Thoughts Over Scrambled Eggs

My roommate is a wonderfully domestic sort, the kind to make scrambled eggs in the morning and chamomile tea at the evening hour. She might hate that I write this. I am not sure it is how she thinks of herself, but I love it. I love the calmness of it, the constancy. Oddly enough, she possesses the same qualities I respect in my father, the steadiness, the command of time and of life. Pain and happiness alike pass through her eyes; suffering transient, but a childlike joy remaining always. I seek it in her eyes, her joy contagious, her sadness uncomfortable. The world calls this “empathy”. I note that I feel if for very few, but I feel it for her.

The thought of her leaving is sour in my breast. I hate it when my mind goes there, though the passage of days and nights bring it ever nearer. I know the hours of my discontent to be fast at hand. I hesitate to call the thing “love”, neither of us, being the outwardly sentimental sort. Somehow that word is weakness to both of us, something in our respective pasts having tainted it. We are what we are, wedded with no marital bed, nor desiring one. The joke of it is palatable, leaves a taste in the mouth for its truth.

Dare I call the thing “friendship”? I am not sure, I am not sure there is a word for this kind of intimacy. After all, what can you call the eyes that peer into your face, the eyes that know every one of its creases and can read your whole demeanor in a fraction of a second? What can you call that knowing glance that prophesies your emotion before it ever rises to your cheeks? I cannot call it anything I suppose, too deep for “friendship”, too shy and inwardly for a label given so liberally. So then I will call it nothing, and I will keep these mediations to myself, they have no place in our usually light-hearted discourse. There is no pressing need to make a moment sad or awkward when it can be so easily avoided by keeping one’s mouth shut.

I will sit down at our rickety wooden table, eat a bite of scrambled eggs, and smile at the face that sits across from mine, alike in veiled emotion. I smile for the promise that passes unsaid between us, that should we hurt from what is to come, we hurt privately so as to not wound the other.