Table for two

She is the most organized person I know. If you don’t know her very well, you see a calm happy girl, with a clean house, everything has its place. At work, she cannot focus if her desk is messy, even if there is almost nothing on it. One day I visited her and let me tell you that if she quits her job today, she could leave without a box, only carrying her purse. There is nothing there that indicates the desk as hers.

She hates ironing, but doesn’t leave her house in crumpled clothes. She painfully irons shirts and skirts like she was torturing herself. She feels the same when she mops the floor. Every wrinkle in the fabric irritates her as much as the hair that sticks in the mop or camouflages in the patterned tiled floor. She told me how frustrated she gets due to her obsession with getting things in that perfect way, making her do the job over and over, almost as music chorus that she hates. The joke is on her.

There is another thing: she hates noises. And loud people. When at work, walking on the streets, doing anything, she does not understand why people must talk so loud and at the same time. This environment distracts her in a way that she loses track of things and her brain must put everything back in order, every item in its cell, as a big invisible life spreadsheet. The noises clutter the cells and she finds herself in an estate of perplexity that leaves her with a distant look in her eyes, focused in some imaginary view. She is fixing the cells between lines again.

You cannot see her like this if you don’t know her deeply. We’ve been friends for twenty years now and the way she walks and talks, this infinite time she spends with others creates a false impression of who she really is. The truth is that she cannot decide a single thing about herself. What she wants, where to go, her desires and dreams. She is Chaos. And when she realizes it, she never gets that lost look, but the opposite: she focus on everything at the same time, almost excluding that depth dimension responsible for photography perspective.

She told me she is doing psychoanalysis. I didn’t see that coming and she continued, saying how she told her whole life in the first session, as she was telling someone else’s story. She said to the psychoanalyst she wasn’t looking for practical solutions, a huge lie that make me laugh out loud and irritated her.

The calmest, organized and happiest girl I’ve ever met is a big mess as if a labyrinth with a short Ariadne’s thread. Or as when you have a hangover and say that old I will stop drinking line. Till the next hangover. Or that stupid guy she met, that she thought was a good one, but turned out to be even worse than the one before. He could not even speak English correctly. And the irony comes again, as she is a sadist to the people who make grammar errors and misses the conjugation of verbs. English is easy, she says. But only for those who got proper education.

She cannot stand people with laziness of thinking and language, she feels like she could shoot someone like that, as the avenger of intelligence and productivity. She is the best person I know. She is the person I hate most today.

*Work in progress. Send me your thoughts about it: tatireuter@gmail.com :)