Taking care of

Clattering out of the exit of a fifty floor office tower after 7pm I found myself on the receiving end of a few sympathetic smiles. I was weighed down with folders and documents*, just like the besuited sympathetic smilers. I felt a small burst of collegiate warmth and kinship as I struggled to the nearest bus stop.

I stared up at the endless rows of office towers and listened to the small concrete echo of traffic and hard-soled shoes. I wondered if I could do this every day. So powerful was the feeling of kinship and collaborative human struggle I got carried away in a fantasy of owning a wardrobe full of business dresses, of rising early every day to brush my hair and travel clean and groomed right into the heart of the city. Then I realised I was at the wrong bus stop and my red shoes were old and scuffed and my anchor broach was ridiculously out of place and my office was not in one of those towers but in an almost condemned building in the back corner of a university.

I achieved a new limbo in that moment. I felt simultaneously part of the churning machinations of the city but also free. It was probably just a case of geography.



*Almost all of them were legitimate work documents and books, only two of the books were poetry and only read one of them during the meeting.

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