I think I felt drawn to you the moment I saw you.

I saw nothing extraordinary. I found you the same way I found everyone else: Plain. Predictable.

However, unlike everyone else that day, you always tended to look down and looked up only when someone talked to you.

It made me think, This person must be thinking about a lot of things. Conflicts unresolved. Viewpoints unspoken.

Also, you seemed to me as someone---close to very---vulnerable. Not weak vulnerable, but susceptible vulnerable. Open vulnerable. Damage-apt vulnerable. You were out of the box, but you were trying to get back in, trying to rebuild it somehow.

You amazed me.

And when every second piled up into weeks---months---and I saw you do that one thing which, even for a short while, let you reside in a beautiful, beautiful box---it was a different feeling for me, seeing how it was a different feeling for you.

That one thing I wish you'd do for me, and not because of me, like you did because of her.

It was selfish, how I would rather have kept you as you are: broken and prone to pain. It was a wish I would have supposedly brushed off but didn't. It was fiendish of me, ruthless, no matter how I tried to convince myself otherwise.

But that wish---it won't happen, anyway. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not the day after tomorrow. Not ever.

. . . .because you've built it now, your box. You've found your place for good. You've devised a way to break all ties with your past.

And I've realized it wasn't your vulnerability which amazed me, but your desire to resist that vulnerability.

And ever since the moment I saw you, I have been, over and over, drawn to you.

Labels: friend