I wasn't looking.
This is the part I most want to get right, and the part I have the least authority over, because it involves someone else, and she does not get a vote in how I tell it.
So: no name. Not here, not anywhere on this website. She is her, and that is all she will ever be here.
the order of events matters
I had just finished convincing myself that a person was not what I was missing. I had put the whole category down. I was, for the first time in years, genuinely not scanning a room.
And then there was a conversation. And then there was another one.
we talked like we already know parts of us not the usual surface stuff— something deeper...
I resisted it. I want that on the record because it is the part people skip when they retell this kind of story. I did not fall gratefully into it. I had just gotten somewhere, and this felt like being handed back the exact thing I had finally set down.
I remember thinking: this is a test, and the correct answer is no.
I was wrong about what the test was.
what it was actually made of
Not fireworks. I keep waiting for the fireworks part of this memory and it is not there.
It was: talking until it was late in a way that did not feel like staying up. Classrooms. Terrible coffee. Someone laughing at the specific stupid thing I said, not at a general funny thing. Walking somewhere slowly on purpose so it would take longer.
The particular sunlight in the afternoon on that side of campus.
it felt like i'd been found not introduced
what I did not understand yet
I thought what was happening was that I had found a person.
What was actually happening — and I could not have told you this at the time, I am only able to say it now, from the other end — is that I was in the middle of looking for God, and something arrived that made me feel known, and I did not yet have the equipment to tell those two things apart.
Fact
I met someone while I was searching for God.
Feeling
It felt like an answer. It felt like the search resolving.
What I thought it meant
So I concluded that she was what the searching had been for.
What I learned later
She was not the answer, and it is not a demotion to say so. Being loved by someone taught me what it feels like to be known, which is the thing I had been looking for a word for. She was not the destination. She was the first evidence that the destination existed.
This chapter is the lightest one in the book. I have thought about whether to weigh it down with what comes later — to hedge it, to write it already knowing how it ends.
I've decided not to. It was good. It was actually, genuinely good, and it would be a small and cowardly kind of revisionism to go back and dim it now because of what happened afterwards.
It gets to stay bright.
Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.