The Day It All Started

There was a particular quality to that first morning — a held-breath quality, the sense that something was about to become permanent.

I remember Eleanor was already at the window when I arrived. She didn't turn around. She was watching something in the courtyard below, and I didn't want to interrupt whatever conclusion she was drawing.

Julian had a notebook open on the desk. He was writing in it with complete focus, as if the chaos around him didn't exist. I would come to understand that this was simply how he moved through the world.

None of us knew, then, what this room would mean. How the particular way the afternoon light came through those windows would become a kind of shorthand. A way of saying: yes, that time. That specific irreplaceable time.

The rest came slowly, then all at once.