01: the corridor

I don't know why I'm starting a blog, nobody reads these anymore. But that's kinda the point. I need somewhere to put this that isn't my own head, and I don't think I want anyone I know to see it. Not work, not my roommate, who would absolutely be too kind about it in a way that would drive me nuts. But I don't want it to disappear either. A blog is the closest thing to writing on a wall in a building nobody visits. Shouting into the void I guess.

So, here's what happened.

At the store (large department store, where I work) there's a corridor between the break room and the floor. It's the last thing you walk through before you're on shift. Grey tile, the kind with the little black flecks in it so it hides scuff marks. Four doors on the left: loss prevention, the manager's office, a closet, the bathroom nobody uses because it's terrifying alone. Two on the right, some kind of access room and an office that I am not sure anyone is using. A wall clock that's never been set correctly, always seven minutes slow, the same seven minutes every day, with a crack in the glass that curves from about the 4:30 mark up to a little past 10. A laminated sign about lifting with your legs that's been there so long the red has all but faded.

I have walked it maybe two thousand times. I could walk it with my eyes shut. Some mornings I basically do. Pill, coffee, badge, corridor, floor.

On Tuesday the corridor had five doors on the left.

I need to be hella precise about this, because I've been replaying it and I know how memory smooths things out. I did not think "there's an extra door." I didn't count. I just felt something in my stomach the way you feel a missing step. My eyes were already slipping away from it, they didn't want to look, and I had to stop and physically turn my head back.

Four doors.

Four doors, the slow clock, the faded sign. Normal. One of the cashiers came up behind me and asked if I was okay and I said I was fine. I said I forgot my keys, and I went back to the break room and stood there holding a mug of nothing, just feeling, off.

The part I can't get over isn't the fifth door. Everyone has done a double-take. It's the speed of it. It didn't fade. It didn't resolve. It was one thing, and then, it wasn't. Like a card trick where you never see sleight of hand.

I notice things for a living, that's my JOB. I'm the one who walks the floor and sees the hanger that's facing the wrong way from forty feet out and I correct it. I make the store look perfect. That's it, that's the job. That's what I'm good at. So when I tell you I looked at that corridor and it was wrong and then it wasn't, I need you to understand I'm not someone who misses things like whole entire doors.

Anyway. That's why the blog. If it never happens again I'll just delete this and feel stupid about it.