Sonder

Chapter 34

[I don't know where this fits.]

She couldn't have known. 

She couldn't have known that his first kiss had been a brief 4 year moment ago.

She couldn't have known how that first impact had se him shivering as violently as a December rabbit. Shivering which could have been blamed on the water bed that had no heating element. But, the shivering was actually a visceral reaction to an event nearly as traumatizing as birth. 

That event, that first kiss, had been the first time, in his then 14 years that genuine reciprocal, affectionate, physical contact had ever cascaded through his forgotten, atrophied nervous system.

 She couldn't have known that in the rubble of that first promise that he had violated himself and his life-marrow ideals with two dignity destroying episodes of promiscuity which had left him feral in an attempt to reconstruct his former moral/spiritual identity and security without the ancient religious bedrock he had built that identity upon.

She couldn't have known about how, as he labored over his fragmented shards of spirit and ideology, his hard had been reassembled effortlessly and joyfully by an angle of unimaginable achievement, compassion, and general magnificence.

She couldn't have known how that affair was severed by the very ideals which had formed it. Ideals Nick had hoped might inspire a reunion, someday.

***

Similarly,

He couldn't have known how she had turned down a dozen lifelong acquaintances that had spent over a dozen years of admiration and consternation stockpiling enough courage to request her company to senior prom.

He couldn't have known about that faults within her genes.

He couldn't have known that she had spent at least four years planning a life life intrinsically incompatible with his.

He couldn't have known that if and when he tried to withdraw from her, how each and every one of his atoms would fuse, implode, and ignite.

"In a world where everything is free. The one pomegranate that's off limits is the only thing that matters"