At the beginning, when I first caught his eye across the lunch room table at school, it did not feel at all out of the ordinary; not how I encountered it later, at least. It was unusual, perhaps calm and maybe warm, but certainly casual, passing, and in queue for being immediately dismissed as something entirely insignificant; though perhaps not so immediately: his hazel held some gravity, after all. Our eyes met, a flash of intrigue materialised, then dissolved, and I looked away, and although science has little to assist me in such an assertion, I can assure that I felt him look away too, and therefore I know that he did.

That was, undoubtedly, after considerable and supererogatory thought to the matter, the very first time I noticed him: the first time I considered him at all, and he at all waded into the realm of my conscious; and it was a considerable step, for he would not leave it at any close time, for a long time yet to be. The second time – no, there is no point counting the times I considered him after that. Instead, it was two weeks past, that he approached me, and with a definite tone, asked my name; and I answered, and asked his; and he asked politely whether he could sit down at the place on the bench next to my own, and I affirmed that indeed he could, and so he did, and thus our silence began.

A romantic, pregnant silence drew the air heavy around us. We looked both ahead, parallel, for miles beyond and into a misty nothing, that promised the world beyond its clandestine grasp. At one moment, I looked at him, and he looked at me, too, and our eyes met again; and we were drawn nearer, though not a muscle on any of our bones moved an inch.

He was a silent type, and I deemed him the father of that pregnant silence; it was not alien to me, but its fragrance was dismal, and it was not my own. On our first date, which started with a momentary dinner and stretched on into a deep, starless night, on a cold street outside his house, illuminated by lamplight and a waning moon, we stood afore one another, facing our faces; and in his whispering hazel, I saw the mist.

And when we leaned in to kiss, I felt it. I could not know what it was. Perhaps the mist, or another void, but inside his warm, dry mouth, beyond the tip of his tongue and the pit of his throat, there lay a nothingness that caught my breath, and dared not return it to the world without.

And only then I saw what I see now: that the illusory cold, that followed him in every step, that it started from somewhere deep inside his body, and thence it flowed, to the outside, and beyond.

12.II.23