When I first came to While working at the state facility, I saw only girls. That was what they called themselves – “girls” – with an emphasis that changed from exclamatory to interrogative depending on the type of disaster unfolding around them. And disasters, I understood immediately, were an inevitable part of the unstable cosmogony of our everyday working lives.

We worked in a small county library, in an office with no windows. The girls’ computers seemed larger than they were. Sometimes you couldn’t see or hear the girls because of the wide monitors and the whirring of the desktops, and then you had to get up from your chair to make sure another living being was present. The room’s lack of windows was apparently compensated for by a photographic print pasted from floor to ceiling: tropical greenery and a steep, tumultuous waterfall, its foaming currents cascading down from above. The image was a daily reminder not so much of fresh air as of the hierarchy of power.

There was a time when I tried to maintain a certain bodily autonomy – we ate separately, took the bus to the subway separately – but this self-separation very quickly lost all meaning. My life was basically a disaster at the time too, so I felt at home at work: it was fun and terrifying, and the boundaries between private and public were blurred by alcohol and appointments. The girls accepted me as one of them. We often turned into a single being with many arms and legs, jubilant, all-powerful, devastating. In those moments I no longer felt my own powerlessness or the weakness in my knees.

At the same time, when I looked at the girls, I often noticed the automatism of my gaze, which seemed slightly arrogant, ironic, sweetly condescending, mythologizing the female community. I justified it with my special status: I’m just passing through. Sometimes, looking at everyone in a gloomy and suspicious mood, it seemed as if the girls existed only up to the waist, as if they didn’t exist under the tables and there was only a tangle of different colored cables conducting signals somewhere. Of course, it could be that I still hated women and just wasn’t attracted to them. Or maybe on those days it was me who wasn’t quite there under the table.