‘Why don’t you come sit and have a drink?’ asked my coworker.
We had finished our working hours and he was sitting at the bar.
‘No, I will go home. I am tired’.
I didn’t say it as firmly as I maybe would have wanted to say.
I was just really tired.
I went to the toilet instead.
‘Ok, I will have a tea’.
I told my co-worker, when I came back from the toilet.
I was standing next to him.
My bag in my hands.
‘I just had a long day’, I said to him.
‘Don’t we all?’, he replied.
‘I was writing before coming to work’, I told him.
‘Yes, but when you are here, you are here’, he said with a firm tone.
I kept quiet for just a short time.
‘He was so right’.
I was thinking.
Also it was something I could have said myself.
Maybe I was just ‘testing’, if I could trust him.
‘I had some personal news to process today’, I said, ‘that made me tired’.
‘But you know, you are a masseuse and you tell your clients to relax at the end of the day’, he said.
‘You should relax yourself also’.
‘Was I not relaxing?’
It wasn’t that he was confusing me, but he was making me aware of why I was sitting there.
‘Well, I am just not used to staying after work’.
‘I mean, I have been working in a massage salon and office for about 1,5 years’.
‘After finish working you don’t stay’.
‘You just go home’.
‘And before working as a masseuse, before Corona, I was working at Starbucks’.
I stopped talking, just to take a breath.
‘I never had the urge to stay, or wanted to stay’.
‘Especially working at Starbucks’.
‘You just want to go home when you finish your shift’.
‘It’s just not in my system to stay after working and relax at a bar’.
‘I mean in the massage salon there isn’t even a bar’.
‘I never had the opportunity to stay’.
‘Let me say it like this’.
‘Do you want another drink, or maybe something else?’ He asked me.
I had finished my tea.
He was pointing at his glass.
I couldn’t say what was in it.
However, I could smell the alcohol.
‘No alcohol, for me’, I said to him.
‘My hormones are going a bit up and down lately and sugar and alcohol aren’t really helping’.
He kept quiet this time.
‘Ok, I will have the same as last week’, I responded.
It was the bottle with the number, but I could never pronounce it properly.
So I just said the number instead.
‘With some ice, please’, I added fast.
Although I was taking the alcohol to relax, my hormones shouldn’t suffer more than needed.
Ice would do the trick.
‘I write about love’ I told him.
‘Are you in a relationship?’ I asked him.
‘I am single’, he said.
‘I can ‘get’ what I want’, he continued.
‘I am good with my ex, but I just can’t leave and go spend a long time away’.
‘I have my children and my responsibilities’.
He stopped talking.
‘Is it perhaps that you are looking for a relationship with someone that has the ‘same kind’ of baggage?’
‘Or has been through something similar in life?’
I asked him.
‘I had a date just the other day’, I told him.
‘He was mid thirties, like myself and he said that he couldn’t date anyone that is much younger, because younger people have a different mindset’.
I don’t know if this means that they haven’t been through something large or ‘difficult’, that you perhaps are looking for.
That you perhaps feel less lonely if you could find someone that has also been through something large like yourself?
That’s a question.
‘I can understand’, I continued, ‘that perhaps the responsibilities of having children, perhaps a divorce make you guess if a younger person perhaps is as serious as you’.
‘Would you give up your stability, if you wouldn’t know for sure that this other person has experienced kind of the same?’
So it would give you a sense of trust?’
I asked him.
I was thinking.
Is that really what it takes to get a relationship?
That sense of trust.
Is that the feeling we need?
‘If I look at myself, I continued the conversation, I am 37 and I still have a chance of getting children’.
‘I know for men it’s different, doesn’t matter the age, you can always get children’.
‘Well, but everyone deserves a change’, he interrupted me.
I was thinking about Christmas.
A post I had written on Instagram.
‘This year I was going to give a chance to someone’.
At least that is the wish I had put out.
Maybe it just starts with that he deserves a change?
But how would I know?
I was just wondering.