When We Met

When we first met, you were listening. Not many people do that anymore. Of course, I hadn't the option. Listening was the simplest road.

You were brilliant and driven and, most likely, beautiful and yet you were happy and excited about every discovery, every pindrop of sound that might have been even remotely promising. I could tell almost immediately the passion you felt, that burned deep. It encouraged me more than anything else had.

When we first met, I missed your hand.

You didn't know that I couldn't see your outstretched appendage and so you also didn't know that I am used to it by now. I almost never miss. Most people can hardly tell. I make it so easy to ignore that I cannot see what you can. I was excited about meeting you, excited enough not to aim.

It had always been a leap in the dark anyway. A handshake, I mean. One can never tell just by sound or smell where a hand is going to land. Only by feel, by a lucky guess, will one get it right without one's utmost sense.

Sight. Something I had thought I had forgotten but the loss hit me hard now.

I could feel rather than hear the confused pause in your voice as you repositioned your hand, clasping mines briefly. Ellie. Just plain Ellie. That was how you introduced yourself to me, the meek, ironically named, Dr. Kent Clark. I knew you had deduced my condition already.

I felt fumbled and ignorant and blunt. I admit my first impression wasn't as welcoming as I had wanted it to be. I chide myself most on the stumble and pause I made when explaining your purpose there for the team. I regret it though I know you were probably used to it, you probably didn't even spare it a thought; you were too determined to.

You are everything that I am not.

Excluding, perhaps, the brilliant part. Many people have called me that, you in particular. I would not call you a liar, not in a million years, but I prefer a smaller word like 'smart' rather than the extravagance of a word like 'brilliant'.

When I repeated what Drumlin had said about you, I meant it to be a joke. The truth was that I had admired you even before I had met you, just by that description. But you were so much more committed than that! It made me feel alive again.

Really the point is that when we first met, neither of us knew what we would become.