The Hot Seat

Elon Musk’s satellites twinkled like strings of pearl beads embroidered across the endless sky. The air smelled of spring. As if nothing bad could ever happen under this magical veil.

In a small, quiet apartment on the outskirts of town, a dim light glowed late into the night. Sofia liked to imagine this little light as a lighthouse, miraculously guiding lost travelers back home.

But what is “home”? For her, home was not just the walls of their concrete box, separating them from the neighbors’ concrete box. Home was a feeling, warmth, and freedom. Sometimes, home is found in people. Blessed is the one who knows where their home truly is.

“Home.” Being a homemaker came easily to her. She was quick and diligent, so she never understood why others complained about household chores, as if they were the greatest burden in life. Women who did nothing beyond work and house.

She, on the other hand, after long hours at the Institute of Applied Psychology, also went to “Dawning”: in the NGO’s barrack she gave free Tai Chi Chuan lessons to women who were victims of domestic violence. That’s why she sometimes looked with a touch of scorn at her friends and their petty lives without extra interests.

Her interests always kept her curious. They gave her bonus duties, pulled her out of the melancholy of everyday life. Yet sometimes, when she was exhausted and deeply immersed in her commitments, she found herself envying those same women who had all the time in the world to doom scroll stories and stay informed about the reality around them.

Her reality was different. She knew her clients’ secrets, that parallel world never posted as “stories”. It was the world of the hot seat; one she could never speak of. Often, she found herself in cognitive dissonance between the truths entrusted to her by patients and the reality she lived alongside some of them… She was often stunned by the image of a woman confessing she hated her husband with all her soul, only to then appear with him in the most loving photograph imaginable. But that was fine, because truth always has many sides, and all realities are, in the end, objective in their own way. Rashomon.

In her office at the Institute, countless stories passed through: heavy destinies, wrong choices, and the occasional diagnosis. They could overwhelm her, haunt her for hours, even days. Yet despite it all, she adored her work and felt deeply grateful whenever she noticed a positive change in someone. She always told herself it would be enough if she touched just one life in a day. But she didn’t just touch—she penetrated deeply into personal universes, and in all those galaxies she found scattered pieces of herself.

She only hated herself when she caught a glimpse of arrogance in her own reflection—arrogance born of her education and insights into self-knowledge. Yeah, right: others had “petty lives,” while she was the one who knew everything! Yeah, she had studied all this, and it’s as if she had managed to fix her own marriage with that vast knowledge, so now she could even help other couples! Oh my, oh my…

In reality, she could not help herself. She could never understand her own plot. The writer of that script must be suffering from some unknown diagnosis. Who else would write a scenario filled with hopelessness, self-pity, despair? “Oh, poor woman… What a fate to have befallen me.”

On top of that, she felt entitled: she was the one to deserve more! Perhaps someone else would have been satisfied and happy. Perhaps she too would have been, if only she were a little less herself… But she refused to be even a fraction less “herself”. She had worked painstakingly to get here. Both changing and consistent, she was convinced she would never allow herself to dissolve into the mass of gray silhouettes. And she was deeply grateful to herself for being aware of this conviction.

Now Sofia lay on the bed beside the small dim light in their suburban apartment. At one moment, she turned and looked toward the part of the room lit only by the glow of his laptop screen. She looked at him—the other main character in her script of hopelessness, self-pity, despair.

“I’ll write him a letter,” she thought. She sat up from the bed and rummaged through the drawer where she kept the beautiful notebooks reserved for special occasions. She pulled out a fine sheet of thick, rough paper and placed it on top of a notebook. She also took out the elegant ink pen her colleagues had given her for graduation, and curled up in the corner of the bed. She glanced at the fine sheet of paper: it was as if she were preparing to write a love letter. Yes, she was an incurable addict of aesthetics—she would not sacrifice beauty even in such utterly un-beautiful moments. A fine sheet of paper, fine ink… for words of questionable beauty.

She turned toward the part of the room lit by the laptop screen and cast a glance at the dark silhouette. Beside the monitor she noticed a beer can. Then she focused again on her sheet of paper and pen.

