Today started with chaos. My computer was doing weird things again, and Fruitloop asked me if I had the good computer or the bad one. Honestly, I didn’t even know what happened, but finally it worked, so it was okay. I was really tired. Like really really tired. I had a huge weekend and almost…
Coming back home after four months away felt unreal. The second I walked into my room at my parents’ house in Alsace, I finally breathed properly again. Everything smelled familiar, even if the room itself looked like a storage war zone because I had dumped half my apartment into it. Between unpacking, reorganizing everything, and…
Some weekends arrive quietly and peacefully. Mine arrived carrying a flea market, a wedding anniversary, Mother’s Day, school projects, birthday surprises, and one tragically shattered ceramic grater. Janita — or Fruitloop, as I like to call her — started the conversation by asking whether I was excited about my birthday. Excited might have been too…
I knew Thursday was already becoming dramatic before I had even left my bed. The moment I opened my eyes and saw the time — six fifty — my heart nearly stopped. Not because the world was ending, but because I had missed Lunch with the Mayor and Fruitloop again. For two weeks in a…
Yesterday, Janita had rain all day. The real kind of rain. The kind that settles in for hours and makes the whole world feel grey and wet and slightly tired. Her father had measured fifty millimetres in the garden and she repeated the number twice, laughing a little at how serious it sounded. By morning…
Manfred I learned very early in life to minimize input and maximize output. Other children may have mistaken this for laziness, but I would call it strategy, and The Mayor, asking the questions, seemed to understand that childhood games were never just games. They were early laboratories for power, efficiency, and plausible deniability. Football was…
When Ritesh appeared on the screen, the first thing was not really the subject of the meeting. It was darkness. The Mayor joked with him, asking if his wife was planning some romantic evening with candles, but Ritesh explained it was not romance. It was a power cut. He was in his native place, not…
I found this conversation more difficult than I expected. Part of it was the language, of course. When I speak English, I can say what I mean, but sometimes I need time. I search for the right word. I start a sentence, then I stop, then I try again. Some topics are easy because they…
Monday, eight o’clock in the morning, and the day was already gone. Finished. That is what I said to The Mayor when we started our weekly meeting. Monday was there, yes, but in my head it was already running away from me. The week had begun, the work was waiting, the normal things were standing…
I heard the song on the radio on my way to go grocery shopping. Not a dramatic moment. No thunder. No cinematic lighting. Just me, the car, the road, and the ordinary little mission of buying whatever needed buying. Bread, milk, sensible things. The kind of things that do not usually rearrange your thinking. And…
