Every morning she woke up more exhausted than the morning before, every month her rent was late, every week she mooched groceries from her roommates. She never had enough gas, she was always borrowing money, she was constantly in debt, and still it wasn’t enough. The hamster wheel kept turning faster and faster.

In a way, the chair was her friend. It freed her from all the illusions. It showed her the truth. She was alone. No one was there to help her. All her life she had run from the one thing she’d been born to do: wear a uniform and work a register. It was time to embrace her true nature.

The problem was the liars. They said she could do anything she set her mind to, they told her she should shoot for the moon because if she missed she’d be among the stars, they made movies tricking her into thinking she could achieve heroic things. All lies. Because she was born to answer phones in call centers, to carry bags to customers’ cars, to punch a clock, to measure her life in smoke breaks. To think otherwise was insane. The chair didn’t lie to her. The chair cured her of madness. The chair showed her exactly what she was capable of, and that was nothing.

Something floated up from the darkness inside Amy’s brain, and she realized that she finally had her sit-down job. It was funny because it was true. This was the last thing she would ever do, and it was about time. She had failed and failed and failed, all the way from the beginning. She had failed to escape her mom’s trailer, she had failed to earn her degree, she had failed the Shop Responsible test, she had failed to do anything with her life. That was her nature. Fail and quit. If you cut her open, it was fail and quit right down to her bones.

For years, Amy had wondered what would happen if she stopped fighting and let go. For as long as she remembered, she had been scared of how far she would fall if she stopped struggling. It was a relief to finally have an answer. This far. This was how far she would fall. This was the bottom.

A sense of relief numbed the pain as her limbs lost circulation. She could feel her mind getting better; she could feel it healing, sloughing off decades of lies and madness, accepting her place in the natural order. She would stay in this chair not moving, not doing anything, and there would be no more illusions, no more lies, no more useless struggle, no more failed attempts to escape. She was thankful for the chair. It was where she belonged.