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I step out of the lift on ground floor and for the fifth time in 3 months look around in complete loss and amazement; which street was it again that Ubers can get into? The ground floor lobby has 2 exists and I am directionally challenged. Nothing looks familiar.
I take my chances with the closer exit and walk out into the blinding sunlight dragging my huge site bag on my shoulder. I'm starving, or rather just bored. The cafes around this part of the city are so posh! The restaurants have actually set the lunch tables with wine glasses and rustic-beach ceramic plates. People in suits, handsome, better paid. Nothing like the dingy -almost dodgy- cafes and restaurants around my office where you get a whiff of marijuana with your burrito, people look grubby, unhealthy, overworked & underpaid if not homeless & on benefit. I spot a cool looking cafe. The guy behind the glass cabinet has unkempt almost hippie-like hair. I decide they won't mind my dirty site boots. I get in, join the queue and stare at the enormous menu on the wall; Superfood smoothies: Magic Green, Simply Sunshine, The Good Life, Engine Fuel...
I scroll on my phone while I wait: 5 half-accusatory-half-frantic emails from the architects, 3 gently aggressive ones from contractors, my chat history with the project manager still looks like a feverish monologue & I've just missed the Pepper's Pies samples give away in the Auditorium, damn! Switching from work to life for balance: Family chat group is asleep across 2 continents. I scroll through jokes and mass-forwarded messages for some actual news; pickling season has begun. Mental note to buy pickling vegetables to leave in the back of the fridge to shrivel and haunt me for the next 2 weeks. The no-longer-friends chat group I just open & close to clear the notifications. No new messages in my actual-friends chat group. Everyone's busy. In the age of speed, energy crises and high achieving professionals it's only natural that friends won't find 10 minutes on the odd weekend to give each other a call. It's an unbiased deduction from many factors. & none of them is you, I assure myself. Besides, who gives a fuck?, I delude myself.
In the absence of instagram and complete boredom I open Facebook: A book club next week; I'm on page 54 of 900 & it's NOT GOOD. I can't make friends if I hate their book or don't even finish it. Who makes friends in a book club anyway? Why am I 13 again?
On weekends when I'm not in the office I sit at home and study Science for Engineering. I found it in the library one day. I'm not sure if it's written for high schoolers here or freshmen -either way the image in my mind is of a pimply bored blond teen with pastel coloured highlighters and sticky notes with watermelon borders. I'd give anything to be that kid. I zoom past the basic rules of physics and mechanics and feel like I'm in high school again, the last time in my life where I had it together! or now I think I did. I can almost see my high school books, my solitary writing pad chair in the class, not my bag though, I have no memory of my school bag whatsoever! Occasionally, I run into concepts I know but in words I can't quite see anywhere in time and place. I look them up in a translator and bam! it clicks in; It's like curing dementia, having the whole memory back like a continuous line! I can trust my brain again. I work my way up through the concepts, gradually bursting these pockets of dementia, finding out where it was last that my brain lost the link to curvature, to pseudo-acceleration, to enjoying an equation of motion.
I've made my way to the top of the line. The hippie-like man at the counter looks at me expectantly;
- What can I get you today?
- Can I have a Good Life, please?
He punches some numbers in & swirls away to the blenders. I swipe my credit card & think to myself "If only".
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