You clear out your desk drawer and you are annoyed. There is a tangle of dead pens, a phone charger for a device you no longer own, and that little cactus someone gave you three jobs' worth of birthdays ago. You almost leave it. You are thinking about traffic, about whether the goodbye email struck the right tone, about the guy in accounting who never once said your name right.
Take the cactus.
Not for the cactus. For the window it sat in, the one with the view of the parking lot and the one good tree. You will forget almost all of these people. That is allowed. But you will not forget the specific sound of this room at 4:50 on a Friday, the keyboards slowing, someone laughing two desks over, the particular way the light went gold and everybody pretended not to be watching the clock.
You think today is about the ending. It isn't. It is just the last time you will be casually, unremarkably good at something surrounded by people who knew it too. That is rarer than you understand right now.
So take a minute before you badge out. Not a big one. Just long enough to look at the chair.
You will do fine. You always do. But nobody warns you that you get only so many rooms like this one, and you are standing in one, and you keep checking your phone.
Put it down. Look up.
There.