Theodore sometimes wonders how it is he's able to be so very comfortable with such a consistently strange life going by around him. Perhaps it's the consistency of the oddities that makes them so easily tolerable, and even pleasant. He looks forward to the surprises that seem to find him, no matter how small. But then, surprises seem to follow Luna wherever she goes, making themselves known where you least expect them. He prefers routine, generally, but even the strangeness has become routine, the coloured tape on the doorframe (marking what?) and the stacks of journals with blank pages.
He's likely to find glossy snips and pieces of ribbon in his pants pockets. Left there, perhaps, so he won't forget her? So he'll look at them just as he's getting on the train to Leave and think
Oh yes. There's a girl at home waiting for me, isn't there?
and turn right around and come back, so she won't be without him. Or at least, this is what she says they're for, when he asks after having finally amassed a collection so large it cannot be contained in the little drawer in his desk.
Or notes. Theodore has a shoebox filled with them, sweet nothings put on paper that he looks forward to finding even if he'll never admit it. Stanza's from her favourite poems, quotes, lines from books she loves—each one boils down to the same thing. A hundred I love you's in a shoebox under the bed, that she can't ever know about.
Sometimes he writes notes back, but somehow they always end up in the trash. Crumpled and discarded. All he can think is, why write it down in cryptic ways when he can tell her? Over tea, or in the pauses of conversations. Just slip it in as though it were meant to be there. Whispered quietly in the dark where it's a secret just between the two of them. Where she can whisper it back and even if nothing else is good and true, they at least have that to hold on to.
