You spoke to me. Out of nowhere, you appeared—it was in the hallway, I was heading for the entrance. I was going for ... for lunch, I think. You asked me about my hand, if it was better, and before I knew what I was doing you had me in your eyes again, that same compassion that rang through me, harder than if you’d punched me. I told you it was all right, and I thanked you, but I wasn’t professional. I stammered, fumbling for the words when the words were “thank you”—just “thank you.” You smiled without a trace of condescension. You wished me well, that’s what you said. What now? You had gone on, and I was going on, in the same direction. You asked me about my department, about my work. I found myself asking you mirroring questions about your department, your work. You said something about a deadline, and I found it funny, and laughed. You laughed with me. I parted from you at the end of the hall in a state of confusion. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I had to grope in my mind for the old habits, which I thought were set in me, set in concrete with bars, and which I couldn’t now even start to remember. They were on the other side of a gossamer-thin barrier all of a sudden, and I had to try before they would begin again. I spent the day working and, when I left, I was unsatisfied, as though I had done my work badly. I reviewed my work, mentally, sitting in my parked car, and I couldn’t tell if I had done anything wrong. Everything that I was supposed to do had been done. I’d missed no deadlines. The only thing—everything I did—I did distracted by your eyes, and now your laugh, and that brief conversation. I’d dragged that along with me into everything, so that for a moment I had an impulse to rush back to the office and check to see if I hadn’t been unwittingly writing nothing but transcripts of what we said to each other, and descriptions of your behavior, rather than what I’d been ordered to write. I knew, though, that I hadn’t, or at least, that nothing of that encounter had made it into the words I’d written. But some of the words I’d written, as part of what I had been ordered to write, were words you had used, that was the thing. It was as though your words were coming back to me in my own writing, not just the same words, but somehow, now, when I wrote them. What am I saying? They were specifically yours now, just because I’d heard you speak them, addressed to me. Words as common as “department” and “deadline” and “office” and “thank you.”