"I've been thinking about shapes," he said, and his voice scratched like the side of a knife slicing through a cardboard box. "Shapes?" I asked, turning the page in my biology book and scratching the lead of a mechanical pencil on a blank sheet of notebook paper, copying a definition I found on the page for the word "endocytosis" with my free hand; the one he wasn't clutching. "Shapes," he repeated in agreement, bringing my fingers up to his face and staring at them, holding them one at a time between his own fingers as he examined them carefully. "Shapes like these," he said, "The shapes of your fingers." I glanced at him and then back to my paper, dotting an "i". "My fingers aren't really shapes in themselves," I said, as he held my fingers in his own, his thumb laying across them as he drew the towards his eyes. "They're part of a bigger shape, really, they're part of my hand, which is part of my arm, which is part of my body."
"Squares," he said, not responding to my comment, "I've also been thinking about squares." I brushed my hair behind my ear with my free hand and turned pages in the glossary until I found the word "osmosis". "Why squares?" I asked, as he set down my hand and lay on the pillow in front of me, staring at my face from under me, his eyes wide with a strange sort of fascination. My eyes flew to him and then back to my paper, and I crossed a "t". "Boxes are square," he said to me, in the tone of a reminder, like this would clear up the significance, to him, of squares. "There you are correct," I agreed, nodding, brushing the pesky hairs back behind my ear. He smiled widely and reached up, grasping the stray hairs in his hand and then sitting up so that he could study them more carefully, his eyes ablaze with wonder. "Everything is kept in boxes," he said, pulling my hairs apart and holding each one up to the light which shone over my room, his eyes sparkling delightedly. "Now that, beg your pardon, I must disagree with. Everything is not kept in boxes."
"Everything important."
"People are not kept in boxes."
"People are not things. I said every thing is kept in boxes." I glanced up at him and a smile tugged at the corner of my mouth, despite myself, and his mouth fell open in joyful surprise, his eyes brightening even further, before I blushed and looked back down at my paper. "Osmosis is 'a process by which molecules of a solvent tend to pass through a semipermeable membrane from a less concentrated solution into a more concentrated one, thus equalizing the concentrations on each side of the membrane'," I informed him, keeping my eyes steady on the blue lines of my notebook paper as I wrote. "It's also 'the process of gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas, knowledge, et cetera'," he replied, his smile huge as he stared at me. My head shot up and I stared at him, bewildered, feeling strangely ill, and yet giddy. I moved forward quickly and my lips touched his lips, like hand meeting hand in a ballroom dance; but it was only a handshake, I pulled away quickly, my heart offbeat, and looked back down at my paper, curling the end of a "g". He didn't move, only took my hand back in his and gazed out the window as fingers ran across the lengths of mine over and over. "It sure is wonderful here," he said, looking back at me, his eyes moving to my lips for a second before flicking back up to my eyes, a blush on his cheeks. "And you've only just arrived," I replied, the sound of his train receding in the distance as he traced circles on my palm.
© 2012
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