Day 141
The taste of this morning’s espresso is still in my mouth, the empty cup still out there on the garden table. My mind went a long way back when I was enjoying it this morning.
Every now and again, I remember, when M and I first started seeing each other, when I was her boss, and we kept the relationship secret because I wasn’t meant to be “fraternising with the troops,” so, being in charge of tech as well as of a whole troop of translators and abstractors, I created a secret text file that I put in a secret place on the office network that only the two of us could access. This way, we passed messages to each other without anyone else knowing about it. This was in the days before email. Hard to imagine that such times existed. I must still have a printout of that file somewhere, and the file itself must be somewhere on one of the multitude of old hard disks I have sitting in a box (actually in boxes) here in the study. Maybe I’ll find it one of these days. Maybe I’ll look for it one of these days. I always imagine I will have time for such things when I retire, just like I think I’ll have time to go through all the photos in boxes and drawers and trunks we have, knowing full well that such a slack time will probably never arrive.
The thought of the file came to mind because, years after the text file became redundant, after we’d got married, I met L from the US, the bromance I described to you some weeks ago, L, whom along with his wife, M and I met up with in London in April after not having seen them for years. L and I agreed that we’d start Zooming every Friday, and I was convinced that yesterday would be the first such Zoom. I got it wrong, of course, and was sitting at my desk a full 5 minutes before the appointed time – and a full five minutes after it – until I double-checked my DMs and noticed they don’t start until next week. Like I messaged L after that, I read some things too quickly, despite there being a note on my study wall telling me to slow down and read attentively. Right next to the 8 Lessons Of Therapy which I still haven’t amended to the 9 Lessons Of Therapy. That’s how it goes in my life – my mind jumps and skips from one thing to the next because it can’t stay still for very long. That’s not always a bad thing, but it begs the question of what could have been were I focused. To be honest, though, that’s not even a question worth asking.
AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 96
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