Breaking...

Leaning against a lamp post while he waits for a bus, Luke is lost in thought. Around him, the bustle of morning takes place. People are going to work, their clothes presenting a unifiedfront of conservatism to the world. There are few touches of personality. Nobody acknowledges the passing of anybody else. It suits Luke that way. He is lost in a revery, trying to put his finger on what has changed since his conversation with Josie - Josie's conversation with him, he concedes to himself as the dilapidated bus pulled up and the dark waiting hoard swarm for the doors. Luke pushes in behind the last of them, tilting forward from the heels to make sure the door doesn't close on him. An annoyed passenger glares at him silently until he returns to an upright position. Luke doesn't notice.

It's the little things he misses most, he realises in surprise. Waking up in the dark to the sound of her breathing beside him, slow and steady. The way she'd laugh with her whole body, doubled up, clutching his knee, his shoulder, any part of him she could reach, for support. The millions of unthinking ways they had connected each and every day. He'd never even noticed them until she was gone. And now he misses her. She had been his link with the world, the silence of the bus told him. He hadn't heard a voice since she had told him goodbye. There had been no interaction with the world.

With a jolt, he understands. Without Josie, he doesn't exist. He is invisible, just like everyone around him was invisible. 

He steps off the bus at his stop, walking on broken pavement towards the blank-faced building where he spends his work days. A door at ground level swallows the people walking ahead of him. He stops for a moment, an island in the flow of head-down pedestrians, and tilts his head back to look at the building. The windows are coated in grime making it hard to tell where the wall ends and the glass begins. He doesn't want to go into the half light he knows waits for him at his desk. As murky as it is outside, at least there is a chance of sunlight, he thinks as he lingers. 

With a sigh he walks forward again, head down. If it is hard going into this office, it is ten times easier than the one he goes to for his evening job, he tells himself. He hates having to go on to another office when he leaves here. It is too much work for one person to keep up, he knows, but it's better than starving. All the same, the tiredness is deep within him, settling in his bones.