- I want to study. -- He confessed out of nowhere, like a deep wish from his heart. It also felt like a sentence said with some kind of frustration or impotency or more than that, maybe despair.
- Really? that's nice. So what do you want to study?
And that's how he started to share with me a little bit of his life. He wants to study gastronomy. "I want to cook for others not to tell me how good I am but to appreciate what I'm doing". The thing is that he needs to work in order to be able to pay for his studies, he needs time to work as a driver, which is what he currently does, but also he needs time to study. He needs time to do both things at the same time, I mean in a parallel, complementary way, and so far, for the research he has done, there are no cooking schools that also let him some time free to work... that dream, for now, is forcefully suspended. And that's when my perception of some feeling of frustration comes...
I really cared and payed attention to what he was sharing with me. However, I was also surprised by the way our conversation was taking place. Just after he picked me up, I took my cellphone to call my mom, I wanted to know how was she doing since she had woke up with some difficulty to walk, she told me that the lack of solidarity from my dad had made her upset, I told her that we both already knew you can't never expect to count on him and later we hung up. So I told this guy, let's call him "the driver" or "the future chef", a little bit about my dad and how hard was to deal with him. Turns out his dad is also hard to deal with, and then he became wide open. I didn't told him much about my life, compared to what he shared but it was okay for me.
He told me his dad wanted him to do what he expected and not to do what he really wanted to do. You know, like if his will were canceled because over it there was the will of his father and that's the one he was supposed to follow. So because of this he and his father have had some strong clashes, and in the end he just decided to stay aside or away and go his own way. Among the few things I was able to share I mentioned the point of money as a way of power and "love". Then this was also a common point except that he is the one who works, the one who has an income, the one who is surviving by himself, and the one who prefers to starve if necessary rather than ask his father for some economical support... I'm a little behind on that. He also told me, like to spice up the plate, that his father was married with a 18 years old kid, (come on to be honest that age for maturity and mental capacity is hardly a woman but a child, I understand this point cause all I can think about is my crazy cousin of that age, 18, living in Egypt now after her so called boyfriend sent her half of the money for the flight tickets), and that his father tried to put her over him... he had to stop this kid to tell her something like "I don't obey my father nor I'll obey a baby such as yourself". Then he walked away. The future chef respects the choice of his father though anyone even himself can see is crazy, but he won't live under the same roof with this new weird reality, then he is all by himself now... I'm missing some parts of the story here, but this is the general idea... I got the sense he has been living alone for a while... He must be thirty something years old...some maths were necessary for that guessing, he said he only scratched a car when he was 15 and has had no accidents in the 17 years he has been driving.
Then there was a silence, and then the confession out of nowhere of "I want to study"... the irony of his wish, beyond the lack of money or time, is that he told me he wanted to cook fish. "But I can't eat it, it makes me sick".¡What the hell?! then what for do you want to cook what you can't eat? wouldn't that be kind of frustrating? I don't remember well what he replied. I'm not sure if he said it was also a challenge or a way to compensate it. He would really like to enjoy eating sea food, but he can't. He said a doctor told him about an option to give it a try so that little by little his body could get used to sea food (something related with tuna, lettuce and a lot of vinegar) but that the treatment, like being a chef, would demand time and constancy... something with what he can not commit oneself now...
In the end our conversation shifted a little, towards animals as topic, cause he said he respect all kind of life forms especially when driving, told me about the time he killed a bird by accident and stopped the car and got out of it to cry on a side of the road. He allowed me to see a little bit how sensitive he was, and that was sweet. I told him about this PetRun race last night someone shared with me through Facebook, I don't know much about that event yet but he told me to send him the link and that though he don't have a dog he would get (borrow) one and run with him/her. For a lonely man who is all the day out of his house (actually a hotel room), he can't have a dog... At some point I also wonder how lonely drivers could be or feel and how listened they would like to be... and right now I just thought maybe my uncle would classify into that kind of drivers as well and felt sorry for him, I love him so much...
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