

The dinner was supposed to be at River Café, which meant I had ironed a shirt. This was March 2020, and the client—I'll call him David, though that wasn't his name—was in town from London. I'd been chasing him for eight months. He was the kind of prospect other reps whispered about in the way people whisper about someone who might be famous: not because he'd done anything, but because everyone agreed something would happen with him eventually.

The email canceling arrived at 2:47 PM. Something about travel restrictions. Something about reevaluating priorities. I remember standing in my kitchen, still holding the iron, watching the steam rise and thinking: this is fine. We can do this over Zoom.

You know what I'm going to say next, don't you? You're already nodding. The dinner was never really about dinner.

What I didn't understand then—what none of us understood, I think, standing in our separate kitchens with our irons still warm—was that I'd spent the previous eleven years learning to perform a very specific kind of magic. Not over the phone or in slides, but in rooms. The magic was about room presence: how you enter, where you sit, the way your silence lands differently than other people's silence. I'd been studying this without ever calling it study.

The physical room was the instrument. I don't know how else to say it without sounding like I'm mourning something embarrassing, so I'll just say it: I was a musician whose instrument got taken away, and for two years I pretended the synthesizer they handed me was the same thing.

The discourse around remote work has been so determined to be forward-looking that it's refused to admit what we all actually lost. Not productivity. Not flexibility. But a particular, strange craft that required bodies in rooms together—a dependency we should have been honest about from the start.