It’s the quiet moments.

Lying in bed, you look over and there they are, idly scratching their cheek or turning a page or typing something out, and suddenly it almost hurts to breathe.

Or they tell a joke the same way fifty times for years and there’s always a little pause right before the punchline, and one day, without thinking about it, without even realizing it, they set it up and you reel off the ending. Boom. And they laugh that they’ve trained you, and you laugh, because it’s true, and you don’t mind. The joke becomes the automatic reaction; a deeper kind of humor.

The petty arguments, well-worn and familiar, ever-changing like the tides, like the precession of equinoxes. The same hollow pit in your stomach when you hear their key in the lock, every time, an acrophobic looking down from the open plane door, silk chute packed tight against the hollow of your back.

The glorious freefall of their presence.