Dias de los Muertos

My first day back for my last week.

The feeling here is one I cannot fully categorize, as it is one that I have never fully been through before, either not having been involved in layoffs or this being a special case as many of these people have worked together for 4+ years.

Simply put, it is the Day of the Dead.

There are brief discussion in the breakroom, but not much interaction - or for that matter, action-in corridors. People flit from office to office, or go into the labs. Senior management, except for floating by once, is not in evidence, apparently bunkered in preparing the next steps.

But even more than the relative lack of interaction is the sense of silence, the lack of conversation, or perhaps the conversation of the dead. There is a pall, unseeable, indefinable, but laying like a thick cloak over the area. It wanders the hall in a thick dense invisible fog, penetrating every crack of every room, flowing under doorstops and around desks - the cold fingers of reality, reaching through the illusion of normality seen in operating lights, dimly glowing computers, and even the ordinary sounds of laboratories in operation.

My only companions are the hushed pushing noise of the forced air as it surges through the diffuser into my office and the clickety clack of my keys as I type.

A sense of something being dead, but just not realizing it.