Over time

She likes to work really late sometimes. When she does, she feels like that lone female scientist in a lab poring over her findings again with a microscope, sitting hunched over on a stool, in a lab coat that’s too big for her.

She’s completing tasks. Small, unimportant, necessary tasks. Outside, the sky draws a cloak over itself, slowly, reluctantly. It’s quiet. Her fingers make the keyboard sound like an un-tuned piano. It’s Friday. Her colleague left the office wearing her new leather jacket and ripped jeans.

She’s getting things ready for Monday, just in case Monday comes and she no longer exists. She does it when she feels under pressure. To prove to her team mates that she is a hard worker, even though it’s obvious when she buys everyone another round of tea. She does it to justify things about herself – enter those details here.

It’s that time of the day when everything about her life simply falls into place. Yes, she can describe it: when you’re completely alone in an open plan office designed to feel like you’re not at work.

You can send urgent emails. Or none. It doesn’t matter anymore. That feeling.

An unclassified variation of confidence. No one to tell you what to do; to interrupt you. Unburdened loneliness. How she imagines life is when you felt like that all the time.

It’s overwhelming and self-absorbed. Soothing. Proud.

It falls away like snake skin as she leaves and boards the tube home in the obsidian evening.