Dear Miss Burrows...

[Nona (DELETED 7562)]

Dear Miss Burrows,

We have received your application for the position of Psychiatric Technician*-421511. After careful consideration, we regret to inform you that you have not been selected for this position.

We will retain your candidate file in our database and may inform you of job openings that match your profile if you selected this option. We also invite you to visit the Career Section on our Web site regularly.

We thank you for your interest in Harper Rock General Hospital and wish you all the best in your career.


Best regards,

Harper Rock General Hospital, Human Resources Department

Replies to this message are undeliverable and will not reach the Human Resources Department. Please do not reply.


_________________________________________________________________________________________________



She tapped her finger against the hard outline of her computer mouse and re-read the email again. 'After careful consideration, we regret to inform you...' She knew the rest of it by heart already. No need to go on, and yet her eyes continued to move across the screen, from left to right, and they followed the words down to their letters and their letters down to the spaces in between for any reasoning that might be there. There was none, and there never were with rejections like these: cold and absolute. Only speculation waited in the white space of the screen, only unanswered questions. 'Did someone else get the job first?' 'Was I under-qualified?' 'Why did I go into thousands of dollars of debt for education if I can't find a job with it?'

As many times as she'd heard them, the sting they created was just the same. The theory that repeated sensations caused the nerve endings of the affected area to dull and numb only applied to physical pain, not emotional. It didn't count for hope, expectation, determination, or sheer desire. Those were the emotion queens that always got hurt the easiest, over any little thing. They never seemed to learn their lesson.

Nona minimized the browser window, and moved to shut the lid of her Mac. She stopped and brought it back up, screen again filled with the stark, sterile white of the email. Even the way it had been delivered was detached. At least with a physical piece of paper, she could crush it up in her fist, ball it into a tight little wad, and throw it, but this was all digital. When she went in person, dressed business casual and smartly, with her great plume of hair braided down behind her, she'd been told that they don't accept applications in person. Load of ****, that was.

She inhaled through her nose, ticked the box next to the email and clicked the garbage bin button. It was just as well that she didn’t get it. Better to receive the news sooner rather than later, she told herself, and then told herself also that it was best to say whatever she needed to get through it. It was just a rejection letter — another rejection letter — and it wouldn’t be the last. Stephen King tacked up his hundreds of rejection letters on his wall and used them as inspiration. J.K. Rowling was rejected plenty of times. It was just a rejection letter.

But that rejection letter said that when asked about her career, she’d have to smile and nod and start with an even-toned ‘Well…’ It could be a toss up how she ended it each time, whether she wanted to go with ‘I’m not sure, yet, which path in psychology would be best for me’ or ‘I’m waiting for the right position to come open.’ Because why do anything if it made her unhappy, right? Her mother worked too hard to see her stuck somewhere, right? And she wasn’t stuck in retail because she chose to stay behind a cashier while she was waiting patiently for her life to really begin.

Right?