Temi was writing laundry detergent copy when she opened Twitter.
Five minutes.
That was all she wanted.
She had been staring at the same sentence for too long, and everything she wrote was beginning to sound like tough on stains, gentle on clothes.
At the top of her timeline was a thread about a doctor.
Dr. Seun Williams.
Thirty-one years old.
Resident doctor.
He had worked for seventy-two hours.
Temi frowned and opened the thread.
Seventy-two hours?
She read further.
He had gone into the call room to rest.
He didn't wake up.
Temi stopped scrolling.
For a moment, she just stared at the screen.
Then she continued.
Doctors were replying to the thread. Nurses too. People were sharing stories about impossible shifts, hospitals with too few staff, months of unpaid salaries and people working until their bodies simply refused to continue.
One post made her stop.
We keep the system alive by giving it more of ourselves than it has any right to take.
Temi read it again.
Then she placed her phone face down.
The detergent copy was still open on her laptop.
She tried to continue.
Nothing came.
Her mind went instead to Hartfield.
Eleven hours of her weekend.
Team effort.
The 10k missing from her salary.
Mr. Biodun's late-night voice notes.
The work that kept expanding because she kept finding a way to do it.
Temi immediately felt uncomfortable with the comparison.
Abeg.
A man had died.
This was not the same thing.
She wasn't working seventy-two-hour hospital shifts. Nobody's life depended on whether she finished a campaign deck. Her job was stressful, yes, but she went home every day.
Still, the sentence wouldn't leave her.
Not the death.
The logic behind it.
Take the people who care.
Ask for more.
When they give it, ask for more again.
Call it commitment.
Call it growth.
Call it opportunity.
Temi looked around the office.
Everybody was working.
Nothing had changed.
Yet something about what she had just read sat heavily with her.
She opened a blank document.
For a while, she didn't type anything.
Then:
There are systems that survive because good people are afraid to stop caring.
Temi read the sentence.
It sounded dramatic.
She deleted it.
Tried again.
Deleted that too.
After ten minutes, she gave up and saved the almost-empty document.
draft_something.docx
Then she returned to the detergent copy.
By the end of the day, she had forgotten about the document.
For the next three weeks, she didn't open it once.
But she didn't delete it either.