The Living Statue

21.

It was one of those lazy days when all you do is enjoy your loneliness by watching reruns of your favourite series or reading a good book with an addition of a cup of tea. The bleak, rainy weather worked in my favour so I decided to get the best of it.

I woke up with a prepared plan. After having a big English breakfast I'd made myself and an enormous cup of coffee, I settled in my little photography wanderland corner. The hours passed by and I was still messing with my camera when the lunch hour arrived, and after eating a bowl of home-made salad, I decided to take a long, fragrant bath.

I am more of a quick-shower person, simply because I'm always in a hurry - working at the office or messing with my camera. But today was different and I promised myself I wouldn't let anything stop me from enjoying an hour long, limb-relaxing, fluffy bath.

Before stuffing the water with every aromatic soap I had to make the biggest bubbles possible, I made a home-made body scrub. It consisted of sea salt, honey and coconut oil and it smelt divine. It was one of Caroline's secret recipes. She is all for organic ingradients and natural beauty treatements. Don't even get me started on her three-days-in-a-week spa hours.

The hot water was like the sun after a month of snowy blizzards, but being the complete jinx I am (the universe and God must've made the conspirancy against me), my phone rang after the first ten minutes of my lim-relaxing, self-care session.

My father was on the other side of the line and he wouldn't stop prattling about my job as a photographer and how bad and completely useless it is. Of course, he doesn't know that I have another job that happens to include being an employer for one of his many business colleagues. Father is usually a sealed-mouth, bringing-the-words-with-metal-pliers-out-of-his-mouth kind of person, but today he resembled my mother by many aspects. I'm telling you, the universe is one wicked motherfucker.

When I finally got rid of him, an hour already passed and my toes and fingers shriveled like an old prune. Ha! So much of a beauty-spa-day. I tended on coming out of my bath as Princess Diana, but ended up looking like Queen Elizabeth.

And then when I finally thought the downfall that was my 'relaxing' Saturday would magically turn for the better and start pouring upwards instead of downwards, the door bell rang.

I'm changing my statement. The universe is not a motherfucker - it must be female, because only a woman can be such an insufferable bitch.

I turned on my turntable and wraped my wet hair into a towel, turban-style. Apparently, my luck isn't the only thing working against me, but my power of judgement as well. First, I forgot to turn off my phone and got figuratively strangled by my father's incesant prattle. Second, I didn't look through peephole before opening the front door, when, trust me, I most certainly should have.

My cardinal mistake cost me not only my foreplanned peaceful afternoon, but also my womanly pride as well. Because there is nothing that can wound your ego as showing up in front of your boss in an oversized, worn t-shirt, barefooted might I add, and with a big, tourban-like towel adorning my make-up bare face. And that's exactly what happened.

I opened the door and there stood Mr Torres in his full freshly-groomed, meticulously-ironed, perfectly-statuish glory. Well, fuck him and each of his fifty four shiny-without-a-flaw editions. No woman is always perfectly presentable, let alone man. But I have long ago comprehended that Mr Torres is a bloody statue and not a human being, so I guess that doesn't count.

I was puzzled, thunderstruck, nonplussed that he was actually there, in front of my apartment, all at once. "Um...Sir? Are you lost?"

Are you lost? What is wrong with me?