Alone

It is cold in the depot; the air conditioning is on all the time and it blows freezing gusts down on you from above. It was a cool but bright morning, when the sun seems peculiarly distant.

The depot itself is huge, a curling open-plan space wrapped around inner offices and a canteen. Last week, half the office moved to new offices, built at a cost of £4 million. They left a once communal area quiet and empty. Today, staff fell sick and vehicles broke down. Everyone had left the building by 8am, leaving me sitting in this giant space, with cold air and a distant sun, by myself.

And in that quiet space, I saw myself, felt my soul coagulate into something firm and fixed, around which the rest of my body hummed quietly. As I looked around the empty space, I thought here and now, this is all mine. This time, this place, this body, these thoughts - all definitively mine.

And this person that I am is not a daughter, a wife, an employee, a colleague, an entrepreneur, an atheist. It is not a brunette, a geek, a woman, a wolf, a loner, a friend, a teacher. It is not even Suzie. All of these things are constructs, built out of the pieces other people have given me. All of these things hum quietly around a centre point, a fixed point.

And nobody, not my best friend, not my husband, not my parents, not a fortune teller or an aura reader, would ever know or see that fixed point. It is mine, and mine alone.

Then...

... I re-read Red Sky. Lol. I am pretty awesome.

Shame it never got finished. It would have been 10x better than LoaE.