The neighbours downstairs

A family in Amman hosts the same Friday lunch for the same cousins, and they can tell you how it will go before the rice is on the stove.

Who will arrive late. Who will talk about the cost of everything. Which uncle will be asleep on the sofa by four. There is comfort in that, and nothing wrong with it. When we do the same thing the same way, the future looks sharp.

Now imagine they invite the couple who moved into the flat downstairs last month, people they have only nodded to on the stairs.

The lunch becomes impossible to forecast. It might be stiff. It might run until evening. The new neighbours might become the people they call when the car will not start, or the family whose children grow up alongside theirs. Nobody at the table can see that far, and nobody should pretend to.

That blur is not a flaw in the plan. It is the sign that the plan might actually change something. A lunch that can only go one way can only ever be what it already was.

The larger the change we hope for, the less of it we can see before it happens. Anyone who insists on knowing exactly how the afternoon ends has quietly chosen the cousins again.