Chapter 2:

Motion is different.

Sitting still, the mind has no excuse to move. It just — stays. Circles the same fixed points. Wears grooves into them. Thirteen minutes and then you pick up your bag and you join the current of people moving through hallways and suddenly the mind has geography to work with and geography is dangerous, geography means you pass things, you pass people, you pass doorways and bulletin boards and that particular stretch of lockers near the science wing that you have rerouted your entire transit pattern to avoid because of what happened near those lockers in September which was nothing, objectively nothing, a conversation that ended in three seconds, except that you were the one who ended it and the way you ended it was by stopping talking mid-sentence and walking away because your mouth stopped working and your legs made a unilateral decision and you've been taking the long way around ever since, which adds approximately four minutes to every transition, which means you've spent — I've done this math, I've done it at 2am on a Tuesday when sleep wasn't available and arithmetic was the only thing that felt real — somewhere in the region of forty additional minutes walking the long way around those lockers this semester alone.

Forty minutes.

I could've learned something in forty minutes.

I could've learned a language. Not a whole language. A few words. Something useful. Something that would make me a more functional person to encounter in a hallway rather than the person I currently am which is a person who takes the long way around to avoid a three second memory and then does the math on how much time that costs him and then keeps doing it anyway because the math never mattered, the math was never going to matter, I knew that when I started calculating, the calculating was just something to do with the part of my brain that needed to feel like it was solving something.

The hallway is loud in the way hallways are loud.

Different from the cafeteria. The cafeteria is a collection of separate silences vibrating against each other. Hallways are just — movement. People who need to be somewhere else. The loudness is incidental. Nobody is performing it.

I keep to the right side.

This is not a metaphor.

I keep to the right side because the right side of this particular hallway has more wall and less foot traffic and because I have learned — this is something I have actually learned, this is a genuine adaptation, I'm not sure if it counts as growth or just as efficient self-management, those feel like different categories but I can't always locate the border between them — I have learned that fewer people means fewer interactions means fewer moments where someone has to decide in real time what to do with their face when they see me.

I prefer to give people that decision in private.

It's the least I can do. Literally. It is genuinely the minimum.

The hallway thins out near the east stairwell. Most people take the main stairs because the main stairs are wider and better lit and the east stairwell smells like something I've never been able to identify, something industrial and slightly sweet, and people generally avoid smells they can't identify. I've identified it. I've had a lot of time in that stairwell alone and I've identified it as the specific smell of a cleaning product they use on the pipes that run along the upper wall and I know this because I looked it up and I looked it up because I had nothing else to do in that stairwell except stand there and either make peace with the smell or investigate it and investigation felt more productive than peace, peace has never come particularly easily, investigation I can manage, investigation requires no one's cooperation except your own.

I'm halfway to the east stairwell when it happens.

And by it I mean nothing. I mean the most ordinary possible collision of two people in a hallway, the kind that happens approximately ten thousand times a day in schools across the country, the kind that generates no lasting documentation, no emotional residue, no significance of any measurable kind.

His shoulder catches mine. Not hard. The contact lasts maybe a third of a second. He's moving faster than I am, head down, earbuds in, the universal signal for I am not available for human contact which I respect, which I deeply and personally respect as a communication strategy, and the collision is completely mutual, fifty-fifty fault, no reasonable person would assign blame to either party, this is just what happens when two people occupy a hallway and one of them isn't paying full attention to his trajectory.

He looks up.

Says sorry — quick, reflexive, already moving on before the second syllable lands, the apology is genuine, I can tell it's genuine, it has the texture of a genuine apology which is that it requires nothing back, it isn't waiting for anything, it's just a sound a decent person makes when their shoulder catches someone else's shoulder, it means nothing except I see you briefly and I acknowledge we collided and then he's gone, he's already three steps past me, he's already thinking about wherever he's going, I am not a data point in his day, I am a minor navigational event he has already processed and filed and forgotten and this is — this is correct, this is the appropriate response to a hallway collision, I know this —

But here's what I notice. What I can't stop noticing, immediately and against my will, what floods in before I can stop it: he didn't look at me first. He apologized with his head already turning away. Not rudely. Not deliberately. Just — the apology was automatic enough that it didn't require confirmation of who he was apologizing to. He didn't need to know who I was to decide I deserved a sorry. He extended it universally. To whatever person his shoulder had caught. A blank sorry. A sorry with no addressee.

