Bee Bop. For the past few Sundays, my only escape from the world. Eyes of brightness and furtive glances over the tops of boxes and through the thin veils of tissue paper that hover about the office. Down by the wrapping section, whence I stand away from the computer screens and the glare of windows sheens. Round by the water-cooler where the air is cooler and the good times are a flowing: She is the one that saves me, who brings me home again. The only one who can slice that palpable silence in the air with her well-thought out cultural references and conversation strategies. The one who dare to be a voice amongst the silent. The one who can tell me which box is best suited to whichever product I may be happening to be shipping to whichever person on that particular day. The one who flirts with me on cigarette breaks and wears low-cut tops and has delectable boobies that would surely contain some kind of fine ambrosia one day. All for some lucky little fucker of child that gets to suckle upon them, should her days of sweet solitude ever end.

I am a sucker for wangers and I wish things could be different.

Bee Bop is the one who has a strange nervous laughter, one which makes her top lip curl up and ride against her teeth involuntarily. She is the one who makes strange comments about English rocks stars, like Chris fuckin' Martin, only to drive herself into aflutter and self-consciously wrap her little fingers around that soft, inviting hair like some well-meaning fat person may take to the lush rims of the chocolate cake-bowl: Slow and long and private, wanting of more than there is. Licking and licking and licking for a desire that never ends. All for just one more mouthful of that sweet, sweet, choco-cake.

Bee Bop is the one who likes to drop hints, ask me to do lunch next week. She's the one who wants to know what time I'll be finishing and what I had for breakfast this morning, where I like to hang on my days off, what time I'll be finishing today and what I have planned for after. I tell her that I'll probably go home and work on some writing, think about the meaning of life and stare at the tree which floats around the window. Drink perhaps or figure out a new way to get stoned. Listen to music without circular, repetitive patterns. Perhaps take a shower.

Bee Bop is the one who tells me to do something besides all that, like to go for a drink or to walk around endlessly in the nightlights. Or in the streets, where we can listen to the taxis hiss by in the rain as we walk past the bright, placid lights of convenience stores and then make jokes about the throngs in suits reading magazines, and the couples who dress the same ,or the old folks with their goddam shopping trolleys……

We are the ones who stand outside in the night air on our fifteen minute breaks. We are the ones who both feel that man-I'm-horny sense of longing. We are the ones who don't actually want to say anything to the other one of us because it might be a little creepy, or even presumptuous, to suggest such things to the other whom we work with, because it would probably just make things uncomfortable and a little eerie or strange the next Sunday.

At closing time, I am the one who waved to Bee Bop as the elevator doors closed, the one who received a sultry glance before that nervous lip-ride giggle after I stick my tongue out.

And now I'm the one who went home alone.