The following days all went pretty similarly. Tryox followed the order he was given as well as possible, making sure I was rarely alone. I didn’t mind his constant presence by my side. It was actually quite nice to talk to him.

The first morning, I woke up sooner than him again, resulting in me making breakfast. However, I decided to head back to my room because I wanted to give him space to eat in peace. I had left a note saying, “Good dawn, enjoy breakfast!” - I had taken an educated guess on the correct greeting. He knocked on my door two hours later, checking in on me and asking if I wanted to explain some “human TV show” to him. That’s how we spent most of the day, except for the times when we cooked lunch and dinner together.

The next morning, I went downstairs to prepare breakfast but it was already done. On one plate was a note next to the food, “Good morning. I hope you enjoy our version of pancakes. I’ll be with you in a ‘minute’.” I chuckled. We had found out the day before that our definitions of “one minute” were a bit different. For him, one minute was like three minutes which resulted in a burnt cake. Luckily, he came down the stairs shortly after I was done setting the table. I just wanted to devour that delicious-looking meal.

On the fourth day, we had established something like a routine. Whoever woke up first made breakfast, then we’d watch TV or read books from Earth. We made lunch together, trying to make dishes that Tryox knew from his childhood. In the afternoon, he told me about his planet, took me to the park to show me edible plants and fruits and sometimes he even gave me a few bits of information about his own life. Dinner was mostly a mixture of both cultures. He started to really enjoy vegetarian burgers made with fruits from his planet - I loved them from the beginning. I couldn’t believe it when he said he had no idea what burgers were.

That was what led us to “day 10 without socialising”. We had just finished dinner - burgers again - and Tryox washed our plates. “Tsaja, my sister, would have hated those burgers. She was more a fan of sweets, spending every coin on them,” he mumbled. It was the first time he mentioned her name but not the first time he talked about his younger sister. They seemed to have been really close. The name seemed familiar to me but I couldn’t really place it.

After dinner, Tryox patted the spot on the couch right next to him to make me sit down and watch more TV with him. We had just started a show that I remembered having started but never finished. His attention was on the show but I knew he was just searching for similarities to the shows he knew. He missed his culture. It became more and more obvious every day, despite our attempts at cooking traditional meals. None of that was a surprise to me. All the natives had to live in a town that had barely anything to remind them of their former lives while the rest of the planet could continue those traditions without us humans interfering. I wished I could help him but I didn’t know how.

And I wished his arm would stay around my shoulders for the whole night, pulling me close to him.