“Those bags under your eyes are getting quite impressive,” remarked Linda from accounting, her perfectly mascara-ed eyes twinkling with barely concealed schadenfreude.
I touched the puffy skin beneath my eyes self-consciously. “Thanks for noticing. I’ve been cultivating them like rare orchids.”
The office kitchen was our daily arena for these subtle warfare exchanges. Linda, ever the picture of corporate perfection, stood stirring her green tea with practiced grace while I clutched my fourth cup of coffee like a lifeline.
“You know, Sarah, there’s this wonderful eye cream I could recommend…” she trailed off meaningfully.
“Oh, these bags?” I gestured to my face. “They’re actually load-bearing now. Essential infrastructure. Remove them and my whole face might collapse.”
Linda’s polite laugh couldn’t quite mask her confusion at my response. She wasn’t used to people who didn’t play by the usual office rules of constant self-improvement and cutthroat competition disguised as caring.
“I’m serious, Sarah. The client presentation is next week, and you know how important appearances are to Mr. Davidson.”
Ah yes, Mr. Davidson - our esteemed CEO who once sent out a company-wide email about “maintaining professional aesthetics” after spotting someone wearing navy blue instead of charcoal gray.
“Maybe I’ll start a trend,” I mused, taking another sip of my industrial-strength coffee. “Under-eye bags could become the new power move. Like how tech bros wear the same t-shirt every day to show they’re too busy thinking important thoughts to care about clothes.”
“You’re impossible,” Linda sighed, gathering her designer handbag (probably worth more than my monthly rent) and clicking away on her immaculate heels.
Later that day, during our team meeting, I caught my reflection in the glass wall of the conference room. The bags under my eyes had indeed reached impressive proportions, like small but determined hammocks supporting the weight of countless overtime hours and meaningless deadlines.
“As you can see from the quarterly projections…” droned Mr. Davidson, while I pondered the evolutionary advantage of developing eye bags. Perhaps they were nature’s way of storing excess existential dread, like how camels store water in their humps.
“Sarah? Your thoughts on the initiative?”
I blinked, returning to the corporate reality. “I think it’s bearing fruit,” I replied, fighting back a smirk at my own pun. “Though we might need to bag it up differently for the client presentation.”
Mr. Davidson’s face twitched slightly, but he moved on. He’d learned not to expect conventional responses from me months ago.
That evening, as I packed up my actual bag - a beaten-up messenger bag that had seen better decades - I noticed something curious in the office bathroom mirror. My under-eye bags seemed to be glowing slightly in the fluorescent light, like tiny beacons of defiance against corporate conformity.
I smiled at my reflection, bags and all. In a world obsessed with appearance, sometimes the most revolutionary act is simply carrying your burdens with humor rather than shame.
The next morning, Linda gasped when she saw me. I’d drawn small smiley faces on my under-eye bags with concealer.
“What?” I asked innocently. “If you can’t beat them, decorate them.”
She walked away shaking her head, but I swear I saw her smile. Sometimes the most insignificant things carry the weightiest truths - even if they’re just bags under your eyes.