Sundays used to be mine alone—quiet, unclaimed. Eggs and bread or yam, depending on the mood or whatever I'd prepped the day before. Sometimes oats. Sometimes just tea. Warm or scalding hot, depending on the kind of day it was. Church—or the small rebellion of skipping it—followed by a market run, either as a reward for showing up and actually paying attention or an attempt to drown out the guilt of not going at all. Then came the familiar routine of cooking, cleaning up, and settling into the rest of the day. Sundays. Slow, unstructured days where the week finally exhaled, and sometimes me with it.
Then she arrived, and Sundays started carrying her name. Warm, charged, and no longer solitary.
The first time I saw her was during my onboarding. After what felt like an endless tirade from Mrs Awele, the loud easily irritated HR supervisor who handled the process with the kind of routine efficiency that told you she’d done this hundreds of times before, she finally stood up and led me out of her office. She introduced me to a few people I’d need to be immediately acquainted to due to my role, and I smiled my way through the usual names, handshakes, and formalities. Then she called her over.
I followed Mrs Awele’s gaze–or Angry Bird, as I’d later discover everyone called her behind her back—and saw her look up from her screen. Eyes narrowed in concentration, the glow of her monitor screen reflected in her anti-blue-light glasses. She walked over, stealing a few curious glances at me while Mrs Awele delivered a version of the same introduction we’d already repeated a few times that morning.
When she was done, she told her to complete my onboarding and get me set up. She looked at me properly then, shook my hand firmly, and asked me to please follow her. So I did.
Even then, I wasn’t really interested.
It was only a few days after Tee had removed me on Snapchat and blocked me everywhere else. Ninety percent of my brainpower was still devoted to figuring out why, my mind constantly replaying conversations and searching for answers that never seemed to arrive. So that was the state I was in when we first met.
She was friendly enough. Polite, a little curt, and I liked that. No forced warmth, no unnecessary enthusiasm. Just someone helping me get through the onboarding process after the HR part was sorted. I did notice her looking at me a bit strangely whenever I had to log into an email account or complete some setup task, but I didn't think much of it at the time.
I just assumed the glasses were maybe recommended after all and this was her normal.
The next interaction and first actual conversation snuck up on me. I was lost in the first few scenes of the last episode of The Sandman S1 on my laptop, when her voice came from behind me.
“Siamese? That’s not a Siamese cat now, is it?. I’d know. My boyfriend has one.”
I hit pause immediately, my heart doing a small, unnecessary flip. I turned around and quickly explained that I was done with my work and only waiting for a response to an email I’d CC’d her on. She shrugged with easy grace and told me not to worry. Angry Bird and everyone else who mattered were in a meeting anyway. Then she asked if I liked animations. She didn’t, she said. Maybe she just hadn’t found the right ones. I told her yes and no. Yes, I loved animated movies and could recommend a few. No, I wasn’t actually watching one right now.
She glanced at the paused screen, where a group of animated cats seemed to be having a meeting of their own. I sighed, smiled, and started explaining. The Sandman. Morpheus. The King of Dreams. Dreams, nightmares, and the whole strange, fascinating idea of it all. Neil Gaiman and what a mind he must have. She leaned against my desk, her eyes moving between mine and my mouth, nodding now and then as I rambled on and the noise of the office slowly faded into almost nothing.