I've grown to think, despite organization having always been a strong point of mine, that my brain is laid out like some medieval town. A mass of kinks, corners and peculiar turns, a circuitry only slowly understood once I grew up with it.
His (from my vantage point), is more like a Hippodamian grid, apparently simple and orderly, despite his not having much use for (or maybe even understanding of) order and its advantages.
Why should one of us come to love the other?
Our door was open. He was in its space, neatly framed. It was the day after we'd returned from the infirmary. A March morning unseasonably warm.
He was standing there, mostly bare, having come back from the shower, visibly damp, where he wasn't still wet. His new cast, not much different from the one he'd fallen down the stairs wearing, he'd kept dry. I'd previously noticed his talent for keeping his casts that way - he'd had awful lot of practice at it by this point.
Except for his having a few bruises on his exposed left arm and along his ribs, it was almost as if the last few days had never happened. Then he plopped his not particularly long, damp person diagonally across his bed and looked up at me. His cane bounced abandoned to the floor, his arms reached over his head, his fingers along the bed's metal frame.
It was a display, a belly-up vulnerability. I looked to his face while he closed his eyes. I stayed there standing, staring, I suppose, as in a museum before some work of art. And it was what I wanted to do. I was pretty much daring him to catch me looking. Were we playing some uninvented game? Going through my mind was only an urge to be hold the moment; make it last. His face remained a calculated neutral as he finally opened his eyes. "What's up, buttercup?", he said up at me, unsurprised.
Really, we could be inhabiting different planets sometimes. I looked away and took a breath.
Absorbing nothing more than air.
Derailed again. These little curve balls, his making me sense him from a different angle from one moment to the next - they were a bit of a constant. He couldn't help it; and with the oddness of him I had almost come to enjoy them. I began to understand how he wasn't aware he was doing it. And maybe, actually, he wasn't doing anything, maybe it was simply me, overthinking what I saw - or thought I saw.
Not agony, anger or joy; not a reckoning, just a moment, a fragment of a Saturday morning.