“I wish you all the happiness in this world! No matter how little you may believe it, it’s true. Because you are a good man. You deserve it,” Sofia wrote in delicate handwriting on the paper, nodding to herself as if to confirm it. She continued:

“I know you don’t need this from me—you expect something else. But it is what it is. I hope that somewhere, someday, you will be happy again. As you are not now. I know it will be far from me, but that is best for both of us. In any case, I have no bad feelings toward you: there is no trace of bitterness anymore. I understand everything, and I forgive you for everything. This is as much as we could, or as much as we wanted—it doesn’t matter. In the end, here we are.”

Sofia paused. One question tormented her without end: “How did we get here?” Curled up in the corner of the bed, she lifted her eyes from the fine, rough sheet of paper, set down the pen, and looked toward the other end of the room, where the light of the monitor glowed. She sank into thought.

“You told me I’m not even in the top ten normal people you know. Me! I, the most normal person I know! I’m not basic. My brother and I made a clear distinction between basic and normal. We agreed that our cousin Radmila is the perfect example of basic. In essence, though, with her madness she is the embodiment of pure compensation. If compensation were a person, it would be called Radmila.”

As she gazed at the monitor on the other side of the room, she almost felt sorry for him—for them. She sighed and drifted back into thought.

“But, this poor man here, he’s also full of defense mechanisms… That’s where this behavior of his comes from. ‘Not even in the top ten.’ Oh, really?”

She tried to recall times when even she wasn’t aware of her own mechanisms. Probably when she was younger…? But she was rather authentic in those times as well. Authenticity was what attracted her. So, what? What an enthusiasm… Pretending to be self-aware, pretending she could fix someone. Her aunt had warned her well: “Mind your own business.” And here she was—minding her business… poorly. Apparently, she doesn’t see things clearly. Well, her diopter is minus three, so… She ought to go check that too. And she needed to see an endocrinologist… Her blood sugar had spiked from being so self-aware. Plus, all those visits to the gynecologists… Well, once you start going from doctor to doctor…

“What must it be like inside his head?” Sofia wondered, now gazing at his face lit up by the images flashing across his monitor. What was he doing? Most likely surfing the internet, filling himself with data useless to her.

Sofia curled up even tighter in the corner of the bed. “But what must it be like inside his head?” she asked herself again. Was it as noisy there as it was in hers? She knew how it was for other people—they spoke to her, everywhere: in her office at the Institute, even on the street when some happened to meet her. They explained, they expected advice from her for their demons. But that was with them. He alone remained an eternal mystery.

Caught in the trap of an average existence, he watched his life pass him by. A passive observer with no proper checklist, only a beer in hand. Comfortably lodged in some corner of his own life, he sat and stared at his Sisyphean struggles.

His working day passed in the casino. He hated the smell of the place: layers of cigarette smoke and bitter coffee particles, mixed with the pheromones of the wild urge for gain, characteristic of gamblers. The same story, fifteen years straight.

He loathed the people he had to serve. He loathed himself when he had to clean the toilet after them. His whole youth left here, between the despair of bankruptcy and the questionable inclination of the Universe, manifested through the rare generosity of the flashing machines.

The deadness in his gaze showed he had accepted his fate. His beautiful gray-green eyes no longer shone. A dulled look from intoxicating substances, directed somewhere far away, as if he had already said goodbye to his dreams.

Only Sofia believed in him. Despite the unchanging state of things over the years, despite the obvious lack of any motivating pulse in him, she believed she was strong enough for both of them.

She begged him to see himself through her prism. To notice the sprouts he carried within. But in vain. His self-doubt kept him from reaching out his hand to her, from letting her lead him toward some truth of his own.

Closed off in his small world, he felt grateful to have her: she carried within herself a different freshness, something unknown to him. He let her fill their home with flowers and colorful yarns. He delighted in all her colors and clumsy jokes. Sometimes he envied her courage to change, to have many desires, to laugh loudly and defend her views even louder. Since he met her, she had been the star guiding him through storms of emotion and quiet Sunday mornings.

