Of Insignificant and Transformative

One of my most memorable moments I’d consider tremendously mundane. I’d flipped 4 hours of burgers, worrying about all the plastic gloves I was wasting and the safety of the quarter-pounder sitting a quarter-longer in the warmer than advised. When asked to work another 4 hours, everything inside said no, but I was only fluent in the language of people pleasing. My eyes flossed the dashed lines of the clock in rhythm with plastic gloves until one minute folded 240 times. Three years later I was given a cookie from someone else completing their tremendously mundane work shift. “I hope your day gets better,” she said in response to my new language of crying in public. What if every choked back tear felt air? More cookies would be delivered. Maybe we would have 50 words to describe 50 types of tears, like the 50 words in the Inuit language to describe 50 types of snow. Maybe tremendously mundane would split open and crash into someone else’s tremendously mundane, unveiling something more memorable than dreading time while flipping burgers.