Five Years on Sunlight

The book Ana was reading in the Munich bookshop claimed that someone had survived five years eating nothing but sunlight. I didn’t ask for more details. I just sat across from her with a Steve Jobs biography, completely absorbed in the chapter about the iPod’s origin—the pressure, the timelines, the particular stubbornness of building something the way Jobs insisted it had to be built—while she turned pages about people apparently photosynthesizing themselves through the 2000s. We’d been there nearly three hours by that point. Neither of us was in a hurry.

The day had started less poetically. Ana recently quit school—a decision that set off a proper debate about where personal freedom ends and social obligation begins—so we’d taken a train to the career information center in Memmingen to look at her options. She went through folders, watched videos about physiotherapy, dug through their intranet. I spent part of the time exploring career materials myself and the rest of it figuring out how to get onto Google through their restricted network. I managed it. File that under useful skills.

After that, two friends—Ira and Daja—joined us for the rest of the day in Munich. They went shopping. Ana and I went to the bookshop and didn’t come out until they found us. I left with a Mac magazine, the Jobs biography, and The Cult of Mac. The iPod chapter was worth the whole trip.

I’d been sick all week—coughing, sneezing, headache—and managed to keep Ana up half the night with it when we got back. I felt bad about that. But not bad enough to regret the day, which had gone almost exactly right.

Before the week ended we made a deal: I stop letting my correspondence diploma slide and actually sit down to finish it. She goes back to school. Fair trade. Whether she follows through is genuinely unknowable—I’ve long since given up pretending I can predict her—but the pact exists, and that’s something.