There are some days when life is something that seems to happen around you, needing neither by-your-leave nor input. You get up, urinate, caffeinate, work. Cycle with a capital sigh.
I’ve had a week of those days. Is this what it feels like to be a machine?(*) A machine with lunch breaks? I peer out of my mainframe (flat) and wonder.
“A whole week,” I grumble to The Mathematician over supper. “I feel like I’ve done nothing. Or at least not been present for it. Just pages processed, emails read and answered, on and on, automaton.”
“That’s not true,” she says.
I chase an olive around the plate, then look at her for an explanation.
“You’ve had a week of meaningful connections.”
I shrug.
“You told me about them! Have you forgotten?”
I have. Well, not so much forgotten as misplaced. I eat another forkful and think. There were the hours of counselling training on Monday and the great exchanges with my group. Later in the week, I went to a friend and found them overwhelmed. We sat and chatted. And The M herself had her own stuff to work through and share, namely an hour’s inhospitality with French fellow academics(**). I’ve been emotionally alongside folk for much of the week.
“You’re right,” I say, drawing and quartering an egg.
“I know,” she replies. “I thought you’d be used to that by now.”
“Hm.” I tackle the yoke and load it with sauerkraut (echt deutsch). “Weird. Just didn’t feel like it at all.”
“Maybe you were focussing on the wrong things.”
“Could be …”
After eating, we clean up the plates. On the way to the kitchen, I walk past the spot by the front door where a large stack of boxes stood. I’d ordered a parcel and got five — apparently none of the other neighbours were in, the DHL man told me. (Read: I couldn’t be arsed to ring the other doorbells.) But that had led to lovely encounters, too. One neighbour who came to collect shared her love of crochet (The Mathematician’s quite the fan). She’s currently making socks. Another neighbour brought us a box brimming with fragrant quince and invited us to her allotment by the woods to pick apples from their trees.
I set down the plates and make cocoa.
She’s right: my week has been full of connections.
—
(*) No, they don’t have feelings.
(**) On the Path to Professorship. The Germans have a bad system; the French seem iteratively worse.
