My mum always told me that nothing happens without a reason. I sure did want to tell her otherwise, but well…
I work at the office from Mondays to Fridays and luckily, I live very close by. Therefore, I often allow myself to sleep some more minutes. I wake up; take a cold shower, put on the first shirt I find in the closet. The shoes are always tight (an unfortunate fact for my feet's ingrown toenails), my old belt with extra improvised holes still needs a substitute, and so does my wristwatch.
On the way to the office, I used to stop by a café and buy myself a ham-and-cheese sandwich with that one special sauce that only they knew how to make, just to start the day in a good mood. 'Cause everyone deserves to feel minimally okay in the morning. However, one day, I started to find myself without my special sandwich, because someone arrived there before me. Yeah, MY fucking sandwich. So there really wasn't anything that could stop me from pulling my worst shit face on the way to work.
Between one sheet and the other, I buffed furiously, thinking of the son of a bitch that had the audacity to steal my favourite snack from the café. I kept thinking of what I could – and would – do if I caught that rascal on the action, having just handed the money to the clerk in slow motion and in a very cinematographic close to my face as I pushed anyone from out of my way, trying to get to the guy to grab him by his shirt collar and throw him to the streets. I remember having drawn that scene once or twice on the back of an used sheet just to kill some time.
Then I had this other idea of sacrificing twenty minutes of my sleep just to get to the café to grant my beloved "Holy Breakfast" instead of eating that other snack (the one with some rubbery chicken meat with strange white cheese).
The café was VERY crowded at that time of the morning, which always made me hunt for an empty seat to the counter or with some stranger (probably, the worst option, if you ask me). I was all happy, believing that I would finally get my hands on the sandwich I wanted and that I hadn't eaten in the past two weeks, but I found it quite annoying – to say the least – when the clerk told me that the last one had recently been taken. As homicide is illegal in here, I decided to fake a smile and get the roast beef one. Without the patience to eat it standing there or to wait for someone to leave his/her seat by the counter, I thought it would be better if I searched for any table and just shrug it off.
And there went Mr. Gilbert Beilschmidt, a little less pimply than his usual self, asking a random lady (with beautiful chocolate hair) whether there was someone sitting with her. And she kindly smiled at me, telling me that she was by herself. I took the seat quickly without paying much attention to her. She was typing something on her phone when I finally took a better glance at her to study the good-looking lady in front of me to discover that she was actually my boss' new secretary. My friends at the office spoke way too much about her. And… she was also the one I was sending my assignments to. We had never spoken directly; only through e-mails and we just talked about professional things, really. Not bad…
Lies, there WAS something bad about her. So I started to think about what kind of person she could be. What were her tastes, what would she wear outside the office, what would I do if I met her in a party, if she was single, if she was straight, whether she preferred good-looking men or intelligent guys (luckily, I was both, SUCK THAT), Coca Cola or Pepsi, what kind of music she listened to, what kind of sandwich she'd buy. And then I made the mistake to look at which one she was eating at the moment: That blasted special sauce snack.
Whatever will I still had to start a "friendly" conversation with her died there. But the worst thing wasn't even having to watch her eating it agonizingly slowly, but having to hear "how tasty that sauce is" or "how lucky I am to have gotten the last one".
However, the more I wanted to get away from that witch, it looked like she merely spawned wherever I went, with that same "haven't I seen you today already, but you know what, I'm not gonna ask" face.
I still tried to wake up early to get the sandwich, but there she was holding it, on the only free table. We ended up going to the office together since she would always offer me a lift. Not wanting to see her anymore, I insisted on getting my colleagues and friends to hand her my paperwork instead of me doing it personally, but I always found her in the process. More specifically, by the coffee machine, where we took turns to kick it, because that damn machine was always swallowing our pennies. We then started to stick Post-It's on each other's backs; the one with more small paper notes on his or her back was the day's loser. And finally, she'd offer me a lift back to where I lived. I ended up forgetting all those stupid plans that I had sketched on the back of those used sheets. I simply crumpled them into paper balls and threw them on her head.
Two weeks ago, she asked me to go out with her. We finally got to know each other: The name of the secretary was Erzsébet (at least, that's how I remember); said that it was a Hungarian name, that it'd take a very long time to get the pronunciation correctly. It just took me five days, actually. We had dinner in a suspicious-looking Mexican restaurant because of some free paleta ice pops. She ended up getting sick because of the huge amount of pepper she ate there, so I let her spend the night at my place. In the following morning, she apologized for "doing the most hideous things" in my bathroom (I still hope it was only "number two" and the vomit), and told me she'd also be free in the next weekend.
The day before yesterday we went to watch some movies. Ended up getting caught by an intense rain, and then we found ourselves soaking wet and shivering in her house. We had a microwave lasagne for dinner and some wine. The effect of cheap booze kind of erased part of my memory of what happened there, but I do remember "nothing sexy" happened Saturday night. 'Cause that happened yesterday.
Now, I'm sitting on my chair in the office, trying not to make any kind of movement that would make my aching body jolt in pain again, just thinking of how good it was to not have eaten the special sauce sandwich. My mum might be laughing her ass off somewhere back in Germany, just waiting to meet her new daughter in law.