Fine, Thanks
When someone asks how I'm doing, something in me starts calculating.
Not what to say. How much.
The Other Room
I was happiest alone as a boy. I had a bicycle and fields and small forest roads, and I could ride for hours without seeing anyone and feel completely full.
But I also loved being near people. Just not in them.
My mother's kitchen, when relatives came to visit. The adults around the table, the coffee, that particular hum of people being easy with each other. I sat in the other room and listened. Not to the words. To the warmth of it.
At my aunt's summer house, there was a woman who lived nearby and came over to put the world in order. She began almost every thought the same way: there needs to be all kinds — men, women, gays, fat ones, thin ones. Her voice was low and hoarse, like Marlene Dietrich after several weeks of smoking and reconsidering her choices, and she had the most wrinkled face I had ever seen. She wore men's clothes. I could have listened to her for hours.
I was completely happy there.
The First Lesson
At some point the lessons started arriving.
A gym teacher with a moustache walked straight toward me across the sports hall — we'd been fooling around, the way boys do — grabbed me by the ear and said something I don't remember. What I remember is the pain, sharp and immediate, and then the corridor. I was holding my ear. There was blood on my fingers. Nobody came.
My aunt was quieter about it. We were in her kitchen, she was frying potatoes, the kind we ate with ketchup, and I must have said something — voiced an opinion, raised some small conflict — and she told me, in her calm and slightly distant way, that I needed to learn to be more diplomatic. More tolerant.
Nobody ever said it back to her. Nobody told them to also consider me.
So something closed. Not dramatically — the way a door doesn't slam, it just slowly stops opening all the way. I learned to read rooms before entering them. To calculate the cost of a sentence before spending it. To give people the version of me that required the least explanation.
The Meeting
Some time ago, I was invited to a few meetings at work. No clear agenda. My role there was mostly to listen — I don't make decisions in that area. So I sat, and I listened, and I watched, and I said nothing.
Afterward, the CEO mentioned I should participate more. Introduce myself. Say what I do. No question about what I think or how I'm doing — which would have been, ironically, the most accurate thing to ask.
The adrenaline arrived before the thought did.
Something in me went completely still. Not calm — still. The kind of still that happens when a body is deciding between two options and hasn't chosen yet. I said nothing. I listened. I watched her talk.
Later I kept turning it over. Not the feedback — the reaction. I've handled bigger things with less adrenaline. Apparently, my nervous system hadn't gotten that memo. A minor workplace comment about meeting participation sent the same signal through my body as a teacher's hand closing around my ear. Dumbest version of this conversation. I wanted to ask: what exactly is your problem here?
Same current. Different wire.
Block or attack. Nothing in between.
2017
In 2017, I stood at a window and watched a colleague's car pull out of the parking lot.
He'd stopped by for a work question. Ten minutes, maybe less. I watched his car until I couldn't see it, and then I stood there in the silence and tried to think of someone to call.
My daughter was in Finland. She was twelve or thirteen. We talked less. Then only when something required it. The distance didn't just happen. It accumulated because being alone felt safer. I had visited her around her birthday that year. I remember sitting in the same room as her, talking mostly to her mother.
The Page
My life looks very good from the outside.
A house. A son I'm still learning how to be with. A partner. A dog. A village I love, two kilometres from a white sand beach. I'm writing — which I've wanted to do for a long time.
And if you asked me how I'm doing, I'd say fine. The word costs nothing and explains nothing, and that's exactly why I use it.
A blank page doesn't look at me when I go quiet. It just waits.
My daughter and I — we got a little closer. Not enough to undo the years, but enough to notice the difference. Sometimes we sit in the same room, me, my daughter, and her screen, and I feel the old instinct — to step out of it without moving. I don't always stop it. The boy who learned to stay just outside things is still here. He still believes warmth is something you listen to from the next room.
We tell boys early that feelings are expensive. Some of them spend the rest of their lives calculating whether anyone is worth the price.
