Question: "Tell me about the people who shaped you during your life - colleagues, friends, family. What role did they play in your story?"

My colleague Patricia became my closest friend during thirty years of teaching side by side. We'd eat lunch in her classroom every day, sharing stories about difficult students and swapping lesson plans like recipes. She never married either - we used to joke that our students were our children. When my mother passed, Patricia held my hand through the funeral and moved into my spare room for a month. She taught me that family isn't always blood - sometimes it's the person who brings you coffee every morning for three decades. Now in the retirement home, we still have rooms next door to each other. Last week, she knocked on my wall three times - our old signal that meant "thinking of you." Some friendships transcend time, space, even words.

Question: "When you look at your spouse after all these years, what moment captures why you still love them?"

Last Tuesday, I watched Marguerite in our kitchen, teaching our granddaughter Sylvie how to make pain aux noix. Marguerite's hands, spotted with age now, guided Sylvie's exactly as she'd guided our daughter's thirty years ago, with the same patience, the same little humming sound she makes when she concentrates. She caught me watching and winked - that same wink she gave me when I was nineteen and covered in flour at her father's shop. Fifty-one years of marriage, and she still winks at me like we're sharing a secret. She never complained about the 3 AM alarms, the flour in our bed sheets, the Sundays I missed because the ovens needed repair. When I retired last year, she said, "Finally, we can have breakfast together." Now every morning, I make her coffee while she toasts the bread I baked the night before - I can't stop baking entirely. That wink, that patience, that woman who sees romance in sharing breakfast at 72 - that's why I love her more than ever.

Question: "What activities or passions bring you the most happiness? What feeds your soul beyond work?"

Every Saturday morning, I teach coding to girls at the community center in Kreuzberg - daughters of Turkish immigrants mostly, who remind me of myself, outsiders looking in at a world of technology that seems closed to them. Their eyes light up when their first program runs, the same wonder I felt behind that green sofa. We code in Python, but really I'm teaching them courage. My partner Anna says I come home glowing from these sessions, younger somehow. Beyond the classroom, I lose myself in electronic music composition - layers of sound built like code, systematic yet emotional. Late at night in my home studio, headphones on, I create symphonies from synthesizers, finding the music in mathematics. Anna sometimes finds me asleep at the keyboard, both the computer and piano kind. This is happiness: teaching girls to be brave, building music from numbers, sharing wine with Anna while our cat debugs my code by walking across the keyboard. The soul needs both logic and art; I refuse to choose.