Marketplace

Elidern, someone I hold here in Brussels, a bond I've been quietly tending for longer than I usually let myself notice, looked thin tonight. Not sick-thin, not the kind that asks for worry out loud, but the kind you only catch if you already know the shape a person is supposed to take up in a room. He laughed at the right places. He asked about my day before I could ask about his. But something in the way he held his own shoulders had gone narrower, like he was taking up less of the space he's entitled to, and I noticed it the way you notice a familiar song played a half-step flat, not wrong enough to stop the song, just enough to sit crooked in you after.