1 I

It all started during my last year of college. I went to a cardboard company because one of my college classmates was working there and was looking for his replacement.

It was my first day of my first job.

There, my classmate, named **********, gave me a tour for the whole company and introduced me to basically everyone; then, he showed me my office.

It was a cardboard table in front of the production area.

He then gave me a brief summary of what my job was supposed to be. I had to implement ISO 9001 to the whole company, but I had no idea how to do it; I mean, I studied what ISO 9001 was in one of my classes, but that doesn't mean I was certified on it or anything.

The only thing I had to do my job was a couple PDFs he sent me.

Anyway, at lunchtime we went to the nearest diner and order a burger or something, and after that he just told me: "Oh, by the way, my shift ended an hour ago," and left.

I went back alone to the company and sat on my cardboard desk.

I was the only one on the quality department.

Because I didn't know what to do, I started to check the PDFs out. Needless to say, there was so much information on then I only became more and more confused as I was reading them.

Also some of my coworkers from the production areas called me from time to time to check and approve their work—which was the only function of my job I kinda understood.

They also told me things like: "you know, the donut lady comes on Wednesdays, and we have a tradition here: the new guy must buy donuts for everyone at least once," or "you really look like ███████████ over here. Come on, get a little closer to him… yeah, like that. Hahaha, you totally look like his lost son or something."

One time, when I was walking back to my cardboard desk, one of them yell to another one: "Hey, stop staring at his ass," and I didn't know how to feel about it.

Anyway, the more time passed, the more I understood how unqualified I really was, so felt a bigger and bigger weight on my shoulders.

I also started asking myself: "is this how it's gonna be the rest of my life?"

Just that simple question terrified me.

When my shift ended, I grabbed my stuff and got out of there. While I was driving home, I started to feel like someone just stabbed me in the stomach—later on I learned this feeling was just stress and, while at that time it was absolutely terrifying, I simply got used to it as the time passed by—and I was haunted by the idea I had to go back there the next day.

So I never did. That very night I wrote an email to **********. I just told him I couldn't do a job I didn't know anything about, so I wanted to quit.

He didn't reply.

I saw him again the next semester. He was as nice as always, but from that point on we never really talked to each other again. And that didn't only happen with him; I started distancing from the rest of my classmates too because now that I knew what an office job really was I started to lose interest in my major—industrial engineering—and everything related to it.

So now my classmates and I had barely anything in common, and I started to feel like a stranger with them.

But I didn't drop out because I didn't know what else to do. I was so close of getting my degree, and the truth is, without my major, my life at that moment was completely aimless. I didn't have any dream job or plans for the future, so I needed time to reorganize myself.

And there was also pride: I didn't want to become one of those people who can't deal with something as simple as a major. I've always been one of the top students without really trying, and this was no exception: I was top 5 in my classroom and I barely studied. Everyone kept wondering what would happen if I released my full potential.

"You could always have perfect grades," they used to say.

But if being a hikikomori has taught me something, is how useless this is. I was so used to getting validated for my capacity to memorize useless data and to solve equations that I didn't know how to apply in real life that I didn't know how to do anything else.

In other words, I'm not smart; I just know how to follow orders.

So I was a little stubborn about getting my degree, and for that I needed something more than passing grades: I needed to fulfill my social service mandatory hours.

I needed 400 hours.

And I had 0.

So I started looking for the easiest way to fulfill those hours, and I found it working at the college's library—yes, they considered that a social service, because everyone could use it or something like that. But it was really boring, though. My job consisted only of prepping books, scheduling study room use and sometimes kick out people who were using a study room without scheduling it first.

Needless to say, except for midterms and finals, the library was practically empty. So I was surrounded with a lot of books and a lot of free time, and so I started reading. I grabbed whatever novels caught my eye in the literature section and read them, but unfortunately most of them were pageful monsters I had no interest in, like War & Peace or Don Quixote, and because I was so eager to keep reading, I started buying my own books.

Now, this meant some changes in my lifestyle: first of all, I was getting every book I wanted, and they were a lot, so I was dedicating so much time reading I stopped paying that much attention in everything else: my grades started dropping—but I wasn't failing or anything, so I didn't really care—and, worst of all, I started to drift apart from my best friends.

All I had to talk about was books and those books about books I also read, and they weren't really interested in literature. They were only talking about their girlfriends, jobs and plans for the future, and I had none on that.

I felt like a stranger with them, and that feeling only increased until one night we were hanging out in some bar. It wasn't even midnight, but suddenly a thought crossed my mind.

"I don't wanna be here anymore."

Then, I just made up and excuse and said good-bye. My friends obviously tried to convince me otherwise, but I kept insisting until I got out of there.

I have never seen them since. For the next couple of months—or years for a few of them—I didn't answer any of their texts, calls, DM's, Facebook messages. Some of them even came to visit me at my place, but I never answered the door, and I felt nothing about it. They had been my best friends since high school—two of them since 3rd or 4th grade—but now they were only a nuisance. I just wanted to be alone with my books, which were so many I started to pile them up all over my room.