“Pardon me?”
“Or quiet. You’re not quiet about anything.”
I scowled at him. “And what is that supposed to mean?”
“It’s a good thing,” Eli told me. “It’s better to just speak up.”
He wasn’t wrong.
“So what do you want, and remember I’m Jewish, so I can’t eat just anything.”
“As I said, I’m a vegetarian, so I’m far more limited than you.”
“Then what are we going to eat?”
We agreed on Mediterranean and headed out. Once I was eating, Eli looked concerned.
“You have something to say?” I dared him.
“No, I just don’t think it’s safe for you to—maybe you should chew.”
“So funny,” I said with my mouth full just to watch him recoil in horror.
On paper, we made no sense. We were wildly different. I was loud, and he was quiet. But I was loud for a certain amount of time, and then once my battery was drained, I wanted to curl up into a ball and be still. Or, it turned out, just sit beside him, close, and let him talk and entertain others while I listened. I could stay places, stay out, do the social interaction for longer than normal if he deflected all conversation away from me and brought me things to munch on and increasingly ridiculous-named alcoholic beverages.
He had the scary job, was, in fact, fairly dangerous himself, but I was far more combative in almost every situation. I nearly got into a brawl at a Blackhawks game, and even though Eli shot me a scathing look, his friend Jer was impressed. When the guy I was confronting stood up, Jer had me keep my seat and he stood up and up and up, dwarfing the guy completely, who immediately sat his ass back down and didn’t say another word.
“One of these days we won’t be here for backup,” Eli warned me.
I scoffed. He would always be there to back me up. I had no concern over that.
“Fine,” he grumbled. “But it’s still very poor form.”
“Consider yourself suitably scolded,” Jer told me, chuckling.
“You’re not helping him learn a lesson at all,” Eli told him.
“God, I hope not,” Jer shot back.
There was an ease with us, with me and Eli, and like two pieces of a puzzle, we fit.
At times, he got lost in things, in worry, in his own head, about fixing things that he had no control over. It came from a place of caring, of passion and concern, but it could become a raging soapbox quite quickly. It wasn’t that his friends, who were all in some kind of service themselves, disagreed or didn’t care, but especially at dinner on a day off, your brain needed a rest. So it wore on others. I saw it, noted the change in them, the concern that he couldn’t stop, that the subject couldn’t be changed because he was hyperfocused on whatever it was.
“You know,” I would say out of the blue, “I have the weirdest feeling that if I was ever thrown out of a plane or fell off, say, the side of a mountain, I might actually be able to fly.”
He would stop talking or ranting or venting, and turn to me. “What?”
“I mean, birds fly because they assume they can. Perhaps it’s the same.”
“No.” He was always emphatic with whatever I’d proposed. “No. That’s not how—no. Birds fly because they can.”
“Yes, but why can they?”
“Because they’re birds!”
“That’s the same argument you used last week about math.”
“Because math is math.”