Hero

When she gets home she usually takes her cape off first. It goes on the coat stand, right next to my boring black coat. Usually she’ll head to the shower first. She likes her outfit, but tells me often that it’s good to get out of it at the end of the day, put on some track pants and stop being a superhero for a little while.

It doesn’t always work out that way though. She’ll often get call outs in the middle of the night. Sometimes she’ll get a bit testy at me if I’ve forgotten to pick up her dry-cleaning. Apparently it doesn’t do for a superhero to be fighting crime and saving innocents in a dirty pair of tights. But honestly, I can’t be doing everything for her can I.

Tonight feels like it’s going to be a quiet night though. It tends to come in ebbs and flows, and she tells me things seem to be on a down swing. So track pants it is, and a little bit of red wine, it’s Friday after all.

I don’t usually enquire as to how her day was. It puts your own day in a pretty stark perspective when your girlfriend has been saving people and arresting criminals. Spreadsheets, by comparison don’t make too much difference, in the grander scheme of things. So we talk about the news as it rolls away on the TV. She’s a pretty handy cook, but I prefer things cooked the old fashioned way with a flame rather than zapped hot by lasers from her eyes. So I do the cooking tonight.

I often wonder what it must be like to be a superhero, and I must have muttered that out loud. Or maybe mind reading is a power of hers that she hasn’t disclosed to me, I’ve had my suspicions. Either way, she begins to respond to my wonderings, whether they were internal monologue or external dialogue.

I wouldn’t like it apparently, it’s mostly boring she says. A large part of the day is spent flying from one situation to the next. Most of the time it turns out to be a false alarm. Or something that isn’t very serious, cats up trees, that sort of thing. So when there is a superhero moment it almost comes as a shock, the mundane nature of the day lulls her into a false sense of security. So then she worries that she can’t deal with the real work when it comes up.

Of course, then she remembers that she has super powers and of course she can deal with it. But her point, she tells me is that most of the time it’s boring, mundane, it’s just another day like the day that came before it. What she’s really interested in she says, is what normal people do all day. She wants to go to a proper business meeting, she wants to prepare some monthly accounts, or repair people’s fillings. That, she reckons would be just super.