Behind her back they called her Secretary of the Trivial, and she sensed that they knew she knew. What they didn't know was that she didn't mind.
It was always the trivial that triggered the big issues. A word, a gesture, a look, and political relations could be ruined or saved. The current President's first summit had given an impressive example for that.
It was always the trivial that ruined human relationships, stupid things like not putting the lid back on the tube of the toothpaste or chewing with an open mouth. Big issues were talked through, and people looked for a solution. The little things were swallowed, no one wanted to make a fuss over them, and one day the dam broke and all was lost, there were too many things to fix, too many trivial things no one really thought about.
Of course she knew that her father had not started drinking because her mother had never closed the toothpaste-tube, and she knew her mother had not cried her eyes out every night after dinner, when her father had once again shut himself away with his bottle of whisky, because he had not closed his mouth while eating. But that had been what they fought about in the end, that had been what had made their marriage break. The trivial things.
Her mother had left him, and they had gone to live with her grandmother, in an ancient house where nothing matched and nobody knew what the others were supposed to do. More than once she had gone to sleep with an empty stomach because both her mother and grandmother had simply forgotten to cook. After all, cooking was such a trivial thing!
On the night of her thirteenth birthday, which had of course been forgotten, she had sat on the edge of her uncomfortable bed, in her small, dark, ugly bedroom, and she had vowed that whatever she did, she would always pay the utmost attention to the little things. She would always try and bring a little more beauty into the world, she thought as she looked at the peeling wallpapers.
Because beauty and order were the most important trivial things in the world.