Differing obsessions

In the class she had some trouble trying to explain to her partner that the work she wanted to do in the future was to design prostheses (she no longer liked ordinary drawing, she was saying, it now made her bored), but when her partner explained his own unattainable dream, she couldn't understand him either -- it being a question, not so much of English vocabulary, as of differing obsessions.

That was only last week

It was a smell, she told me. She'd been standing in the shop, just waiting around because the afternoon had been slow, when a smell she had smelled at the time of the accident slid into the space -- whether in through the vents or the lungs of the change-rooms -- such a physical, palpable smell, as if thick with scurf from the tyres, the brakes, the airbags expanding, or even the rent in the dashboard as the hot metal dark had belched from the body of the car. She could no longer stand or sit or talk or think. The boss sent her home for three days, with no pay of course.

That was only last week.