And I think — I start thinking — I start building, which is the problem, I start building a whole architecture around this stranger from a one-third-of-a-second shoulder collision and the architecture goes like this: he apologizes reflexively because he has been taught to apologize reflexively because somewhere in his life the cost of not apologizing was high enough that it became instinct, became pre-verbal, became something his body does before his brain participates, which means somewhere there was a lesson, which means somewhere there was someone who made him feel the weight of collision, who made him understand that bodies moving through space affect other bodies moving through space and that acknowledgment is owed, that acknowledgment is the minimum currency of human passage —

Or.

Or he is just a person who says sorry when he bumps into people because that is a normal and common courtesy that most people extend without requiring a traumatic origin story and I am standing in a hallway having constructed an entire psychological history for someone I will never speak to from a collision that lasted a third of a second and I am doing it again, I am doing the thing, I am taking a person who is probably fine — who is almost certainly fine, who has every statistical reason to be fine, who bumped into someone in a hallway and apologized and moved on, which is fine, which is what fine people do — and I am narrating their interior life from the outside because I am guilty of something and guilt is a lens and a lens changes everything you point it at, everything becomes evidence of damage, everyone becomes a case study in what damage looks like, I look at a stranger's reflexive apology and I write him a wound he probably doesn't have and then I feel something close to recognition and the recognition is not empathy, I want to be very clear the recognition is not empathy, empathy would require me to be thinking about him, what I am actually doing is thinking about myself while using him as the surface I'm projecting onto and that is — that is the same thing I've always done, just quieter now, just internal now, the audience is just me now instead of a lunch table full of people who thought I was funny —

The arrogance of it.

The specific, nauseating arrogance of deciding that I can read people. That I have earned the ability to read people through suffering. As if suffering is a credential. As if two years of quiet makes me perceptive rather than just — still. Still and watching. Which is not the same thing. Which is not the same thing and I know it's not the same thing and I caught myself and I want credit for catching myself and the wanting credit is its own problem, isn't it, the wanting credit for the catching, the small interior satisfaction of going there it is, there's the arrogance, I found it, I named it — like that makes me better, like naming the thing you're doing wrong while you're doing it wrong is meaningfully different from just doing it wrong, like the self-awareness is the same as the correction, it isn't, I know it isn't, awareness and correction are not synonyms, I have confused them before, I have stood in front of people and named what I did and believed that the naming was most of the work and it isn't, it has never been most of the work, the naming is just the beginning of the work and sometimes it doesn't even qualify as that, sometimes the naming is just — performance, just another version of making yourself the most interesting person in the room, except the room is now entirely inside your own head and the audience is just you and you are, it turns out, a very easy audience to perform for, you know all your own best lines —

He's gone.

He was gone before I finished the first sentence.

The hallway has thinned further. I'm closer to the east stairwell than I realized. I've been standing still for — I don't know, I've lost count, which doesn't happen often, which means I went deep enough that the counting stopped, which means I owe myself a return to the surface now, which means I pick up my bag strap where it's slipped off my shoulder and I walk.

The stairwell smells like it always smells.

I've made my peace with it.

The classroom is empty when I arrive.

Not unusual. I come early because early means choosing, early means the room is still a set of possibilities rather than a set of already-made decisions I have to navigate around. Third desk from the back, left side, against the wall. I chose this seat on the first day of the semester and I have sat in it every class since and I will sit in it until something forces a change, because consistency in small things is — I've read that somewhere, or heard it, or arrived at it alone in the east stairwell, I can't remember which, consistency in small things is a way of practicing consistency in large things, and large things are what I owe people, large things are what I've been trying to build, quietly, without making a production of it, without letting the building become its own performance —

I put my bag down.

The room has seven other desks. Two of them have jackets on them already, which means their owners have claimed them and gone somewhere and will return before the bell. I don't know whose jackets. I know which desks they prefer and what they tend to write in the margins of their notes and the particular rhythm of how one of them taps a pen when they're thinking but I don't have — there's a word for what I don't have. For the thing that would make those observations into something real rather than just accumulated data stored in a person who has had nothing better to do with his attention for two years than observe and record and never use any of it, never spend any of it, just — collect.

The word is permission.

I don't have permission.

I look at the board. Nothing written yet. Clean. The particular blankness of a surface that hasn't been asked anything today, that's just waiting to find out what it's supposed to hold.

Outside the hallway starts to fill.

I keep my bag on my lap. I keep my eyes level. I keep my face doing the thing I've taught my face to do which is approximately nothing, which is a kind of resting neutral that I've practiced in the mirror at 6am more times than I will admit, timing it to confirm it, making sure the neutral doesn't tip into something that reads as hostile because hostile invites confrontation and I don't — I can't do confrontation yet, I don't trust myself in confrontation yet, I don't know what I'd say, I don't know what would come out —

People start coming in.

I look at the board.

Clean.

Waiting.