We were eating
breakfast. Not really breakfast, since I was eating a
grilled-cheese sandwich and he was eating
fries, but it felt like breakfast. So that's what I'll call it.
He had been away all weekend and I felt like I would burst by the end of it. I know it sounds silly and girly and stupid, but it's true. Whenever someone mentions his name I get all giggly and melty like a sixteen-year old cheerleader. I feel even dumber because he's quiet and introverted and just wouldn't appreciate that kind of thing.
He didn't know about the weekend I'd had. He didn't know how I thought I might be going crazy, and how I almost got hit by a car because I couldn't stop staring at it, and how I had to run out of my Literature lecture because I thought the walls were caving in on me. I was saving all of this until I had finished my sandwich, because I would lose my appetite once the story started. So we talked about dogs instead.
There was a quiet moment. Not an awkward silence - with him, these did not exist. Sometimes he would stare quietly into the distance like he was thinking about something way cooler than anything you could ever understand, and then come back to earth a few minutes later. It was nice, this silence. He knew how to frame his words. And then he turned to me, out of nowhere, and said (with a little smile that made me want to kiss him right there, even though I had bread in my mouth):
"Look at you. You're squirming in the crushing grip of reason."
And he was right.
I almost choked. I hadn't told him a damn thing, and he was right. He had a way of saying it that made it sound bigger than everything else in the room, like he was making a mockery of his own words, not being painfully intellectual and trite like it sounds coming off of a page. Like he was joking but secretly not. So what do you suppose I did? I ate my grilled-cheese sandwich and I squirmed. Because I didn't need to say anything else to him about it. He knew already. He knew how scared I was. What good is a conversation when the words have already been spoken in your minds? It's a big fucking waste of space. That's what it is.