Only Humans

Visitors

It was not a good way to start a day. The hot water ran out mid-shower, the outfit she'd decided on didn't work when confronted with the mirror and the train doors closed in front of her just as she got on the platform. She shot a dark look in the general direction of the driver and didn't even try to suppress the profanities in her mind. She knew that it started with the dream; there was someone she couldn't save, a journey she couldn't finish, and the chime of the alarm prevented her from carrying out something momentous.

She tried to choose a cheerful, soothing song for the train ride but her phone connection was wobbly and the snippets she caught were all from the wrong songs. The train moved along at snail's pace and, finally succumbing, stopped completely for seventeen minutes, longer than the entire journey should've taken. "Ladies and gentlemen, we apologise for the delay, this is due to normal morning congestion in the London Bridge area", announced the driver as humidity condensed on the windows. Robin was seething inside. How can this just be accepted as a "normal" part of a day?

'People like that should be banned from London', she fumed a few minutes later as she tried to wind her way through the infuriatingly unperturbed tourists blocking the way at the bottom of the escalators. One of them stopped in his tracks halfway through an open ticket gate, which, predictably, closed on him with a loud and painful crash. She raised her eyebrows and shook her head as she sped past them with the conceited agility of a local.

She was in a state by the time she got to the office. Thinking of the morning ahead of her, she realised that the prospect of breakfast was just as out of reach as finishing her makeup before her first meeting. She hated mornings; the never-ending, pitfall-ridden ritual of getting ready. She thought with disdain of all the complacent men on the train looking disapproving as she put on her mascara. The hair straightener had done nothing to tame the frizz and other people were surely thinking that she just didn't bother. She thought it unfair that other women had to spend less time getting ready and arrived at work looking flawless and collected. She felt a poisonous, hot envy surging through her and tried to avoid inquisitive eyes on the way to her desk, lest she burn them with her gaze. She briefly wondered how she was going to endure the day but immediately had to snap out of it as there were people to greet, small issues to solve.

Day in, day out, there were new people to welcome, meaningless conversations to be had, emails to send by the dozen, interruptions to be endured. When she moved to London she had envisioned a life full of purpose as an agent of change, confident in the knowledge that she was precisely where she was meant to be. As the years passed she found herself wondering whether she was on the wrong side of a glass wall.

She retreated to the ladies' for a moment of quiet in the enclosed space of a cubicle. It was good to shut out the world. She closed her eyes, hung her head low and exhaled deeply as she peed. It felt like a certain amount of stress was leaving her body with the urine she passed. It was good to flush all of that down the drain.

As she washed her hands she allowed the warmth of the water to creep up her arms and run down her back with a small shiver. In passing, she thought of cliché movie scenes where the hero retreated to the restroom, washed his face and dried it with a towel while dramatically looking at himself in the mirror. She wondered what those people were trying to wash off.

She was still a little ruffled when she entered the meeting room and turned on the display. Why did she have to be in charge of this first thing, every single day, when other people had it together so much more than her. It smarted to admit that she couldn't even take care of her own single self in the morning, let alone run a meeting and sort out others' workload.

She plopped down on the couch and exhaled. The motion sensor didn't pick up her presence and the light turned off after a while. She sat in the semi-darkness and felt the broken pieces of her morning slowly ebbing away. As she waited for them to turn up, the thought of the sleepy people who had the courtesy to be a few minutes late suddenly gave her an almost motherly urge to make everything ready for them.