Her Week, My Past?
I should have seen it coming and I suppose a small part of me did. I just didn’t expect her to sneak up from behind me the way she did. Kim happened to stop by the office again today, which I had anticipated. Typically, she would approach me from the front of my cubicle, but today, for whatever the reason, she came up from my right side, which is about as close as one could get to sneaking up from behind me. Also, to my surprise, she brought with her a seemingly newfound positivity, one that I hadn’t seen from her in months, if not years.
Whereas last Saturday, she had complained about some of our coworkers not liking her or remembering that she still existed, today, she was suddenly singing their praises. Out of the blue, she was enjoying all the e-mails that our coworkers had sent her during the week, as if these e-mails were sent to her as part of some sort of unforeseen awakening and random heaping of praise. I don’t know what the content of these e-mails happened to be, but whatever their contents, they were strong enough to make Kim do a sort of 180 and love everyone that she definitively hated last week. She felt that all the praise and attention that she thought she deserved and should have seen over a week earlier was now coming in, as it should have all along.
Strangely, she went on this odd tangent, one that I didn’t see coming, nor did I understand. Even as I write this, I’m still trying to make sense of it all. Kim had randomly told me that she happened to run into Carmen many times this past week. I don’t know if I necessarily needed to know this, but she made it a point to tell me repeatedly that she came in contact with Carmen on more than one occasion last week. Truth be told, it has been a few months since I’ve seen Carmen. What I don’t know is why Kim is telling me about her run-ins with Carmen. They barely know each other. They don’t do the same job and they’re not even on the same side of the office. I barely regard them as acquaintances. For them to have that kind of contact, Kim would have to go out of her way. I don’t know why she would need to go to such lengths, unless their contact had all truly been random and I’m making a bigger deal out of this than it needs to be.
Kim then suggests that maybe sometime next week, I come by her new office so that we can have lunch and maybe while I’m there, I can also stop in on Carmen. Why is Kim suddenly trying to play “matchmaker”? I might be reading this wrong, but I still can’t fathom why she felt compelled to tell me about her week, but yet make so many mentions and references to Carmen. I can very well seek out Carmen on my own, though I’ll admit that I probably haven’t exerted myself as much as I should have to see her. We’ve been trying to schedule a lunch date for going on two years and thus far, it hasn’t materialized. I guess we’re still trying to coordinate schedules.
Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I’m wondering what Kim’s motives are here. It might be nothing. Maybe there’s something there and I’m just not seeing it? Kim doesn’t know that I haven’t seen Carmen in a few months. Or does she?
Being that I don’t anticipate being all that busy next week, maybe I take a trip to Kim’s new office and maybe peek my head into Carmen’s office? I suppose I could make one of my rare social calls during the workday and see how she’s doing. I don’t think I could sneak into that office and make that random appearance. I’d have to tell at least one of them that I’m going to be in the building, so this won’t be the stealthy operation that I would have preferred it to be.
Leave it to Kim to bring Carmen back into my mind. It’s not that I don’t think about Carmen from time to time. I do and I’ll admit that. You don’t just forget someone of Carmen’s caliber, especially after all the years that we’ve known each other and with all the time that we had been especially close to one another. I just would have never thought that it would have been Kim to be the one who would have pressed the issue and forcefully stamped Carmen back into my head.
Kim may have had a wonderful week. It looks like the coming week for me is going to consist of a bit of confusion and the need for me to sort things out somehow.