part b: day six

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

I was #5KV^♠︎, a taxi driver from Augsburg. When I was younger, I did not know what I wanted to do so I did not go to school. I served twenty years in the military and after being discharged, I worked a bunch of odd jobs until I settled on being a chauffeur. It is a job which does not require a lot of brain cells and pays the bills, and I also get to meet all sorts of people. The working times are also more flexible than most people think. In my free time I like to read; mostly about philosophy; I am part of a regular hiking group too with a few gal pals. 

I met my husband when I decided to learn to make coffee art and was working as a barista in one of the more popular cafés where university students frequented. This was before joining the military. He was studying computational neuroscience at the Technical University of Munich but is originally from Augsburg, he visited his family and childhood friends once every three weeks on average and it was on one of these visitations that our lives started to entwine. Fast forward to today, we are still married and have a child together. It has not always been blissful but we keep trying.

Our toddler daughter developed the superhuman ability of telekinesis and gosh was that a huge pain in the ass… we could not hide snacks from her and she kept exiting her crib. But she also changed her own diapers and when we got home from work, she would remove our coats for us; which was creepy at first but we feel like we won the parenting game. 

My husband is a researcher at the Department of Computational Neurosciences and his current focus is to improve the communication between babies and their parents. In layman terms, he is trying to decipher the baby language. Sometimes I am not sure if he really wanted to start a family with me or he just wanted a specimen for his experiments. Luckily, he also excels in adult communication and promised me that our baby would not be hurt in the process, and I was allowed to be present to keep tabs on him.  After putting my honey bunny through some terrifying-looking gizmos, we found out that our daughter is more intelligent than the average (cool, smart kids are easier to manage than dumb ones), prone to have depression (it broke my heart just thinking about it) and she could be musically gifted (but it did not say which instrument and I scratched my head wondering what kind of music prodigy am I going to raise). 

Although I get foreign tourists in my taxi a lot, most of the time it is the Germans who ride with me, and we normally share a peaceful silence. That stoic facade cracked a little after The Pod arrived, suddenly no one could shut up about it. It got a little worse since the superpowers came, the conversation was a mix of excitement and horror. A few swindled their way to free rides, but most people did not abuse their newfound abilities. Interestingly, foreign tourists were not affected at all; they did not have super skills, to their dismay. 

Even though taxi drivers nowadays use navigation apps, we had to pass an exam where most of it involved route memorisation. Just to be clear, we now utilise web apps only to check for traffic jams and figure out the most efficient route to send you to your destination. It surprised me when the streets became more vivid in my head —— I could right away pinpoint exactly which building my customers were heading to. I started to remember everything I read, and I had a fun time arguing with my recreational philosophy book club; because I kept winning. Oh no Marie, Wittgenstein did not say that, Hegel did! 

I had perfect eidetic memory and obviously it piqued my husband’s interest, he lovingly said to me: “I thought I know you inside out but you are still able to be more interesting!” 

I volunteered to be a legal assistant to lawyers defending domestic abuse victims pro bono, which was a great asset because I literally have all of the relevant facts in my head, ready to go. Fuck abusive men; learn from my husband, you dwerps.

to be continued…