He went looking for her at the auditorium, and confirmed she was indeed there, with her notebook on her lap, facing the stage. He walked towards her and entered the row right behind her, sitting in silence, one chair to her right. She had her eyes closed until she noticed him, resting his head on his arms, over the chair right beside her, and stared at him from the corner of her eye.
— Do you always sneak up on people and just stand beside them like that?
— I thought you might be thinking about something and I did not want to disturb you.
She smiled a faint smile, and clicked the pen she held in her hand a few times, laying her head back and looking up to the freshly painted ceiling.
— So, are you thinking about something?
— I was, but now I'm just staring at the ceiling.
— One could say it's a nice ceiling to stare at.
— I suppose so.
They fell silent, admiring the ceiling.
— Tell me, is it harder to talk about a feeling you've never felt, or is it just me?
— One could say it's harder, yes. But then again, you can have an opinion about things you've never actively experienced, can you not?
— Feels awkward to have an "opinion" about a feeling.
— What is the feeling you find hard to talk about?
— I have an assignment to write about something powerful, passionate. And I've always been average.
He turned his eyes away from the ceiling and looked at her. She didn't move an inch.
— That's kind of sad.
— But it's true. The thing is, I've seen people write and talk about how it is to be the person that feels more, you know. About being the passionate one. I've never been the passionate one. And now I'm sad to think about it, and I don't want to write about it.
— Make it up, then.
She stared at him from the corner of her eye, again, before turning to face him. "He's an artist, he must think it's easy to make things up," she thought.
— What?
— Imagine yourself in a situation where you are the passionate one. Like a dream.
— I guess everyone dreams about that, isn't it? About feeling in such a marvelous way about someone else.
He noticed the tone on her voice was dryer than it had been lately. Lately she had been writing a lot, and spending more time at the drama department, part of her personal quest towards becoming a less rational person. "She's a matematician, she must think the way she feels her own feelings is wrong, because she thinks in numbers, not in an abstract way, like everyone else seems to do," he thought. He decided to respond so that she wouldn't think he was analyzing her that much.
— Yeah.
— I guess I could do that.
All of the feelings she put in that sentence fell on him with an extraordinary weight. Numbers are very heavy things, to an artist who thinks mostly in colors, and he was very much sure that she didn't realize how heavy her words had been. He felt a strong urge to carry her in his arms and take her to a museum, or the park, or the top of the Eiffel Tower, all at once. He decided to go with what he could really do, instead of what he wished to do, with all the colors in his artist heart.
— Do you wanna get coffee? Or some dessert or something? Or a hug?
— I'll take all of those, please. All at the same time, if possible.
You know, I made up a few stories in my lifetime. I have character sheets, entire backstories, the whole nine yards. But if I had to choose one of the stories to focus on and build something greater out of (like an actual book, who knows), at this point in my life, this would be the one. It's fairly simple, there's no big endgame or anything. I even considered not naming the characters at all, I'd try to describe them in some other very characteristic way so that I could tell the stories in a bunch of dialogues and you would still get it. But eventually a few names came to mind, although the two main characters remain nameless. They are almost ethereal beings, in my mind.
You don't understand how good I feel about this. There's a fangirl screaming her lungs out inside my head.
I want to feel like this forever.
