Toast and the Bathroom

With my face pressed into the bathroom floor I was reminded of the importance of my abandoned beliefs in housekeeping. The defense I offered myself that I had worked 60 hours this week just didn't seem to satisfy me like it should have, as I attempted to contemplate the layers of dust on the baseboards and the hair dye I had obviously missed on the bottom of the sink, accompanied clearly by an unforgivably wide streak of toothpaste.
It was going to be the mother of all orgasms. Right there on the floor of our decidedly dirty bathroom. Until a child wandered up to the bedroom door asking for toast.
Toast.
I may have sunk my teeth into Alpha's shoulder and muttered something about wanting to be one of those species that eat their young.
Maybe.
But it was still good. And hot. And kind of gross because really, I do need to clean the bathroom. But maybe that was part of the appeal and it fed the part of me that thrives on humiliation. Just a little bit.

I found a Space...

I haven't put in this many hours since I was 16, and I've never drowned in responsibility like I am now.
It's kicking my ass. I almost quit, but then I thought about what would happen to the people. Our wonderful, overworked staff who trickle in every morning and work until they can't see straight. What happens to them if people like me quit? The business sinks and they don't have a job to drag themselves to in the morning.
And so I get up and go back for more.
But I still want to quit. I miss my babies. I miss life.

One of the interesting an annoying things about being a manager is that everyone thinks that they know how it should be done. There is an often surprising lack of appreciation for being provided with solutions an a path to follow. It's not as easy as it sounds to choose and provide those paths in an industry that forges its own trails as it goes.

My job has so many facets, sometimes it makes me feel ill...

I am responsible for vaults and the products stored in them. I have had a love/hate relationship with the vaults. The first time I had to open one, it took me an hour. Those vaults were the first thing in the facility to bring me to tears.
In my life, I have found that one forms relationships with places. Mostly those magical outside places that resonate with the soul in some way.
The vaults are old, they have a somewhat unknown history, and before me, they had a keeper. It is likely that they have had multiple keepers in their quiet years of watching over the things which people deem to be of importance, with their limited access and concrete ceilings behind two foot thick doors.
I am the next keeper of the vaults. At the moment, I am one of only a few people who can even access them, and I am the only one working in them. They are quiet in the constant insanity of desperate activity which surrounds them.
These old vaults have a soul of their own, and had many keepers before me. They are silent in their purpose, watching over that which they have been entrusted to guard.
I had a moment yesterday, the kind of moment I have only ever experienced in magical wooded places devoid of people. In that moment, I found a space here where I belonged. That sounds small, but I have never escaped the feeling of not belonging in this not so new place we moved to a year ago.

The vaults watch, silent guardians of valuable things. I became their keeper in more than title alone, and those cold concrete walls with their steel doors and complicated combinations held me in their silence for a moment as their own. For the vaults to be mine, I had to become theirs, like a promise to a place, a small moment in space.
As things settle and staffing becomes less of an issue, and the vaults fill to capacity, I will spend a rising amount of time in them. I'm looking forward to it, that place where I fit. I miss the cage that one feels so strongly when one has time to immerse themselves in M/s. We are still what we have always been, and always will be. But our everything is directed at and given to the world right now.
In a way, those vaults are becoming a safe place for me in the insanity. I will be their keeper and they will hold my secrets, absorbing the quiet, serious conversations within their walls, watching those in charge as we whisper out our issues and fight through the tears that exist because it is all ultimately about people, and people feel and bleed, cry and need, people are people.

While making a somewhat extensive appearance in my job description, the vaults are only a facet of what I do. Yet somehow, in some small moment, I found my place and an unwritten title which fits me. I am, and will indefinitely remain, the keeper of the vaults.
Vaults are like M/s. They are a space of their own, almost outside of time. Safe, quiet to the depths of their soul. A space inside the storm.