Sometimes I don’t like being sensitive to atmospheres. It makes it much more difficult to know what to do.
A few of the bigwigs at work flew over to Borg HQ last week and they’re all back in the country today. They must have been anticipating the questions they'd be asked in the office. What will the collective decide to do with us? What’s our future? What do you know that you’re not allowed to share?
I felt that tension. It swirled around like a maelstrom as one person swept in this morning.
“How was it?”
“Cold.”
He deftly steered the conversation towards the environmental factors, the safe topics: air-conditioned malls that are interconnected with the hotel, the hugeness of everything, the sameness of everything, especially in America, and how the blindfolded traveller could probably find their way around if they had seen even one Stateside metropolis before. There was a ‘day of facts and figures’ of course, but that (and don’t forget, those facts and figures were the reason for the trip) was glossed over like a trivial extra.
I saw another travelling bigwig in the kitchen, while I waited for my porridge to finish in the microwave. There were colleagues there too, conversing in fast-talking French over coffees.
“How was it?” they asked him, switching to English.
“Interesting,” he said, filling a glass with water. I detected the atmosphere changing. Not ‘good’, not ‘okay’ or ‘fine’; not ‘not too bad’ either, just interesting. Then one of the French people said, perceptively:
“I love this English word, ‘interesting’! It means so much!”
He would not be drawn though. Someone else filled in the gap by saying, ‘Well, Americans are interesting,’ and then the bigwig smiled and carried his water back to his office, and that conversation was over.
The trouble is that these kind of atmospheres just multiply. You can’t ask what you want to ask straight out (that would be even more awkward) so you’re left to guess, to speculate, to wonder. Which is also awkward. Talking to others in the dark doesn’t help; in fact it just makes it worse. So what’s left?
Well. Isolation is left. Stewing at your computer, wondering to yourself what it all means. I don’t like an atmosphere sometimes.
Sparkly people have an advantage in these situations, I think. Either they don’t know what they’re sunbursting into, or they do, and they’re really not bothered about disrupting it. Hats off to them if that’s the case.
Meanwhile, the uncertain atmosphere continues. I guess knowing it makes it a bit easier to look out for other people. It seems like a poor second to being a burst of sun through the grey. It isn’t though. And I know that really.
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