I remember not being able to get over the lighting inside that place: dim, even, its perfect flatness was terrifying. A very specific design.
I kept wondering about how anyone could harness such a thing as light, hold it and shape it into a design.
Still
they manage.
Anyway the waiter came and cut through the fog that built up in my mind by the lighting, and so he did, finding me not even close to being ready.
I rushed into a much regretted answer and went on with the evening, smooth (just like the lighting).

Me and you, we never cared to go deeper than a very specific point in the way we relate to each other, in our conversation.
We both know we could easily plunge into the big picture together, still deliberately choose not to.
Just like the lighting our relationship is dim, even, its perfect flatness is terrifying. I'm still waiting for all of that to break.

We kept rambling politely about random topics and digging up shared memories which were too fresh to be sacred, so disrespectful, with the only aim of filling silence.
But it did look like everybody else in the room was doing the same, like the other few people present were also struggling to entertain each other with the shape of words.

Then everybody suddenly shut up.

Just like that.
I was terrified. I couldn't make sense of it. No explanation, no prelude, only sudden silence. I couldn't make sense of it.
Thinking back, though, I clearly remember the feeling right before that.
The air sucked up in a vacuum and it felt like the universe came to a stop, like being woken up to reality by a painless fist.
Must be what some animals feel right before an earthquake, we couldn't run.
I can't even recall the moment when I realised what was happening and especially how it did.
We just knew.
Everything was still.
I'd say hours if only I hadn't counted them:

one

two

three

four.

Four heartbeats we shared and we were kin,
flooded by silence and by that lighting.
I can still feel that sense of belonging,
of order reassessing,
in order
to make us one.