First day
“I have a classic late twenties life. Very busy with my job and social outings, I live in a city where I have no family ties. I am overall happy, even if I want to no longer be alone and to feel more things. Like every day of my working week, I go to this large administrative building, as noisy as it is bright, which smells of soup and fries: the canteen.
She is there, between the meal trays and the wooden tables, and I find her very beautiful and playful. She’s a friend of the person I share my office with. I’m not love at first sight, but I want to discover it. We talk about our jobs, we make jokes about our colleagues. Our enthusiasm is mutual. We realize that we work in the same corridor, and that we had never seen each other. In the process, we meet often. And when I don’t see her, I write her little notes. Every time I go to a tobacconist, I buy him a postcard. At the end of an evening with friends, she sends me a message: “see you +++”, it’s not just “see you anymore”. I send him another card in which I enjoin him to “obey the obvious”. She doesn’t answer me right away.
One evening, she suggests that we see each other and talk about these famous facts. Appointment is made at Octopus, a rather dark bar whose walls are covered with tribal paintings. It’s filled with tall bearded guys covered in tattoos, sort of hipsters before their time. It’s not a very romantic place where I would have to offer her roses and champagne. The place allows me to play the side business as usual of our glass, to pretend until the end that nothing is going to happen between us, that we are still suspended in this indefinite space between friendship and love.
But hey, after all the cards I sent her, we say to ourselves that we have to stop pretending. At one point, I offer her my hand and she takes it. The bar is not far from her house, and we kiss in her living room. We spend time together, we like to discover things and people. We have the same repartee, our verbal ping-pongs last for hours, like the time we waste doing nothing on the terrace.
The following summer, we still write letters to each other. I explain to her that I am “very happy” with us, she replies that she still finds it “very strange”, because we work in the same offices. Our relationship is secret at work, and that leads to funny situations. At Easter, we take our holidays at the same time, we come home with the same tan, except that I am telling the truth, that I am coming back from Spain, and she says that she was with her parents, in Lons-le-Saunier (Jura). I think our colleagues fried us.
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