My Love Letter to Hospitality

The staffrooms at Halcyon were not so much empty space but negative space, an area of non-existence defined by age-worn beige walls scuffed by years of movement up and down the halls. The eclectic furniture was equally as tired, scribbled on and scraped into and chipped away at by the many employees that had passed through. She had always imagined that working here would feel like decay, a complete awareness of time passing by as she clocked in and out of the same repetitive shifts-- sweep, steam, shake, serve and the relentlessly animated customer service voice chirping out of your mouth over and over again. Now she has realised that it is stagnation. She was no one here, a cog in a cog of the machine that is the mass corporation of hospitality. Here, time doesn’t exist. The dank, windowless corridors are a reminder of that; the musty, suspended scent in the air even more so. Nothing has moved on here. Perhaps nothing ever will. How long had she been here? Months, years? The rot had seeped into her bones, wearing her down in the aches and pains that she never seemed quite able to shake. 

She pushed open the door into the staff locker room and the motion sensor lights winked on, their trademark electric buzz whirring to animation. The back right one had been out as long as she could remember, a pool of gloom settling on the grimy floors. Once, she believed they had been white, now a murky shade of grey that melted as one into the dark of the lowlight. She had always imagined stepping into that corner, slipping away into nothingness to meld with the building too. Tentatively, one foot was pressed in, a game of make-believe in which half of her believed (hoped) that she really would manage to stumble out of existence and, by proxy, this shift. She would become one with the gloom, a pair of ever watchful eyes in the corner of the locker room. 

She slung her bag into an empty locker, pulled her lanyard over her head and positioned it so that her name stood out proudly to customers. As management expected, of course. She would rather twist it around and let people forget that she existed at all. She smoothed her uniform, erasing every crinkle of black fabric into one smooth, unvarying sheet. 

Then back down the stairs, key the code in to get into the backroom, another code into the machine, and she was clocked in. Poised. Ready. The corners of her mouth tugged up, her eyes following suit and distorting into a crinkled crescent shape as she plastered a smile on before stepping out onto the floor.