The aroma of freshly brewed coffee and the clacking of keyboards dominated the atmosphere in the office. Javier, sipping from his cup, looked out the window at the huge city. The multinational corporation building loomed imposingly before him, reflecting a certain dawn melancholy in its dark glass.

Approaching fifty, with a brilliant and versatile mind, he harbored a passion as ardent as the rising sun: photography. As a teenager, his father had given him a camera. Since then, his fascination for this art dominated him. Over the years, and especially with the advent of digital technology, he had photographed almost everything that crossed his path, capturing the beauty in the details, the life in the gray streets of the metropolis he now observed with nostalgia.

Yes, photography was his refuge, his passion, his dream.

He had been with the corporation for nine years, being one, if not the main, guarantor of financial health. His job was to analyze numbers, evaluate risks, and optimize profits. He was good at it, very good! But the routine consumed him in the vilest repetition. Every day, he felt (more and more) like a cog in a complex and cold machine. A machine that did not allow him to feel the heat of the rising sun, the excitement of a new project, or the satisfaction of capturing a unique moment through his lens.

Over time, he adopted the habit of looking at the photos he had taken during the commute to the office on his tablet every morning. He sighed at the freedom they represented, even though they were captures of unrepeatable moments. However similar they seemed, he saw the singularities when comparing them with the previous ones. The streets, the buildings, the people, everything looked different, especially from outside the walls of the sober office. Photography had become a form of expression, a constant search for beauty in the everyday.

The monotonous work and the constant pressure from Mr. Garcia, his boss, were beginning to bother him. The grumpy one, as they secretly called the boss, was an ambitious and ruthless man. He was concerned with results, with figures that (he believed) reflected the success. So, Javier's photographs, although they were good, even excellent, had no “spark” for him. On the contrary, he judged them as an obstacle to what was important: the reports.

That day, full of the usual aroma of early coffee, the boss surprised Javier with his abstraction and asked him sarcastically about the photograph on the tablet resting on the desk. The image, a building in ruins, with broken windows and peeling walls, a building similar to the one he was looking at through the windows, is a reminder of what any magnificent construction can be.

For Javier, the image represented more than that. It represented the passion with which he had photographed her and how he saw her freedom abducted by the desire for subsistence. He understood in contrast, the loss of his own life, by dedicating himself to the achievement of other people's interests and not his own.

He saw in Mr. Garcia, with his obsession for control and profit, an obstacle that clouded him. “This is not what I had imagined as a child,” he thought, looking at his boss's face and the simultaneous photo on the screen. The echoing noise outside his thoughts told almost inaudibly, “These figures are too tight, too controlled.”

The photograph, a quest to capture a fleeting moment in time, was a perfect metaphor for what his own life would be like if he didn't change. He had been thinking about this project for months. A project he wanted to put his whole heart into. He saw himself as an artist trapped in a world that only valued him for his spreadsheets and projections.

But that morning, something changed in Javier. He looked at the photograph of the building, an image of what could be, a vision of a future from which he wanted to escape to pursue his artistic dreams.

“This isn't right.” He said aloud: ”I need to be free to create, not just calculate.”

His voice broke the silence and for the first time in months. He felt it resonated with truth. No more cost-benefit analysis. No more potential return on investment. No more workflow efficiency.

“This is not what I imagined,” he rethought, ”I need to be free to create.”

Mr. Garcia, a man with a cold, calculating look, approached Javier, his face serious in the dim light of the lamps on the office ceiling.

“Javier, what do you mean?” He asked quizzically. “Perhaps you haven't heard me!”

“I resign, Mr. Garcia.” He replied with a lip-smile, relieving himself of a weight he carried for a long time.

“What do you mean, do you quit?"

Javier took the tablet, finished drinking for the last time the office coffee, and walked towards the human resources department to stop being a simple resource, a piece of interchangeable machinery, and let the artist crouched inside him emerge.