended. But you said you had it covered. Isn't this your signature? They said the package never arrived.
Everything is black. I'm hurtling toward the earth at mach 3, engulfed in flames. The tsunami is about to hit. Impact is imminent. There's no way to avoid it. I close my eyes.
And then.
Nothing.
A white light.
I pull the ripcord on my parachute and suddenly I'm floating in the clouds and everything is calm. It's all miles beneath me, minuscule.
Everything looks like a miniature train set from this height, so neat and tidy.
I am the pearl in an oyster at the bottom of a raging sea of hurricanes, shipwrecks, and chaos.
I am the Buddha.
I am serenity.
I am one million miles away from the cosmological shit storm.
I am bulletproof.
And it's all because I have just uttered the two most magical and liberating syllables ever spoken in the history of language:
I quit.