It was a lazy night at work.

I hated graveyard shifts. But I kept crawling back to it like an ex-girlfriend who got dumped but still wanted some action.

Each time I go to work, I get nervous. This wasn’t my usual MO. I eat, sleep, spam, and rewind. But at that time, I didn’t really know what I wanted, only that I needed a job to finance my surface-level spending habits.

Still, I worked there — a tiny speck of dust carried by the wind that somehow ended up on a chair in an office somewhere.

A speck of dust.  That’s how small I felt working in that place. Sure, I acted big. Cracked up a big smile. Gave free hugs. Laughed at jokes at my expense. But my dignity was small. My mind — misunderstood. My charms—gullible. Not understanding office relationships and how people perceived me was terrifying.

But here comes Ezra — self-proclaimed genius. A wise man, they say. Curly hair with a man bun coiled in chopsticks. This dude screams a different type of sexy. Like an eccentric man who works in an antique shop, curating worthy finds. I can imagine him holding one of those monocle glasses, sitting behind a desk, legs crossed, carefully examining the beaded tassel with gems once attached to one of his hair sticks.

This man doesn’t belong here, I thought. He should be in my room examining my neck to see if the light kiss he once planted the night he was drunk left a mark — easily forgotten the next day.

I didn’t mind it at all. Surprised? Yes.

He may have that beautiful smile with his teeth glistening…like in some toothpaste commercial, but I wasn’t sure if I was into him.

But the way he smiles? Somehow, I felt at ease, and it got me. I emotionally spiraled in his wit, pulling me deeper. But did it change me? No.

I wasn’t in love with him. I wasn’t obsessed.

But I was fascinated — by the way he moved, the randomness of his jokes, the way his mind worked like it was tuned to a different frequency.

I caught myself mimicking his little habits, like how he’d pause in that ridiculous “thinking stance,” or the way he’d lean in when something amused him. Somehow, his quirks started to echo inside me.

His randomness — like when he grabbed a rubber band and started to eat it thinking it was pansit — that was funny. Genuinely. But I cannot quite recall most of his jokes or his insults — I just remember laughing.

But there’s one thing he told me that stuck. That time when he was “on his own kind of trip,” I asked, 

“What did it feel like? What was on your head when you were high?”

He replied, 

“It’s like — I just sit and stare like this for hours at the manhole waiting for the rabbit to come out.”

I thought, Ah, like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland?

Maybe his rabbit hole was an escape from feeling too much, while mine was a desperate need to feel everything. Somehow, both led us into strange places.

Well, at least we had something in common: his trippy daydream and my favorite childhood story somehow clicked. But sinking into that rabbit hole? Basically, my life story.

It is not enough for me to just scratch the surface. Stolen kisses, sweet glances, or a toothpaste smile wouldn’t cut it. I had to dig deeper and deeper to find meaning in all the things that breathed life.

Maybe I saw something deep in him that he’s trying to hide behind these jokes — insecurities or doubts that somehow mirrored my emotional fragility.

But memories, no matter how awful or great those moments made me feel, prove only that I lived.

I observed, recorded, and filed them in the “Are we still spiraling?” vault — the deep, not barely scratching the surface.