But when she did speak it was as though she had spoken a hundred times before and would speak at least a hundred times again.
I was concerned because she had sat in silence for a good portion time after I asked her a question and I didn’t know how else to feel about it. It was almost sticky in my mind and when I tried to move the concern onto another finger to get it to stop sticking to my hand I found that I was just making it stick to my other hand or finger. But she did speak and it was unremarkable.
“I just… I don’t know.” She folded her hand as small as it would allow itself to be folded underneath her chin and she fluttered her eyelids as she broke eye contact with me. There was something else on the wall over there that made her blush. “I…” she made a concerned sound and looked at me, at the wall, at her shoes (all sullenly). She cracked her delicate knuckles loudly and looked at her fingernails impatiently. I didn’t know anything.

The wind blew a couple of times and if I would have got up and opened the window a stack of papers would have blown all over the floor and we would have got down on our hands and knees to pick them up, stack them, and shut the window again. We would have muttered apologies to one another and this bump, this rift, it would have done something different—it would have closed or flattened maybe. I was within walking distance to the window and I thought this and I noticed a coffeepot on the table by the window. And because I asked her if she wanted some coffee as an excuse to go open the window, she said that she had to leave and she refused to make eye contact with me.

I met someone else a few years in the future. It was the longest wait of my life.

Her name was Celia. The girl who left me, not this other one.