Burned Out
Chapter 1.
Morning
Sunlight beat the window. A half-drawn curtain refusing to defend the sleeping woman from the morning.
It was another day. Get up. Work. Go to bed. Nothing changes. The rinse and repeat of it all was exhausting… numbing.
Laura was the quintessential former “gifted child” with the promises of future greatness. If she was the smartest and worked the hardest she would create change. She would move mountains. No one told her those mountains were meetings and Slack notifications. That there was no moving; only a deluge of colored meeting boxes being added to her Google calendar. Slowly blocking her life out a chunk at a time.
It was a lonely life for her. A life built on a foundation of suffocated dreams. Her friends were the accounts that responded on social media, people living their own lives between tweets and Instagram posts. Or were they bots, she wondered.
Begrudgingly getting out of bed, she sees the pile of clean clothes on the floor. Not for lack of time but for the lack of will to do anything about it, she casually rearranges the shirts and pants until she spots the one black sweater she intended to wear. It’s always easier to just put on something black. Timeless. Easy. Elegant.
