A stained carpet or a stained soul? A 17 year old boy dies in his sleep. A football player dies doing what likely was one of the things that made him feel most alive. In Palestine more families are handcuffed to Israel’s torture carrousel. And some of us are not dead, but not very alive either.

My day job is listening to people.

I wear different hats, but the part that pays the bill is… me listening.

I seem to work like a sponge.

I absorb what people tell me.

They feel lighter.

I do feel happy seeing them unburdened, more vibrant, but am more aware than when I was young that what they share has a way of putting poisonous hooks in me.

I then need to expell the accumated stories from my system somehow.

Either I do that creatively or – if am not careful – it comes out as anger, frustration or a plunge into bottomless despair.

Some of the stories that stuck with me this week.

Session with a 17-year old.

His mum warns me that he might be different today. A friend has called him with the news that one of their mutual friends went to bed this week and never woke up.

It reminds me of seeing my friend Tom die of an aggressive type cancer at 23.

It’s clear the young man will not share details about his friend. I will learn nothing about who this friend was.

Instead I touch him on the shoulder and merely say: ‘That’s really tough.’

We then have a very playful session and the young man laughs quite a lot, makes several clever jokes, does funny accents. They way he can switch between anglosaxon accents is impressive.

I leave and the mum tells me at the door: ‘Am surprised he talked so much.’

There was a man with debt.

We talked about the video games he used to play in his childhood and got visibily animated.

As if the lights went back on.

Another man shares the video of a football player who got hit in the chest by a goalie and never gets back up.

What sticks with me more is how he complains he doesn’t feel like seeing his girlfriend.

He says: ‘I wanted a relationship and now I have to pay the price.’

The price being: spending time with her.

This hits me a little different because I talk to several men each week who would love nothing more than to be in a relationship with a woman who wants exactly that: their presence.

One man complains a woman wants to spend a week day evening with him.

Other men complain that to women they simply do not exist.

It gets particularly puzzling when I find myself concluding that these isolated men are top notch guys in my opinion. Intelligent, knowledgeable, good-looking, well-groomed, passionate, driven and caring. Yet from their weekly stories it’s undeniable: they have practically no chance to meet women in real life. Not for lack of trying. They just suck at selling themselves in a world where people rate each other based on one picture swiped for two seconds. They have substance and are a hard sell in a market that values immediate visceral appeal over anything that requires a bit of refinement, a bit of Bildung, a bit of discernment.

One described himself as a walking credit card.

The only time anyone has an exchange with him is when he is paying in a store.

The other one described himself as ‘an island looking for other islands’.

When I offer him to come to a party am organizing he says: ‘I don’t want to do that to your guests. I have so many sad stories I will kill the mood.’

It would be unfair to just tell him: ‘Cheer up.’

He’s facing real constraints.

He’s a complex whiskey in a market that prefers syrupy cocktails with a colorful straw, photographed with glamorous lighting.

One of the men tells me near the end of a session: ‘We have to find a way to make life great on our own, without thinking life can only be great if you are with the kind of people you wish you could be with.’

My own story that stuck with me this week:

I got angry over Bruno dropping a large plate of chicken, sauce and rice on the carpet in the living room.

I quickly realized I was dumb to raise my voice over a stained carpet.

My dissapointment with myself lingered for days.

Then I got it fully hammered in.

I watched how a father had to say goodbye to his injured child, about the same age as Bruno.

The boy had been allowed to exit Gaza for treatment, but why else than for sadistic reasons, the parents were forbidden from joining their wounded child.

The process of getting him out took too long and he died.

A stained carpet is fine, as long as it’s not blood.

If someone is around to stain your carpet with food the blessings in your life are innumerable.

You have carpet.

You have a roof over your head.

You have food.

You have someone who wants to eat a meal with you.

You have someone in your life so excited about the next activity that yes, in his exuberance he drops his plate.

The parents of that 17 year old boy who died in his sleep or that father in Gaza who had to let his terrified, shivering, wounded son be taken off to Egypt alone, would pay everything they own and more for their loved ones to come back and make a grotesque soy sauce stain on the carpet.

I am going to pick up Bruno from school now.

I will tell him my reaction was wrong.

Let the carpet be stained.

Not his soul.