Sofia, on the other hand, was the complete opposite: she had always imagined herself as the main character in a romantic comedy. To her, life’s events only lacked background music. And she had good tracks for the playlist.

She wondered how and when the genres had shifted—how their cohabitation had turned from romantic comedy into psychodrama with British humor. This was not the film she wanted to act in, much less star in.

Still, the film had to go on. Like now, tonight: Sofia abruptly crumpled the fine sheet of paper, along with the few lines of small text. She glanced toward the other end of the room: there they were, he and she, like two goalkeepers from opposing teams. On the same field, yet distant. Facing each other, silently defending what was theirs. But was there anything left to defend?

Suddenly the silence was cut by her voice. It sounded resolute.

“I can’t take it anymore!” she thundered, shredding the paper she clenched in her hands.

On the other side of the room, his figure, lit by the colors of the monitor, did not move his gaze from the screen by even a millimeter. He only muttered indifferently: “What’s the problem?”

“You’re to blame for everything! I can’t take this anymore!” she shot back defiantly, swallowing the lump in her throat. The same lump that had tormented her for years, that kept her from eating… or breathing. Sofia was surprised by herself and her determination, but as usual, that determination in her voice quickly gave way to hesitation.

At last, he shifted his gaze from the screen and turned toward her. When he looked at her, his face showed no confusion. He was already used to such outbursts. “Are you about to get your period?” he asked, with a cynical smile stretching across his cheeks.

This question, repeated who knows how many times, she saw not only as a refusal to acknowledge her expressed pain, but as a complete, insulting belittlement—of her emotion, and of her intellect.

“Always the same story…” Sofia said, and then her voice began to rise exponentially. “That’s all you’ve got: stupid sexist jokes. I don’t find them funny. You insult me, belittle me, underestimate me. You have fucked me up completely. You gaslight me at every step. You’ve turned my mind to scrambled eggs!”

Sofia emptied herself. Her voice seemed worn out, and her next words came quiet, hesitant, barely audible. “I want a divorce…” she whispered, her eyes falling on the shredded paper.

At last, he seemed to peel his face away from the monitor. Slowly he stood and walked toward her. He approached her body, curled in the corner lit by the dim glow of the desk lamp. He bent over her and with trembling fingers ran through her hair. “It’ll be okay,” he said, sitting down beside her. Like a tame kitten.

His touch always stirred Sofia. Movements like waves that turned her eyes into two small lakes. That was all it took for the tightness in her body to dissolve. “We’ll talk another time,” he added, kissing her forehead. She obediently nodded.

Again, the same story: the tantrum once more successfully hushed, the little tearful Sofia subdued.

He brushed a strand from her face and slowly rose from the bed. He turned toward the dark part of the room and walked back toward the monitor’s glow. He grabbed the beer can.

“Yes, it’ll be okay…”, Sofia nodded again, curling back into the corner. “Yes, we’ll talk…” she added silently, wiping her tears away with a sharp motion.

In her head, however, the noise continued. Her gaze wandered across the walls: “the bathroom leaked,” she thought, “the washing machine is broken as well, and that fridge needs also fixing… The flowers didn’t bloom. Come on, get up, go open the window for them. How can flowers bloom in such negative environment? All that morning yoga and crystal cleansing – for what? Well, to be honest, I haven’t cleansed them in ages… That should also be done. Even though someone insists it’s craziness. Look at him: unaccomplished, full of conflicts and frustrations, has something to say about me… Man oh, man, I feel like disappearing, leaving everything behind!”

On the other side of the room, he sat back down before the monitor. As if nothing had happened.

In such critical moments, he knew how to caress her, but it was that same pride of his that kept him from saying aloud how much he loved her. That’s why the spark that she had inside of her was sometimes swallowed by dark emptiness, leading her to lose control, to begin to shout. Slowly she seemed to lose faith in him… Wasn’t that literally betrayal? And on top of it all—she was about to leave him!

He sat once more on his hot seat, shielded behind the monitor. He stared blankly at the screen. As if slightly shifted off his axis: maybe only for a moment, but the thought of being left alone seemed to frighten him. He knew he had no one but her. Nowhere else to go.