His eyes were aged and brown from years of dreaming. About sailboats, he said. He said that there was only one place worth escaping to, and that only sailboats could take you there. I never knew where that place was. We drank sweet tea on the pier and took walks, collecting seashells on the way home. I stopped feeling sick about the space between stars when we shared our own space in the warm evenings that turned into nights only marginally cooler. Strangely, we were louder then. Trying to learn the songs of sailors and drinking songs and the songs that belonged to travellers. Our days were spent in a sincere, cosy sort of silence.
But as is ever, things regressed towards the mean. He started telling me things I knew that I was secretly thinking, as if he could read my thoughts alongside sentences in his book named The Elegant Universe, which was about dimensions in hiding and superstrings and a quest for the ultimate theory. When I told him that we should perhaps just be friends, he set fire to all his sailboats. I never did tell him that the love I had for him put his oceanic expeditions to shame. That even if he did float away, one constant would remain, and still, even if there were hundred of miles between us: loving him would always be my biggest and favourite adventure.
