Jacob and Sarah move through the hallway like the same poles of a magnet — perpetually close, perpetually repelling. Their hands drift toward each other and dodge away at the last second, over and over, a game neither of them agreed to play but neither will quit. I have watched this happen at close range for weeks. It looks exhausting. It looks, from the outside, like two people slowly losing their minds over a distance of one inch.
At lunch the wall between them collapses, and what replaces it is something I can only describe as an invisible pink gas — a dense, ambient field of mutual awareness and suppressed feeling that radiates outward from where they sit and makes everyone in the immediate vicinity deeply, inexplicably uncomfortable. It's not anything they do. It's what they almost do, constantly, and then don't. The almost is the whole problem. I personally suppress the urge to regurgitate every time I sit near them. Olivia thinks it's sweet. I think Olivia and I have fundamentally different nervous systems.
They are, on paper, obviously not a match. Jacob dresses like he sources his wardrobe exclusively from the reject pile at a thrift store — sweatpants, oversized hoodies that have never seen an iron, the general aesthetic of someone who made a decision in eighth grade to stop trying and has honored that decision every day since. His commitment to this is almost admirable. Sarah, by contrast, never fails to be elegant. She moves through school in pink and cherry blossom coquette outfits that seem to exist in a different atmospheric register from everything around her. She takes all high honors classes and is the tenth grade representative. She is the ace of the junior varsity volleyball team. Her skin is so flawless that I have spent an embarrassing amount of time wondering about her routine. Her eyes are the exact right size for her face. When Jacob first introduced her to the group, I was so struck that I was grateful she even looked in my direction. I remember thinking I was fine to be completely absorbed into her orbit. I thought that was a normal thing to think about a person you had just met.
I still think about it sometimes. I have not reached a conclusion.
So when I found out that Jacob and Sarah were talking — really talking, texting in the specific way that produces the kind of messages that make me want to unplug my eyes and rinse them — I was as blindsided as I was the day Kyle blocked me on Instagram and moved away without explanation. That comparison surfaced on its own. I noticed it, filed it in a folder I haven't labeled yet, and kept moving.
The texts, for the record, are objectively terrible. I have seen some of them. They communicate in a language of half-finished sentences and excessive punctuation that should not work and somehow does. Jacob, who communicates with me primarily through the middle finger and a rotating catalog of insults, apparently becomes a different person over text. I don't know how to account for this. I have been trying not to think about it too hard.
What I can account for is the way I watch them. I tell myself it's professional interest — ongoing case study, data collection, the due diligence of someone responsible for the relational health of the group. This is partially true. It is not entirely true. When their hands almost touch and then don't, something in me holds its breath without asking my permission first. When Sarah laughs at something Jacob says, which she does more than anyone has a right to given the quality of his material, I feel something that I have been categorizing as secondhand awkwardness and moving on from quickly. The categorization may not be accurate. I am choosing not to investigate.
Jacob is my oldest friend. I have known him since before I had a concept of what a friend was. He soiled his pants in kindergarten because he was scared to go to the bathroom alone, and I was the one who didn't tell anyone. I have been not-telling people things about Jacob for so long that it has become a reflex. He knows things about me that I have never told anyone else, not because I told him but because he was simply there when they happened, accumulating evidence the way you accumulate weather — passively, over time, until one day you look up and realize how much has gathered.
I don't know what Sarah sees in him. I have genuinely tried to reverse-engineer her perspective and come up empty. What I know is that she sees something, and that whatever it is has produced in Jacob a version of himself I don't fully recognize — careful, attentive, willing to sit in sustained awkwardness for the chance to be near someone. Jacob, who has never been careful about anything in his life, who operates entirely on instinct and momentum and the baseline confidence of someone who has never really needed to try. With Sarah he tries. It is strange to watch. It is stranger to feel strange watching it.
I am the analyst. I read people. I identify patterns, make assessments, deliver verdicts. I have been doing this for years and I am good at it. But every system has the cases it wasn't built to process, the data points that don't fit the existing framework and force you to either expand the model or look away. Jacob and Sarah are making me reconsider some of my models. Sarah, specifically. The way she moves through a room. The way she turned to me once in the middle of a group conversation and asked what I thought, as if my answer was the one she had been waiting for. The way her scent reaches me before she does, every time, and something in me orients toward it without being asked.
I haven't told anyone this. I'm not sure I've fully told myself.
For now, I'm calling it a case study. I'm watching the data. I'm waiting to see what it means.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ6CweKHI2mn
and then Add to home screen.