Goodbye to a Week and to Two Colleagues

This afternoon my work team and I marked two events: Firstly, one of our teammates will leave us to join a data science team still within our company. Secondly, and more drastically, one of our colleagues will be leaving the company, and Berlin, altogether.

So we took over the kitchen in one of the company offices and brought food and drinks, and stayed there until past 9 p.m.

We toasted each other in prosecco and white wine, also drank beer and locally bottled fruit juice and water; our Greek teammate had made her first vegan chocolate cake and was typically modest about the delicious result; and I brought in a sponge cake. Then we had After Eights, pistachios, red beet chips and chickpea chips and lentil chips, nacho chips, guacamole, flatbread with hummus and a feta cheese dip and a tomato dip, Portuguese bread buns with caponata, and the soft caramels that we used to always keep in our team's office room.

We learned more about each other (past and present), exchanged gossip, and reminisced about former times and former colleagues.

One aftereffect of social distancing was that a few gatherings I've had with current or former colleagues have felt like 'classics', one-in-a-lifetime experiences that are hard to improve on. It will be hard to forget the walks and meetings we've had, with a feeling of genuine togetherness I think we didn't often achieve before the pandemic. The small dramas (riot police, Brazilian teammate cutting their finger with a knife, etc.) that occurred along the way made them even more memorable. Minus the dramas, it's quite heartwarming.

It sounds — and is — quite cheesy, but one thing I realized after my father's death (when I knew that few people could believe in me as much as he did or lead me as much to try to be kind and honest, but it became clear how many people could be supportive and affectionate and good) is how deep the human capacity to feel platonic love is. I didn't believe in it while I was a teenager or in my twenties; I felt tolerated or endured rather than liked, and I guess that influenced how I felt about others and about human kindness in general. But every now and then the proof of it is hard to miss.

When I returned home after cycling through the early autumn night, my uncle (whose birthday it was) had already left, but sister T. was still there. So we ate chocolate mints and caramels, and chatted, until it was time for some of us to go to sleep. It's been a long week and, for example, I'd only eaten a salted licorice herring and a few crumbs before the evening party. But I am finding little islands of respite.