We both sit and smile at our beer glasses for quite a long while.
We are broken from our smiling haze when the KJ approaches our table. His sudden presence, matched with the awkwardness of him out of his performance booth, startles me.
“You’re William?” he says to me.
I look from him, to Martin, and back. “Yes.” It comes out as several broken syllables.
“Great job, boss. That was fun.” He smiles a massive smile, looks to Martin and then back to me as he holds up something he’s been carrying. It’s a large envelope, swollen slightly by its contents. “I was asked to make sure you get this.”
He thrusts the object toward me and I grasp it quickly. It’s stiff and flat and I feel a series of ridges along one edge. He smiles, waves a small salute-like wave from his temple and heads back to the KJ booth.
I flip the envelope over in my hands several times, examining it in the pink shadows, letting my fingers find every edge and seam. Martin leans in.
“What is it?” he says.
I flip it over several times, building the courage to open it. The envelope is white and sealed by a blue string that is wrapped around two cardboard tabs. On the backside, right in the middle is written my name, William Everett, in the same sloppy blue pen I’ve grown to recognize, and possibly, love. I carefully unwrap the blue string and open the tab, looking inside. Martin leans in further, then flicks his eyes to me.
I discover that I’m looking around the room, thinking I’ll find my secret person smiling and watching me, but everyone in the space is caught up in their group or the singing, having a great time. I look back to Martin. He’s half-smiling, still trying to peer into the envelope.
“It’s a notebook,” I whisper as I pull out a spiral notebook with a blue cover and thumb through it. All the pages are blank. The lines on each page are gray with blue margins, and the book is smaller than a standard sheet of paper, so it feels personal, not like I’m about to take biology notes. I open to the first few pages and flip through them carefully, looking for a message or something. There’s nothing.
“What does it say?” Martin is asking, eyes searching through the page I’m flipping.
“Nothing. It’s blank.” I hold a page up to the pink light, thinking maybe there’s a secret message, but it’s blank in every light.
Martin sits back. “What do you think it’s for?”
I don’t know. I look around the room again. Oddly, my tripping-friend, the one with the strong hand on my shoulder, makes eye contact with me across the room, smiles, raises his glass at me, and then leans back into his buddies and their vivacious conversation. I look back to the notebook.
I’m not sure what to make of it.
“I guess I’ll have to wait,” I say. I’m not sure what my tone indicates, but I feel strangely at peace with all this waiting. Normally, I’m a nervous wreck, over-thinking every detail, but one thing I’ve learned from my secret person is that I’m having a great time just enjoying the moment. This one included.
And so I hold my notebook, this strange, blank gift and cherish the possibilities and the sweetness of this unknown thing from my unknown person in this very public place as my best friend smiles at me from across the table. I hold it close and take this moment in. This pink and blue, and slightly off-pitch, moment.
The day has been going along pretty normally, just a regular day of work. Well, mostly. At Pratney and Jarrow, the engineering team works in the main complex that overlooks the green belt and gardens. It’s a beautiful view with lush grass, meandering trails and an artificial babbling brook that most of us never see because we become so engrossed in the bluelight of our screens with their CAD drawings and spreadsheets.
Today, I happen to notice. I’m not sure why I do, but the vivid reds and oranges of the changing leaves are transportingas I get to my office, and it never leaves my peripheral vision. The day is simply beautiful, and the blue sky keeps singing to me.
Of course, my screen tries to steal the majority of my focus today. We’re overseeing the final stages of the development of our newest redesign of the lift cylinders and mast chains for a major forklift manufacturer. My job has been to review the test data coming back from the specs shop and flag any anomalies. Glamorous work, I know. But I love it. There’s something about correlating the data with the specs and tightening any fluctuation. Besides, it allows me to work with the team sometimes, but also to retreat into my office to just work and think and get to it. It’s very much my style. If someone outside of work ever asks what I do, I usually just say I’m in mechanical engineering, and then the conversation ends and I don’t have to get into specifics about forklift pneumatics.
This morning, I have successfully avoided the video meeting in the conference room and am soaking in the garden view when my phone pings. It’s a GoodWord.
I debate whether or not to read the message during working hours, like it might be a betrayal of my job, or maybe consume my focus in a way that causes problems. Problems like not getting the data analyzed and back to the specs department by the end of the day.
Turns out, I have no self discipline and open the app. So now, my brain is split between the beautiful speckled sunlight in the garden, the message from my secret person, and the scrolling spreadsheet in front of me. I’m making the best of it, though. I still think I can meet my deadline.
I’m wrong. My deadline is going to be a bust today. The message keeps echoing in my head and I can’t generate another coherent line of thought.
Here’s the message in a nutshell: Start a journal. Use the notebook I received at the Palm Frond to write some personal thoughts and share my experience with my secret person. I was given a dead-drop where I will leave the notebook and then my secret person will write back. It’s like having an old-fashioned pen pal, with a little mystery sprinkled in. I’m not sure what I think yet.
I do get the distinct feeling that my secret person is more interested in me having a great adventure, than in spying or secretly watching me from the shadows. For example, my first journal “assignment” is to share my karaoke experience. I’ve been making assumptions that everywhere I go, my secret person might be lurking in the shadows and watching me, but I don’t believe that anymore. Whatever the goal, the truest part of my secret person’s motivation is for me to enjoy myself and have fun. So I’m good with that. I’m also hoping that since this is technically two-way communication, however slow it might be, I can learn something about my secret person too! I like that idea. A lot.
So, all I can think about is getting home and writing to my secret person. Which is not helping my deadline.
By the end of the day, I’ve drafted and erased and rewritten my journal entry in my head, and only analyzed about a third of the data I intended. I’m still mentally drafting my journal entry all the way home, and even after, as I kick off my shoes. I’ve written so much in my mind, that when I actually sit down with a real pen and my notebook, I’m wordless. I just stare at the blank page, not knowing where to start. Imaginary words roll out of me so profoundly that taking pen to paper seems futile.
After staring at the blank page, flipping the pen in my hand, I suddenly realize my holdup: In my imagination-drafting, I’ve become someone else. I keep telling my story with so muchenergy and detail and bravado, that it’s a story about someone else, like I’m trying to impress my secret person with great storytelling, and possibly, even greater characters. I also begin to realize that I find the alternative scary; what if my story is boring or stupid or embarrassing? Like, my secret person might read my most heartfelt words and then throw the journal in the nearest dumpster, running for the safety of the nearest next try. I stare at my pen, battling which version of me to put on paper, grieving that there’s two to choose from.
