Buy and sell.

We had cancelled another meeting, and with the freshly neutered day I walked into Brighton to meet Woman from her dungeon of work.

The two of us were ten jovial minutes from home, and just walking into the gigantic Hove Tesco, when management called me on the phone.

“Pick up a basket now,” I told Woman.

Management laughed through the speaker.

We sauntered through the vegetable aisle as management talked about the release of the new album. Woman picked up a cauliflower and looked at me with her eyebrows raised. I nodded.

I jabbed an excited finger at the courgettes. Woman scrunched up her face. 
 

On the way here we had passed a man talking loudly on his phone.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s a difficult one to challenge,” he said into his hand.

Woman and I walked a few steps in the night, then talked without looking at each other.

“It is,” she said.

“It’s a very difficult one to challenge,” I said.

“It’s true. It can’t be denied.”

“I know.”

And then there I was, not ten minutes later, hanging out beside the vine-ripened tomatoes and loudly talking lead times and effective project management and revenue streams into the ears of shelf-stackers and mothers wearing slip-on shoes.

I walked casually and mulled the Philadelphia while management chatted about things that would happen, and what my part to play would be and why they would be good. Since these things were first mentioned, maybe a week or two before, I’d discovered a little burst of enthusiasm in myself which was helping things fall out of me here and there that might be of use. I had, in fact, been working.

But now management talked of opportunities and of plans and of reality. And of history. And of potential. These are things that I have faced up to before and found no benefit in. Maybe they excite some people—but not me. The last time I started to touch on those things and what they might mean, I developed a chronic pain condition.

So the floodlights shone on the minced meat and I picked some up, as Woman and I had decided to have bun-less burgers for tea. I make very good burgers. It’s something I make well without really thinking about it. I felt good about making dinner.

I told management that I’d been working hard on creative stuff and that I would send her what I’d done.

I felt empty when I hung up. I figured that from here on in I would be forced to open up a little more than I’m comfortable with. Sometimes I get caught in strange little loops of solitary habit that only get shown as the waste-of-time/road-to-absolute-misery they are when somebody asks me about what I’ve been up to, and I have to turn up my palms and show them. Suddenly I’m going to have to open the box of mystery and show off what I’ve been hiding in there. And now that that’s about to happen, I don’t understand how I got here. I don’t understand why there’s a box. I don’t understand why I’m in this room. Stop looking at me like that. I don’t know why you’re treating me this way. It’s just a box. It’s just a few pieces of paper. I don’t know what they mean. Please don’t make me scream. Not here in the middle of Tesco. I just wanted the burgers. I just wanted to walk Woman home. She’s buying mayonnaise and rainbow peppercorns. How did things end up like this?

The reason the meeting was cancelled was sickness. That’s a good one. I'll have to use that.