5 East.

Four months prior to receiving the news of the store closing, I had finished paying off my student loan and opened a savings account, convinced I was now financially stable enough to start planning for a future vaguely resembling adulthood. Having accrued a net worth of $2,559.63 (in these situations, one tends to know exactly how much is in the bank at any given time), I now faced the prospect of completely depleting that amount just to survive for the next few months.

I became desperate enough to engage in human interaction long enough to inquire about the status of my application to a company I really really wanted to work for, which I had submitted in July back when it was just a job I wanted as opposed to needed. After so long, I figured it was a lost cause, which was a damn shame because I had gone to the trouble of finding out what typeface the company used for their communications and used it for my résumé (a variant of Chalet London 1960 if you're curious), but a few days later I actually got a call for an interview. Certain that my entire future hung in the balance, I failed to get any sleep that night and showed up to the interview so tired and incoherent as to be functionally drunk. I made little to no eye contact, blanked on basic questions, and revealed far too much information about why I had left a previous job.