Chance
Friendships born of need rather than choice are the bonds that stand tall through the test of time. Those accidental acquaintances, which have nothing in common with one another, are the ones that carry the heaviest weight. It's the people who share nothing that are accepting in the highest degree, for there is no instance between the two where one professes to know what the other is thinking, and this is what lends that sense of adventure and mystery that every relationship thrives upon.
Their meeting was an accident. Neither of them knew at the time that they had been seeking what the other had. Neither knew what it was, but somehow they realized that in each other they found a piece of themselves which had been lost long ago. For her, it was the sense of innocence in the world, and the good in people. It was trust and camaraderie, and perhaps it might have also been a little bit of love. For him, it was a sense of normalcy. It was the ability to see past the blame to take in the benefits. It was the sense of purpose, the loyalty and the ambition for higher goals that had made him appealing in the first place.
She did not see the way those pretty blue eyes stared into a different world. She couldn't possibly have imagined the torment behind those boy-ish good looks, or the remembrance of terror that shook those once steady hands as they ran through dirty blonde hair that used to seem neatly combed. She wasn't aware of the miasma of self-depreciation, the hate and fear and helplessness. She didn't know why the man sat in the back booth of the little mom-and-pop diner, and yet somehow she understood, and patiently wondered just how many cups of coffee it would take before he found whatever it was he was looking for in the printed grains of a faux wooden tabletop.