I was working beside a colleague this week. I came in from a train ride trying to calculate the golden ratio without the help of google because I had forgotten my phone at home and didn't have enough time to goback. He starts throwing out numbers that include both the right answer and the wrong, but I already have it worked out that it has be between 1 and 2. Without google, neither of us come up with the magic number (it's 1.6), but we both babble on about different aspects of it. I am struck with how dumb it is that I try and remember Fibernacci's sequence when a two digit number is all I need to take home. He's trying to find an image that shows that each adjacent segment has one shared length, but the other has to be smaller in order to form the spiral that we both know as the classic example. We both admire not only the beauty of the concept, but how the geometric certainty plays out in natural life. I find this remarkable, and for one moment feel akin. This is not something that has happened before.
We could not be more opposite. He tells me about WW trench smells in forests and using the decay to attract deer while he hunts. I am philosophically vegetarian. He was recently against including a statement about equity in our department rules unless it was "actionable" but doesn't see that his stance only makes the gender divide larger. He wears button down dress shirts and pants and is usually clean shaven. I wear yoga pants and runners, am lumpy, and usually wear my hair up in a ponytail. He lives in a two story modern apartment downtown. I live in the suburbs in a cluttered rundown bungalow on a street I love filled with art I love surrounded by neighbours I love. He loves Archer and mixing drinks and talks a lot about death. I love Martha Stewart and drinking red wine and being disorganized and think a lot about suffering and am exhausted by death.
I believe he has a kickass surgery girlfriend who works elsewhere (is her fellowship over? I haven't seen her for years. Are they still together?), and I am understood as asexual, especially during Covid restrictions, in our department of mostly male physicians, surrounded by younger women and being of that middle age group of women who are largely invisible. I hate his father, a former bad mentor, and he would make my daughter cry in a heartbeat. But in that moment, I look back and see the broad strokes of attraction.
He's in his late 40s too, grey haired and a little more thick than trim, but he's tall enough, has a nice enough voice, great hands, and is smart. Standing there, he looked strong and manly. He had good eye contact. He works hard enough. But he is probably not nice enough. He could eviscerate me with his words faster than he could clean a deer. I don't know if he could listen. I know I tried to make a joke about the golden ratio, but he didn't laugh.
But what if he didn't laugh because I scared him? What if he left without saying goodbye because he was single and abstinent and feeling the same thing?
"I never noticed before, but she's smart enough. Attractive enough. She looks confident and soft and alluring enough. Like I could put my arm around her waist and feel solid curves. Like she could laugh at my jokes if I was funny enough. She's intense. She's feisty. I could like her."
Within the knowledge of being who we are, diametrically opposed, and certainly if he is attached, it's fantasy; still, whether he is single or not, I'd have another conversation about the golden ratio and geometry's beauty, and nature's tessellations again.
If he was single and listen and hiding a big heart behind a gruff exterior, I wouldn't throw him out of bed either.
No comments:
Post a Comment