just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets

It would happen when he'd put his feet up to think carefully about an obscure process; enamelled molars impressing on a the end of a pen with an already considerably chewed upon topography, a cold mug of tea long since discarded on a pile of no longer useful post-it notes, and the entire world - hurling itself furiously at a million miles an hour around a nuclear inferno - utterly lost to an obscurity and insignificance of thought. A process, a business problem so small and utterly without significance captivating and whirring his pre-frontal cortex.

It was then that a part of himself would quietly point at what he was - a tiny speck already lost in a corproate plethora; and for a moment he was overwhelmed. By the scale of the universe and how capable it was to continue without him. By the gentle hypocrisy of what he wanted to believe work is and the work he now did. And the unbearable loss of moments that couldve been threaded together if he was somewhere else.

It would quietly push down on his chest, and with a heavy, gasping shudder, psychosomatic instinct would wretch him away from the cold, numbing fumes his conscious held ready. And with that heavy shudder, he always imagined his soul being shaken a little more loosely. And without really knowing why, he'd compress his palms over his sternum, strangely satisfied by the firmness of the bone beneath his fingers, weary and revolted by the satin flush of fabric as his tie brushed over on top of them.