Encrypted-9

Chapter 9

Brandy leaves headed to work and to go dance and I’m here alone for the first time. It’s unsettling but I first go around and I check all the windows and all of the doors then all of the windows and the doors again before I’m good.

I turn on all the lights and I walk. I walk and I pace and I clean things. I have a bucket with cleaning supplies and lot’s of paper towels and such. But as strange as it is that I’m doing this it’s my way of knowing here, and I get to examine things up close and lose myself it that in my very kind of autistic way. I know that I’m somewhere in the middle of both.

I end up using the paper towels not just to clean things but to hold the plastic garbage bags. They still give me the Icks as Brandy would say.

I miss her already.

I find it really on the edge of unnerving but at the same time reassuring that being in a real relationship is so symbiotic. I feel symbiotic I guess, like there’s this thing that binds us and that makes me more.

More than what I was.

That’s true too. I’ve seen it; my Code with some of her’s inside of me. It’s not like possession or infection but like they say. “You change something even if you’re just observing it.”

I sort of stare at my own code looking at my own hand. It’s like those sight puzzles I let my sight not focus on anything that’s there, like I’m not trying to see what’s there at all but what I know that’s there.

There she is…Brandy her bits of information running in perfect sync with mine.

“I wonder though if there’s a saying of how much being in a relationship changes you?”

I like staring at my hand like that. I like seeing her as part of me. I miss her actuality but I’ll never be alone…I lose track of seeing the code as good tears fill my eyes and spill out. I’m sure that they’re good tears because I’ve been upset enough to cry before and this isn’t it.

It’s the first time though that I’ve done this though. Crying because I am happy.

I let them just flow, it’s…

It’s nice to feel this way and to just feel it.

I make a coffee, I want to stay up so I can go to bed with Brandy when she comes in and I drink it in the kitchen. I’m planning on using her computer and I have this OCD almost fear of spillage onto the computer from all my time in various labs and such. When you work with them a lot one either gets very careful and precise or non-chalant.

Jerry McDonal…. (Shiver) he’s a theoretical physicist I had worked with once and he left as much food in his keyboard as some people leave after a meal…

I trigger and for at least thirty minutes I’m cleaning brandy’s keyboard just to get that work experience out of my brain.

You shouldn’t be able to tell someone had a Big Mac by looking at their keyboard.

Ick.

Ick, Ick, Ick…

“Oh Brandy…you treat your computer as badly as you treated your car.”

I get on her computer and I can’t help but to winch at it. It’s so out of date. I get things cleared out Brandy has that casual surfer pollution on her computer that just kind of slowly fills your system full of garbage. I can feel the stuff she’s actually interested in and keep that but slip into her browsers and write a few quick programs in my head to get rid of the pop ups and all the unsavoury attachments to those sites and then streamline everything so that she’s running faster. It’s not much and I’m limited by the hardware but it’ll have to do.

I enter my lab accounts and I go through my project lists and start to print off all my notes on the things that I was working on and finish the simulation equations and coding on one that was getting close to it’s preliminary do date and I get so into doing it that it takes on a life of it’s own in the math of the code.

I run beta tests of this new pressure seals for a rotating underwater camera eye in my head faster that the engineering computers could do at the university and I pull out the faults in my first and second batches of calculations and I am going over the lists of the materials available readily for the contracted company and what they’ll need to use and the parameters of the construction and reach into the system to look into the net…literally look into the Net and find who makes it and where at the best prices…

There’s a point where I’m not even really using the keys and I’m just connecting my body’s bioelectrical field to tell the actual electronics of the computer to respond at a thought.

Electronic telepathy?
This is more than odd and by the time I’m completely done that I save everything onto the computer in a compressed file and the same to disc and then send it off to the head of my department.

This should actually buy me some time work and money wise.

I lean back in the computer chair and I’m trying to blink the math and code out of my eyes. It’s like looking at a bright light and having spots afterwards. I sort of see the stuff I was doing and code floating around in front of myself.

I get up and head into the kitchen and start to make soup. I like soup, I like canned soup and tomato is my favorite. Campbell’s is too strong and Heinz is too sweet but both mixed together with some skim milk to thin them out is just right.

It’s not possible to have tomato soup without grilled cheese. I cut the crust off the bread bakery bread in the nice paper sack bags and not plastic. I put the crusts in a tin with a box of baking soda laid flat so they dry to make bread crumbs. I have to smell the bread first too. I can smell mold on things like bread before you ever see it and I can taste it.

Okay the bread’s fine.

I butter the bread on both sides and I grate some mozzarella cheese and I put a little on both inside parts of the bread and then the two slices and some of the mozzarella in the middle of those. Yes I’m very strange but I think that a grilled cheese should be both creamy and stringy and should make you smile when you eat it.

I make six of them up knowing that I will eat three since I’m feeling very hungry and Brandy is usually hungry after she dances and I get everything ready and listen to some CBC-1 classical music and think of what had just happened on the computer.

I did a weeks worth of very hard work in a very short time just a few hours.

I just finished making our bed and using fresh sheets from the dryer and was starting a pot of tea when brandy comes in she looks like she’s tired and her head lifts though and she inhales and I smile at her and go to her and kiss her gently.

“Welcome home.”

She looks at me and she looks around and smells again and tears well up in her eyes.

“Oh Madison…do you know how many years I’ve waited to hear that? To have this here like this?”

……………. “This is a rhetorical question?” I ask unsure, I’m very literal.

She Kisses me deeply a starting with caps Kiss.

“Yes beautiful this is just perfect, better than perfect.”

“Brandy….” I can’t help but while, perfect is perfect by definition…she does this to tease me but the light there in her eyes and her smile. I reach up and wipe a few tears away. “Happy tears?”

“Yes baby happy tears.”