Priceless

I meet him outside of my usual routine. It is campsite dark, the stars a fish shape across a December sky. It is arctic cold, the sort of cold where it hurts to breathe rapidly.

He is scaffold size and wintering. His dogs pause on the pavement, wet noses up, and he asks me where I am headed.

I tell him I have been walking for miles today. 24 miles in fact. 

By God, 24 miles to where, he says and I say not really to anywhere. 

I like to walk in a grand circle, I say. I tell him I am am now en route to buy essentials and I tell him my entire itemised list. I say: 4 pints of milk, toilet roll, dishwasher tablets, a newspaper to encourage the fire.

Far too much information, he says. 

I know, I say. It is a brain thing. 

His dogs are far too obedient. I cannot follow his speaking in the event they should frolic sweetly into the traffic, I imagine the screams, the red mess, the trauma that our five minute exchange could cause. The dogs have perms, they are soft as shandy.

I think of my youngest child, the feral evenings that shape our lives. How nobody could ever know the pain if it. I don't ever tell anyone about what happens to us. I have learned that sharing results in interference.

When he talks his voice has a nostalgic element to it that I recognise, but cannot justify. I pull over some past I cannot grasp, sense a sudden overwhelming safety - how horizon it is, I remember how long river the days felt as a child. 

We start to make calls. They are often. Irregular. When you can. Talk tomorrow. Talk now.

Coffee. Sometimes. 

I confess like he is my church. 

The vulnerability of his childhood kisses like a blue bruise.

He challenges me every time we speak. 

He makes me a higher version of myself through self awareness. 

He is relentless with questions, he is excavating. 

He sends me podcasts about my lifelong neurodevelopmental condition. 

He is astonishingly blue eyed. He is athletic and short wearing with fuck-me thighs, he ritualises wearing glasses on his head.

When he self deprecates. I oppose rigidly. 

He is not familiar with women who aren't ghouls to socially conditioned aesthetics. 

We take responsibility for what this is and what it isn't. 

An oxymoron. It isn't very much, but it has unmeasurable value

I am not his type. I will not ever be his type. It is a blessed relief to not be somebody's type and to still have a connection that is blinding.

He is the extraordinary person I didn't know I was waiting for. 

There is no anything for us. We might meet later - we might not.

He talks about a woman with labia like octupi.

He does not pathologise when I have a pseudobulbar episode about the woman with labial octupi.

He has to go soon. 

Going will feel like a severance.

I will still look for him and the dogs when I go to the green coffee shop.

I will not call his phone. 

When my grandfather died, I called his landline intermittently for three years. 

Although this isnt a death, I will not do the Grandad thing. 

I think about him thinking about his children and I think about him on his own and the stop of the external world and I think he will listen to the silence, and grow another three thousand feet. 

He said something about me being different. I am. I go over and over that