One time this happened...

In the crowded elevator on my lunch break, I pressed the button for Ground Floor, only to find myself face-to-face with a coworker I've been avoiding for a week - our eyes met, then the doors slid open and we both fled separately into the lunchtime chaos.

As I fumble for the door handle at the crowded subway cafe, I'm hit with the overwhelming aroma of yesterday's coffee. I try to subtly jockey closer to the condiment station, desperate for a distraction from the awkward encounter earlier – the coworker who, for some reason, insisted on buying me a latte after a heated team-building exercise.

My feet kept slipping on the rain-damp escalator, and I stumbled into a kid playing with a broken balloon animal near the kiosk. He stared at me, mouth still, as if waiting for his mom to tell him which one of us wasn't following the rules.

Sweat accumulated in neat beads on the vending machine as I leaned in to retrieve a pack of stale gum. I hated mornings in shopping malls – everyone else's early alerting brightness was amplified in me, making it impossible to gauge the time on my wristwatch.

In the fluorescent glow of the food court, I spill soup on my tie for the third time this week. A young girl in sweatpants points, unsure if she should intervene.

As a stranger, you don't usually see the little things about a place, like the way its tiles are unevenly aligned or the flickering fluorescent lights that seem to mock the idea of 'daylight saving'. But I noticed them all when I spent a weekend sleeping on benches here, at this station nobody calls home.