Tim

It was his hands that I noticed first.  I like hands that are not perfect, hands that look a little rough.  I especially liked watching him write, the lightness of which this rough hand might be capable.  I wanted to touch his hand, but I did not.  I wanted to outline his hand with my fingertips.  I wanted to touch his fingers to my bottom lip.  My thoughts about his hands were all I knew of him for the first year.

In the second year I learned he drank coffee.  He was one of those types that carried a travel mug clipped to his backpack, long before travel mugs were an everyday, everyone, kind of thing.  Back when it was a waving flag that meant you were a friend of the earth.  I liked his addiction.

The third year I learned his name.  He told me had noticed me a lot.   I wondered how this was possible as he had always seemed oblivious of me.  After that it became okay to sit beside him instead of a few rows back.  And up close I could see his hands better.

The fourth year I learned he was a better actor than I expected.  And he was quirky.  Maybe even a little bit odd.  In a good way.

Year five, I learned that his hands were rough, and soft.  He told me had always wanted to kiss me, and his kiss was the kind that lacks something utterly unknowable.  In that crowded space his emptiness spilled over onto me a little and choked me.  I drove him home when he became too intoxicated to drive.  His father seemed unnecessarily grateful.

Year six his brain began to implode.  I learned he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.  He got into a car accident and abandoned his car on the roadside.  He showed up at the bar immediately afterward and ordered a beer, and made sculptures on the table out of pebbles and gum wrappers and bits of broken glass while he waited for his drink, which was not meant to be mixed with lithium.  It turns out they do not have nachos in the psychiatric ward.

His father came looking for him that night, but by then he had fled.  None of us could have convinced him to stay.  His father stayed instead.  He sat at my table and told me about his divorce.  And about how he had tried to help his son keep a job.  And how mental illness ran in their family.  And how lonely he was without his wife.  And I looked at his father's rough hands on the rough wood table, the same hands as Tim's, tracing the names that had been carved there, and still wearing his wedding ring.



*