He drove and I didn't talk and he didn't push me to.
That was the thing I kept noting, even now the absence of push. The specific quality of a person who understood that silence was not vacancy. Who could be beside someone who was inside their own head and not require them to come out of it immediately.
The city went past the window.
I was thinking about Tola saying finally, about Emeka's burn, about the graduate school friend who had argued about a building in Porto with the specificity of someone who had been waiting for years to make this argument with someone equal to it.
About the stories.
The thesis at two in the morning. The road trip mediation. The furniture and the four-hour drive.
He was the same person everywhere.
That was what the evening had given me. Not new informatio
