met him again, at the bus stop. this time less tension — but still the same unknowingness. we talked less than before. the usual questions again — the same ones he's asked before, things he should already know by now. i answered. i always answer. always try to explain.
and then we just — sat there side by side. in silence. again i noticed i was acting differently. still aware of him in that specific way. and somewhere underneath the quiet i think i was waiting for him to say something. but this time i knew how to stay silent.
 

bus arrived.
 

we sat exactly where we sat last time and this time it felt less tense. probably since i partly knew where this feeling came from.
 

meeting him again made me think about it.
i've been thinking about it since. not about him exactly. more about what the whole thing represents. this strange, recurring encounter with someone who once felt like the most familiar person in the room, and now feels like someone i'm perpetually meeting for the first time.
 

the thing is — i can't read him. at all.
and i'm someone who reads people. easily, almost automatically. i pick up signals, match energy, find the thread in a conversation without really thinking about it. with him, none of that works.
i say something and i don't know how it landed. i look for a signal and the room gives me nothing. the whole system i use to connect with people just — stalls. it's like trying to navigate in the dark by instinct, and realising your instincts have no reference point here.
so i go quiet. which is not like me. i normally talk easily. with almost anyone. but with him i never know what to say — and i think i've finally understood why. it's not that there's nothing to say. it's that something is at stake. the part of me that usually flows freely gets intercepted by the part that cares too much. i was just trying to be careful. and i'm not used to being careful.
 
still i've been trying to understand what we actually were. and i think i've been calling it the wrong thing for a long time.
there was that trip. and during that time something shifted — at least for me. i found myself gravitating toward him, looking for him in rooms, staying close without fully understanding why. i think i told myself it was because i liked him. it was the easiest explanation. but i don't think that was really it.
i was in a vulnerable place then. unsteady in a way i couldn't have articulated at the time. and something about him felt fixed. not warm, not open — just there. solid in a way i wasn't. the kind of person who doesn't spiral, doesn't make things about themselves, just exists in a room with a kind of quiet certainty. and so i gravitated. the way you reach for a railing without thinking about it. not a choice exactly — more like a response.
 

he probably didn't know he was doing that for me. he was just being himself. unspectacular about it. he wasn't trying to be steady — he just was. and i needed something steady, and he happened to be standing there.
those kinds of people leave a mark that has nothing to do with romance. maybe it's almost deeper than romance in some ways — because it's tied to who you were when you were most exposed. for me it's a deeper kind of feeling. for the other person it was just him being himself.
 

i think i've finally untangled it. what i felt was real. it just wasn't what i thought it was. i wasn't reaching for him. i was reaching for ground. and for a moment, briefly, he was it. and then the trip ended. and the container it existed in disappeared. and there was nowhere for it to go. so it just — stayed. unnamed. unlived. still somehow present every time i see him, layered underneath conversations about nothing.
that's where the tension comes from — the underlying memory.
 

i was looking for steady ground. i found it briefly in a person. and then i had to learn to find it in myself.
 

that's probably the whole story. almost funny how clear things can become years later — and almost feel delusional when i think back of it.