The stability arrived without fanfare, the way real weather systems do—slowly, thoroughly, until the landscape itself had changed shape underneath it.
I noticed it first on a Sunday morning that should have felt ordinary and did not. I woke in Damian’s bed with the residual warmth of his body still printed along my spine and the residual quiet of a night that had required no formal negotiations, no counted permissions, no emergency stops. We had simply gone to bed after a late film session, found each other under the sheets with the ease of people who had stopped treating proximity like a referendum, and slept. My body had not mapped the exit. My mind had not run the old diagnostic. The software that used to boot automatically every time I regained consciousness near him had gone so quiet
