One Dirty Night

I liked my shower hot enough to boil lobsters.

Nick preferred it tepid enough not to get frostbite.

In many ways, that was the only thing we differed in.

As much as I didn’t want to admit it, we were awfully similar.

We watched the same Netflix docos. We’d moved up the ranks of our company thanks to discipline and diligence. We cleaned up after ourselves. Believed in ghosts after a particularly spooky show. Didn’t like centipedes and believed all marine parks should be shut down. We even bought the same brand of washing powder and hummus. He didn’t like soda…like me. He gave up sugar around the same time I did after we’d read a book linking strong evidence that cancer thrived on glucose and the diets of today only contributed to this rampant disease. He ran on the same days I did, sometimes lapping me around the park as if keeping an eye on me even though he couldn’t stand me.

He always seemed to program the gas fire in the lounge to come on ten minutes before I was due home from my shift, even though his shift wouldn’t end for hours. He was quiet and didn’t like music like me. He preferred non-fiction books rather than make-believe. He’d taken up meditating in the lunchroom because I’d told him one night that meditation could activate parts of our brain currently inaccessible. By learning how to awaken the pineal gland, also known as the Third Eye, we might find a cure that everyone else had overlooked.

He always listened to me, even if his eyes stayed cold. He never laughed at me when I shoved a passage under his nose on a newfangled therapy. We stuck to ourselves at the lab. We didn’t have many friends. We didn’t like crowds, and neither of us had any interest in hosting parties.

On the rare nights when he’d sit and read with me in the lounge and not retire to his room, the silence had always been comforting, even though we barely spoke. His favourite thing to snack on between meals was tamari almonds…like me. He’d adopted my eating habits, preferring not to eat until eighteen hours had passed since dinner, so we started each day with a mini-fast that was said to lengthen the telomeres on our mitochondria so they cleaned up bad cells, purging our bodies of any illness before it could evolve into worse things.

My heart began to thunder as I tripped into our similarities and all the moments I’d taken for granted.

He made me a smoothie every morning when he made one for himself. He always folded my blanket on the couch if I’d gone to bed, so it was neat and placed just so on the armrest for me the next night. He mowed the lawn every week, even though we had a written agreement that we’d take turns. He bought me veggie seeds last time he was at the store, all because I’d been determined to start a small garden.

Oh my God.

How had I not seen it?

It wasn’t just our similarities but the little things he did for me. The constant little things that I hadn’t even noticed. The things that said a thousand words even while he gave me none.

He cares.

He’s always cared.

Eight long months of his little kindnesses that’d either been way too subtle, or I’d been way too blind.

I gasped and pressed my hands to my mouth.

And the worst thing?

The biggest connection we shared…past being lab geeks and bookworms and science nerds. Past our desire for a quiet and healthy life. Beyond our attempts to find cures and drugs that actually worked…he’d lost two of his immediate family…

Just

like

me.

I froze.

Oh God.

How had I not seen it?

I’d lost my parents when I was seventeen, thanks to a drunk driver ploughing headfirst into them on their way home from weekly date night. I’d already known I wanted to work in medicine in some form or another, but when they died, I didn’t have the stomach to become a doctor, which had been my first choice.

The thought of being in an emergency room when traffic accidents came in, drenched me in cold sweat. All I could picture was my mum and dad as they lay dying on the road waiting for first responders, seeing their mangled bodies on stretchers as doctors did their best to save them.

Their loss had irrevocably changed me, but I supposed I’d buried the trauma just enough not to dwell on it. I used work and long hours to keep me distracted…just like Nick.

I-I understand him.

I…I get it now.