Uncharted Territory

Cristina and I had a weird conversation late last week.  Well, we tried to have that conversation anyway.

I’ve known her for 17 years.  We’ve had all kinds of conversations through the years, some riddled with nothing but small talk, some with a little more depth than, “Hey, how was your weekend?”, and a bunch of random conversations falling somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.  Suffice it to say that she and I talk.

This past Thursday, she was stressed.  We had a mandatory meeting we had to be in and I will be the first to admit that this meeting not only sucked, but it was a complete waste of time.  A lot of the meetings at work are like that, useless and unnecessary.  I would have wanted to have gotten out of this meeting, but unless I was sick, dead, or dying, there was no way in hell I was going to get out of it.  She was stuck in countless other meetings that day and she had all kinds of other nonsense to attend to.  I say all of this because aside from a brief conversation that morning, during which she felt the need to remind me of that damn mandatory meeting, we did not talk again that day.

Enter Friday, late afternoon.

She called me into her office and said that she wanted to talk.  Whenever she says this, I never take it seriously because this doesn’t have any kind of hidden meaning.  Cristina wanting to talk means exactly that – she wants to talk.  I’m always looking to take a break from whatever work I’m doing.

She tells me that she was of the impression that I was somehow upset with her on Thursday.  I wasn’t, but somehow, she thought I was.

So, follow me back to Thursday.

Just before 8am on Thursday morning, Cristina called me.  I had already left the office and I knew that I wasn’t going to be there when she arrived.  As she had already known, I leave the office earlier than I used to, so that I can avoid having to greet and otherwise be around certain people in the morning.  I leave the office well before 7am now.  She never gets there before 7:30am.  Our paths no longer cross in the morning like they used to.

Cristina had called me to ask me if I had already left the office, to which I told her that I had.  Apparently, Cristina wanted me to help her bring in some stuff into the office from her truck.  If I’m in the office already, of course, I don’t mind helping her bring things in.  I had essentially reminded her of this, that unless she was willing to wait for me to return, I wasn’t going to be there to help her unload her truck.

She continued with, “Well, I’m not going to wait for you to unload the truck”.

Now, I will admit that when she said that, her voice had a certain tone to it, one that at least to me, sounded like it contained a hint of irritation, with just a dash of frustration.  Still, I was not mad at her and I wasn’t even close to it.

She then goes into reminding me about that damn mandatory meeting.  I told her that I was well aware of said meeting (Kim happened to remind me at about 6:15am earlier in the morning), though I told her that I did not get the e-mail, nor the invite to the meeting that that e-mail was supposed to have contained.  Cristina was convinced that I did receive that e-mail and that there was a strong chance that I had inadvertently deleted it.  Maybe I did?  Maybe I didn’t?  Regardless, it was not worth arguing about.  I just told her that regardless of what happened to that e-mail, I would be present for the meeting, whether this was to occur in person or through virtual means.

Then, suddenly, without warning or explanation, Cristina’s tone returns to what I would consider to be normal and she says, “Well, I wouldn’t be offended if you happened to come back to the office with an unsweetened iced tea”.  Cristina loves her unsweetened iced tea and it is not unusual for me to bring her one after I’ve returned to the office from my travels in the outside world.

I returned to the office well before that 9am mandatory meeting, gave Cristina her iced tea, and found a seat in the conference room.

In the years that we’ve known each other, Cristina and I have never argued with each other.  We just haven’t.  I can’t explain why that is, but I am grateful that we’ve never had any kind of friction between us.

Funny enough, Cristina and I never finished our conversation from Friday.  We tried to, but we didn’t.  As we tried to converse, we were constantly interrupted and we just never resumed our talk.

I do recall the last thing I told her, which I guess will be where we will pick up this conversation the next time we try to talk.

“I have never been mad at you, but I know that if I was ever feeling that way, I would come to you directly and address that situation before it had a chance to ever escalate”. 

Yes, this is how I speak.

I am hopeful that we finish this conversation next week, because for us, it was and is a weird conversation.

We’ve never spoken about us being mad at each other, being that we’ve never been mad at each other in the first place, so to some degree, it is uncharted territory for us.

I don’t know where that conversation will take us, but indeed, I am curious to see where it goes.