And it should frighten me that it is that easy just thinking about her.
Bliss spreads through me, and it is the last thing I notice.
When I wake the next morning, I have a headache beyond, but the sensation from last night lingers with me still.
I have never slept in or stayed in bed all morning.
Today, I do.
Because there is nothing I have to do right now.
There is just this wonderful sensation.
And it stays with me all weekend.
It is one of the best weekends I have ever had, and when I arrive on campus on Monday, I am in quite a different mood. I feel light and confident, reassured and excited.
Reality, however, is catching up with me as I enter the lab. Because I have completely forgotten that this means I have to meet her again. As a student. With all that has happened—and not happened.
I nearly die when the lab door opens, and she enters. I am not used to anyone entering here, and my routine hasn’t adapted to her presence yet.
“You said Mondays are lab day,” she says, frozen where she is.
“I did,” I say. “I’m still getting used to another person being in here.”
“Do you want me to go?” she asks. I look at her for a moment.
“No,” I say. “We have work to do.”
She smiles and comes inside.
“I had an idea last night,” she says, and pulls a messy batch of pages from her backpack.
She spreads some of them and starts talking.
She talks about the issues we might face with testing any form of drugs, and how the studies about mental stimulation through thought could be thought further, how changes in environment also meant changes of neural pathways, how she’d like to set up a trial with a control group who don’t get a drug, but don’t get the placebo either but are use their thoughts to change their behavior.
I listen, but I also watch her. I expected it to be awkward between her and me. But it is not.
I let her unfold her wild train of thoughts and ideas. I like her enthusiasm; it is hard not to be drawn to it. But I am also a scientist. And science, research, has rules. Rules she doesn’t know about—and even if she did, she’d most likely be the first to ignore them.
Half an hour later, I am sitting in a mess of pages, and I get presented the final one.
“Listen, I know you already plan to tell me all the things that don’t work in that plan, all the hurdles, all the rules, I can see it in your eyes, but please, hear me out.”
“I hear you out the entire time,” I say with a smirk.
“Fair point,” she says. “This here is where it all comes together.” She points to the page in her hand. She wrote very fast on it, and I can see the difference in how she filled out the form. Apparently, she felt comfortable enough to give me another piece of the real her.
The handwriting is exactly what I expected. Messy. Some words are cursive, others straight; the m’s and n’s are differently written within a single word; some capital letters are artistic, others straight. It shows her. The one who does not know who she really is.
“—which means, we could get it approved, couldn’t we? It would be a simple, minor change?—”
“It wouldn’t,” I say. “It would require entirely new evaluation by all involved parties. While I agree with you on many points and would very much support evaluating everything you just proposed, we can’t do so in this study. I could tell you about all the things you’d disapprove of anyway, like the rules of research, so please just take it as it is.”
She sighs heavily.
“I didn’t say no,” I say. “Not just in this run.”
