10/06/2017-12/06/2017

10/06/2017

It has been on my mind for almost a week now. I’ve thought and pondered and contemplated about it to the point of losing sleep. What Viktor said on that phonecall that I unfortunately overheard. Why did it make me feel so uneasy? There are plenty of reasonable explanations for this, and I can list them all. I just wonder, if he does have his alarms on, why did he say what he said? “This is different of course, I don’t need you to peel me off my desk and herd me to the cafeteria.” It could be a joke. a little bit of humor. it probably is. Or maybe a sporadic event. where whomever he was speaking to does fetch him to go eat. see? It could be any number of completely normal things. This I know logically. But something else in my head that refuses to see reason does not. That something is settled upon the possibility that there is untruth, and it keeps reminding me of the sliver of guilt on his face back when I asked him about it. So all I can think to ask is, are the alarms on or not?

It bothered me, this strange possibility of lying. Why would he lie? There is no reason to lie, is there? I tried so hard to reason about this, thinking about it on and off. And no matter how hard I think about it, this is not a big deal. It is not a big issue. So why is there the possibility of a lie?
I am going to ask for his phone. I must check if those alarms were really on.

_

He set them. Every day at 12:30pm for lunch, 4:00pm for a tea break, 8:00pm for dinner. Every day. They were set, but they are all turned off.

12/06/2017

I asked him about it yesterday. The alarms.
I believe that I have moderately good memory and tend to remember things well, but I will try to recount everything for future me’s convenience when retrospectively looking at this.

This was not meant to be a confrontation. I didn’t need nor want that. I wanted some clarity. Some…some reassurance. I’ll admit it, that was all I wanted. It’s why I asked him offhandedly as we watched the telenovela.
“Who were you on the phone with at the dinner with Anna and Henri?”
Peach looked surprised at the question. He’s always looking surprised nowadays. He asked if I overheard him, I said I did. I was looking for him to bother him as I am known to occasionally do. This I said lightheartedly, because it was not meant to be a confrontation. But he didn’t seem to find my offhand remark quite so funny. He laughed weakly, then apologised because it had been his colleague asking if everything was alright. Apparently, this colleague had come in late that day and was surprised to see Peach away, so he called to ask if he was alright. Because of this, I assumed that he was apologizing because even at a dinner between friends, he took a work call. I don’t mind that, I wouldn’t think much about it. And I told him as much. Then I asked about what his colleague said about having to pull him off his desk to eat.

I do not understand why he felt the need to lie to me about something so…inconsequential.

He got this look on his face. I know it well. When his eyebrows rise and his eyelids flutter and his lips set into a hard line. How reassuring.
I was expecting him to say it was a joke, or that it was an occasional occurrence when he would ignore his alarms. There were so many explanations that I thought of, and I had expected to hear any one of them.

And yet Viktor sat there silent.

And then he apologized.

Why would he do that. Why would he do that?

I didn’t speak, and I know that he felt uncomfortable in that silence. And so he did. He told me that he had tried the alarms for a while, and he hated them. Hated how incessantly they rang, hated being pulled from his work by the chime of a phone. He truly despised it, enough to almost toss his phone across the room. But his colleague--this ever-nebulous colleague--was there, and when he explained to him his problem, his colleague offered to fetch him when the time came for his food breaks. He thought this was a good idea. In this way, he would honor his deal with me, to keep eating healthy and not overwork himself. So that’s what he began to do. Lunch, break times and dinner would roll around, his colleague would drag him out the lab, and everything was well. But he began to feel strange guilt when I asked him about eating and the alarms. These are his words. He said that he had “picked a fight” about my constant questions about his eating habits and how late he was out only for me to be “proven right”. Proven right? We were not fighting. We hardly ever fight. What was there to prove? As long as he is well, then I am content. But he admitted to me that he struggled to reign his focus in to the point where he would forego food and sleep for more time with his work. He felt like he was failing somehow.

Fine then. It’s alright. As long as he was eating and taking breaks then I really could care less if he was doing it by alarm or by colleague. The only thing I could think to ask, then, was why he felt the need to lie about it? Why couldn’t he just tell me when I asked?

He just didn't want to admit that he did end up relying on someone to break his focus when he should be fully capable of doing it himself. He compared it to being a child that had to be managed, and ... and I saw how that thought angered him. Regardless, that is the explanation he offered to me. He didn’t tell me until I asked so he felt ashamed about keeping it to himself.

And all of a sudden, I felt oddly tired. Tired of all this, all at once.

So I smiled at him and told him that it was fine. All I really needed to know was that he was eating and resting appropriately. It wasn’t a big deal. And that is true, it was really not such a massive problem that either of us needed to be bothered by it.
“As long as you’re not starving and coming back home looking like you haven't known sleep in years, then there’s no issue to be had.” That made him laugh, and it made me smile. We watched the soap opera, then had some apple pie as a treat. It was not a big deal. All the time I’d spent pondering was needless, and now, everything was fine.

Read the next entry.