skid marks

It is 6.38am. Nothing is open at Great World City, even as my dad takes me on a blitz around the basement, just in case. “Not even McDonald’s is open”, he says, as we make our way up. 

This is how I end up in a meeting room in his office, watching the sun come up over the city. I fire off a few emails while spinning around in an office chair. 

Another Monday. Another workday.

*

Because I was always lucky enough to hitch a ride to school from my parents, because I attended schools that were mostly close to home, and because my parents hate being stuck in traffic, I used to arrive in school uncannily early. Often, it wouldn’t even be 6.30am. 

Those years taught me that life does not have infinite workarounds. If I arrived in school before the custodian, I would just have to sit in the corridor, waiting. If the fuse box hadn’t yet been unlocked, I would have to sit in the dark, waiting. And if someone I didn’t like came by during this time, I would have to sit in the corridor, in the dark, waiting out their stories.

There’s a lot you learn about people when they haven’t yet donned their skin for the day. The coolest kid in my class came up to me once, when I was 14, asking if I could teach her how to put in her contact lenses. In 15 minutes, she told me about her dad, her sister, the fight they just had where they both barrelled down the staircase. She was bruised, mad, maybe a little sad. 

When the sun came up, she slipped back into insouciance. We never spoke about her family again.

*

I was thinking about that on the way back home today — how time can be so thieving, so elastic. How mornings are supposed to be fresh starts — the break of a new day, the dawn of new hope. 

And how, armed with the folly of youth, I used to sometimes let a great day deepen into a sleepless night, so when I turned up in school the next morning, I would get to live one long, unbroken, beautiful yesterday. 

*

I watched the sun rise in the silence of a meeting room this morning, and there I was, years before, growing up — yawning, laughing, bleary-eyed in day-old skin. Happy.