Richard’s attention caught me by surprise. Everyone in MIT’s cognitive science department was cordial, but I was used to being in the background there, as a lowly technical assistant who had no plans to be a career scientist. As nice as people were, it was always implied that my work was less of a priority than theirs, so it was jarring—though pleasant—to meet someone at MIT who sought after my talents.

“I do photography,” I replied.

“Then you’re the person I’m looking for.”

It turned out Richard had been taking black-and-white pictures with an old Nikon F1 but had no idea how to print them. I started bringing him to the darkroom I rented in Jamaica Plain and showing him the ropes; then he became another beneficiary of my studio rental, since my setup came with a black-and-white darkroom so he could print at my space whenever I wasn’t using it.

I was attracted to Richard the way I was attracted to pretty much any good-looking straight man who crossed my path, a dynamic I’d gotten used to over the years, to “look but don’t touch,” as my straight Mormon friend Chris once told me in undergrad, comparing himself to a painting in a museum. It helped our friendship that Richard wasn’t Hollywood attractive—Ralph compared his looks to a golden retriever after they met the first time —and I knew what he meant since Richard had a slack face and sleepy eyes, though his jaw was well-defined. He also wore wire-rimmed glasses that gave his slim but muscular frame a nerdy slant, a combination I couldn’t figure out until he mentioned that he had taken a year off during college to sail with the merchant marines, which explained his overdeveloped forearms. He was one of those people who was aware he was attractive to some extent but was too deep in thought to care much about it.

It was inevitable that Lenora and Richard would run into each other in my studio, on a Saturday afternoon in spring when she was shooting and he was coming in to print. Seeing the two of them awkwardly shake hands, a feeling of satisfaction welled up in me, because they somehow represented two ends of a mind spectrum that felt uniquely my own, Lenora the emotional artist and Richard the analytical scientist. I loved that I was friends with both of them, that I understood their motivations and interests in ways they each would find difficult in the other. This was the better side of being me, how even if I didn’t fully belong anywhere, part of me belonged to so many places, because I’d grown accustomed to always being in between.