Even before you said, “I can’t move their cheese too fast,” I suspected you might be someone who lacks self-awareness. You are on the phone at a café and your voice is too loud.
I am trying to read the news. A sixteen-year-old girl with Asperger’s is angry about adults’ disregard for the environment. She travels by boat.
I think about asking you to stop talking so loudly but instead run through a variety of scenarios. You might be hard of hearing. You might be under a lot of pressure. It is important you keep this client otherwise your business will dissolve. Your husband has cancer and this is a brief moment away from his bedside. All of your friends died in a van accident. You need this money. You are running out of money.
This café charges five dollars for a latté.
You slam your fist on the table to emphasize your point, and I wish you would take up less space.
Grown men are angry at this Swedish girl for loving the planet. Her straightforwardness has touched a nerve. She must be a poster child for the left-leaning liberals. She has braids for goodness sake. Braids!
You have now used the expression “pressure points” four times in the last 15 minutes. You look up from your laptop to glance at a younger man who has just entered the café on an electric unicycle. You don’t seem alarmed by the man ordering an oat milk cappuccino while balancing on a circus apparatus. Adults have confiscated all the toys in this city. Where are the children?
Recently I admitted to a friend that I find it hard to get worked up about the environment when there are homeless people and guns. She said she couldn’t talk about global warming without crying. I told her I felt ashamed. Since then, I have wondered why I never cry thinking about the planet. I don’t even get choked up. In fact, I go days without thinking about greenhouse gases and the increase in tropical storms.
I wonder what you think about climate change. Maybe you are in the business of saving the planet. Your booming voice might have an opinion, and I might ask you about it if you weren’t on the phone. Or, we could beat our chests, walk on our knuckles, steal all the unicycles, and ride off the edge of the world.