I look at him in quiet moments, the potential energy between us almost visible around us. I play out scenarios where we might have met 25 years before in a university town. It might have been at the first Starbucks I ever went to on Telegraph, where I got free drinks from my friend’s friend, the barista. Him in line in front of me, turning too swiftly, and spilling a drop of coffee on my Doc Martens.
Or that rave in a San Francisco warehouse where my heart was broken, but I danced like it was whole, like I hadn’t discovered the half-life of love is so fleeting. Bumping into him as I twirled, him in a Pearl Jam T-shirt and tattered sneakers.
Or maybe walking across campus with my friend to her science lab and catching a glimpse of the cute TA. “What’s his name?” And when she tells me it, it seems like fate that he has the same name as my first love.
But there is friction between the possibility and the reality that if I had met him then, he would have seen me as some 18-year-old kid. Too young. Too dumb. Too awkward to notice.
He notices me now. As an equal. As a friend. The decade between us inconsequential in middle age. Our attraction is luminescent, but on an invisible spectrum to everyone else but us.
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