The Studio Floor
10. The week had been ordinary. That was the thing about it.
The week had been ordinary.
That was the thing about it. Nothing had gone wrong. The account was confirmed — the client had responded to his recommendation with a brief satisfied email and a purchase order that arrived the next morning. Priya had finished the campaign visuals. James had resolved the thing with the typography, or stopped arguing about it, which amounted to the same result. Invoices had gone out. Two new briefs had come in. The studio had done what it did, steadily, getting more fluent in ways that didn’t announce themselves.
David had done what he did.
He had sat at his desk and answered emails. Delegated. Approved. Called clients back with his voice easy and warm and professional. He had stood in the doorway on Monday morning and watched the studio and felt the familiar pride of it and underneath the pride something that had no name yet and that he was managing.
He was good at managing.
Two weeks he had been managing.
The pills helped. Not dramatically — they had stopped doing anything dramatic two months ago. But they kept the edge accessible, kept the processing fast enough, kept him present in the way presence was required in rooms full of people who needed things from him.
The squeezing came and went.
He noted it. Placed his hand briefly against his sternum when he was alone. Removed it. Continued.
By Friday afternoon he was very tired.
Not the ordinary tiredness of a week. The kind that had been accumulating since March, since Guangzhou, since the tea house, since the river going gold at the hour before dark. The kind that sleep didn’t repair because sleep wasn’t the point.
He sat at his desk and watched the studio wind down.
Chairs pushed back. Bags picked up. The particular lightening of bodies released from a week’s work, people becoming more themselves as the professional surface thinned. Priya laughed at something on her phone before she’d even reached the door. Two of the junior designers left together, their conversation already shifted into weekend swing, lighter, faster, going somewhere he wasn’t invited and didn’t need to be.
He said the right things.
See you Monday. Have a good one. Yes the campaign looks good. Yes tell me how the pitch goes.
The studio emptied.
James was last. He always was. He stood at his desk with his jacket half on, looking at something on his screen with the frown he used for things that weren’t quite right, and David waited with the patience of someone who has learned to wait and watched him decide it could wait until Monday and finish putting his jacket on.
“Good week,” James said at the door.
“Good week,” David agreed.
The door closed.
David sat still.
The studio settled into its Friday evening self — the particular quiet of a space that had been full and was now empty, the hum of the computers still running, the last of the afternoon light coming through the windows at a low angle, lying in long rectangles across the floor the way it did at this hour.
He looked at his screen.
There was nothing urgent. There was nothing that couldn’t wait until Monday. There was no reason to stay and no reason to leave and his chest was doing the squeezing thing again, had been doing it since two o’clock, persistent and low, the hand around his heart tightening and releasing and tightening and releasing with a patience that matched his own.
He closed the laptop.
Sat for a moment.
Then he pushed his chair back and lowered himself to the floor.
Not dramatically. Not in the way of someone falling. Just — sliding. Down. One knee, then both, then sitting, then lying on his back on the cool concrete with his arms at his sides and the ceiling above him and the long rectangles of light moving slowly across the floor beside him as the sun continued its descent.
He lay there.
His heart was loud.
Not fast exactly. Just present. Making itself known in a way it usually didn’t, the thump of it coming up through the floor into his back, or coming from inside him outward, or both, the boundary unclear. He could feel it in his throat. In his wrists where they rested against the floor.
He breathed.
The studio breathed back, or didn’t, but held him anyway — the familiar smell of it, the coffee from this morning still faint in the air, mixed in with the particular scent of a space that had been full of people all week and was now empty of everyone except him.
He lay there for a long time.
Not thinking exactly. The mind running its numbers somewhere in the background, the calculations continuing because they didn’t know how to stop, the risk models modeling, the projections projecting. He let them. Watched them run from somewhere further away than usual, the way you watch traffic from a high floor — present, continuous, and not requiring you to be in it.
His chest did the squeezing thing. Again.
He put his hand on it. Felt his own heartbeat against his palm.
Still there.
Still his.
The light moved across the floor. The computers hummed. Outside the city continued its Friday evening, people releasing themselves into the weekend, the particular energy of Singapore at six thirty on a Friday evening, restless and light and going somewhere.
He wasn’t going anywhere.
He lay on the floor of his studio and felt his heart beat and breathed.
After a while he reached into his pocket for his phone.
He looked at the ceiling for another moment.
Then he opened WhatsApp and found Lina’s name.
He stared at the blank message field.
His mind assembled sentences. Paragraphs arrived, organised themselves, made their case — the studio, the account, the Guangzhou trip, the pills, the squeezing, the floor, what he thought it meant, what he thought he should do, what he’d read about burnout and cortisol and adrenal fatigue and whether any of it applied to him or whether he was simply—
He deleted all of it.
And he typed instead:
I’m on the floor of my studio. I don’t know what’s happening to me.
Sent it.
Put the phone on his chest.
Felt it buzz against his sternum seven minutes later.
He picked it up.
Come for 2 weeks. When can you leave?
He lay there with the phone on his chest and the ceiling above him and the light almost gone now, the studio going dark around him, and felt something loosen that had been held for longer than two weeks. Longer than Guangzhou. Longer than March.
He didn’t cry.
He just lay there and breathed and let the loosening happen without rushing it into anything.
After a while he typed back.
Give me a couple of days.
Her reply came immediately.
I’ll have someone pick you from the airport.
He put the phone down.
Lay there a little longer.
Then he got up, turned off the computers, picked up his bag, and walked out of the studio into the Friday evening city, which was still going where it was going, still releasing itself into the weekend, still entirely indifferent to the fact that something in him had just, quietly, given up trying to hold.