Your Second Self Is Your Most Important Job
The Mask and The Raw Nerve
The felt is a specific shade of green that exists nowhere else in nature. Your fingers, a blur of practiced grace, feel the crisp snap of the cards, the cool, weighty clay of the chips. Sound is a muffled roar-a thousand tiny bells, a hundred hushed conversations, the distant ghost of a jackpot siren-all of it forming a wall of white noise you’ve trained your brain to ignore. You are a statue that deals cards. Your face is a pleasant, neutral mask. Your voice, when you speak, is a tool: clear, calm, final. The pot is $979. A bead of sweat traces a path down the player’s temple. You feel nothing. You are a function. A procedure. You are the house.
Then the relief dealer taps your shoulder. The spell breaks.
Fifteen minutes. You push through the heavy door into the jarring fluorescence of the break room. It smells like burnt coffee and disinfectant. The mask doesn’t just come off; it shatters. You slump into a plastic chair that sticks to your back and your hands, the ones that were impossibly steady 49 seconds ago, now tremble just enough that you have to try twice to unlock your phone. A frantic text to your sister: I think I’m having a panic attack. Did I leave the oven on? The guy on seat 3 looks like he wants to murder me. You are no longer the
