Olly 

I came home last night thinking about how many people you meet in a lifetime. Mine being relatively a short one so far, it’s amazing the amount of people I have encountered, spoken with, exchanged longing glances with, made friends with, known as friendly acquaintances, co-workers, fellow students, teachers, doctors, bosses, coffee-shop owners etc. If you were to count how many people you interact with in a day, you’d be surprised how popular you are (depending on the day of course, I’m not counting the days you don’t get out of your crumby bed except to sludge your way to your fridge for more Netflix worthy snackage). But what really got me thinking was Olly.

There is a woman that I work with who — let’s call her Liz — I found out last night after many months of wondering and guessing, is 46. She is an all-around puzzling person, which only adds to her extreme attractiveness. I don’t say attractiveness because she is handsome or delicately beautiful, but somehow she has the ability to contain within her person the best of the two sexes. I would describe the way she carries herself as mannish, but that wouldn’t be right, it’s more along the lines of how a young tomboyish girl would carry herself, which makes sense since I know she is the only sister within a family of nine brothers (a very Irish Catholic family, no birthcontrol). Yet in contrast with her mannerisms, her skin is bright and soft, and she always smells so clean; she emanates the smell of fresh shampooed hair, and that will be after an eight hour shift in the hot, smelly, greasy kitchen. She has bright blue eyes and an even brighter personality. For one thing, Liz is loud, and outspoken, and loves to gossip and stir the pot at work. It’s her main pleasure in life to involve herself within all the romantic goings-on: who’s dating who? Who’s dumping who? Who’s not dating but should be dating? Liz is at the epicentre of it all. Last night, she told me she started a rumour that my ex and another quite attractive co-worker were dating. If I still wanted to be with my ex, I’m sure it would have bothered me, but it just made me laugh.

In fact, Liz was the impetus behind me and my ex getting together. She was the one who told him that I had a crush on him, she was the one who pushed him to ask me to get a drink, she was the one who coached both of us through the first awkward week of “do they like me as much as I like them?” When we broke up, she didn’t speak to me for a week.

It’s quite fitting then to say that Liz has had an interesting romantic life. She told me that when she was nineteen, she was engaged to be married to her high school sweetheart, and about four days before the wedding, he got hit by a drunk driver on one of the busiest streets in the city. Since then she has never been able to think of marrying again. Even so she has Olly. Olly has been her boyfriend (or man-friend) for the last nine years or so and although they live separately they spend a lot of time together. When Liz first started mentioned him, she told me the main reason she liked him was because he hated everyone except for her. She said he was surly, angry, and anti-social. For some reason that didn’t surprise me. Then she began to tell me about Olly’s unique job that, being a wanna-be journalist, piqued my interest. Liz told me that Olly was a researcher for news companies; she told me that during the last Olympics, he travelled over to Russia to get the scoop from the horses mouths. He was apparently a freelance news researcher who sold his stories to people, but sometimes he would work on contract with big companies. I had no idea that such a position even existed in the world and wondered how on earth a person could get into something like that, and by a person I meant this person. She told me that Olly was perfect for the job because sometimes these things would get dangerous, or he would have to live in obscure and strange places for long periods of time, which not many people could handle, but Olly could.

During the Olympics, Olly was away from home for over a month, and Liz would come to work and tell me how she was counting the days until he came back. I would laugh and imagine how sweet their reunion would be until she would say something like “When I see him I’m gonna hit him so hard.” I smiled and imagined it would look like the reunion of two happy bears. It made me happy to know that Liz was able to find the love that was right for her, she didn’t need to be married, she didn’t even need to live with a man, she just needed a partner.

Then last night, a few of us girls went out for beers after work. I of course got a lot more piss-drunk than I ever meant to, and started rambling on about this boy and that guy and the conversation lead to relationships. Liz mentioned that she had known Olly for the last twenty years, which didn’t register right away, but I specifically remembered her saying that she had known him for only nine years. This was a fairly unremarkable detail at the time, but in hindsight I do remember trying to do the math, because she told me she was 46, and that she met Olly when she was 24, and it was then that I knew I was drunk when I had to do a mathematical equation to prove to myself that that was longer than nine years. I let that drop and we went on to talking about other things, our passions and our hopes and dreams and all the things you believe when you’re floating on a beer cloud. Then I realized, through Liz I had an opportunity to meet a person who could help me out with my journalistic dreams! It was perfect, he had all this experience getting information out of people, and I wanted to know how to do that. I wanted to know how to get a scoop, and how to get down and dirty, get my Babe Bennett on.

So I asked Liz if there was any way that I could meet Olly and ask him for advice, from one type of journalist to another. Then I saw it in her eyes. She looked at me and slightly receded into her chair, and though her lips smiled her eyes grew wide and a bit shifty, and worried she said “Yeah, you know the thing about Olly is…that he hates everyone and really doesn’t talk to me about his work. I never ask him, because it’s so top secret this stuff. He has a lot of power with these big news stations, they really are at his mercy, because if they don’t deal with him than he can just say no to CNN and go straight to MSNBC”. Her grin widened and she looked around proud and pleased as she voiced the two biggest news stations in the world. That’s when I knew that Olly wasn’t real. I couldn’t meet Olly not because he wouldn’t meet me, but because Olly doesn’t exist.

It was less the circumstancial unbelievability of her story, it was the look in her eyes, like a fox caught in a trap, that told me that it was all a crock. I looked around at the other girls to see if they had caught it too, but I was alone in my realization. I just looked at her and smiled, nodded my head, and changed the subject. As I walked home that night I realized that though I had been working with Liz for almost a year now, I didn’t know Liz at all. I knew she embellished here and there and I knew sometimes she lied, but I didn’t know how alone she felt. There was a brief moment where I looked at her face and the constructed reality of Olly fell from it like an imploding building.

And I let her build him back up from the dust that he is. I never told anyone my thoughts about Olly, because just like Liz, I’d rather live in the fantasy.