I came to college for medicine and surgery. For the version of my future that had nothing to do with heartbeats that were not anatomical,but love, i was learning, does not respect your timetable.
My first serious test came six weeks into the semester.
Pharmacology. A course that had been described to me by second year students with the specific kind of grimness that people reserve for things that have genuinely wounded them,I had prepared,i had read ahead,I had colour coded my notes in four different pens and made flashcards and tested myself every morning at five before the rest of the room woke up.
I sat down in that examination hall feeling ready.
I was not ready.
Not because I had not studied,i had studied more than almost anyone in that room,but somewhere between the first question and the third, my mind did something I had never experienced before. It drifted. Not to anything important not to a memory or a fear or a decision that needed making. Just to Felix. To the way he had looked at me that morning over breakfast. To something he had said the night before that I kept turning over quietly in my mind like a smooth stone.
I caught myself pulled my attention back just to read the question again.
Drifted again.
I finished the paper, i answered every question. But when I walked out into the afternoon light I knew with the quiet certainty of someone who knows their own mind that I had not performed the way I was capable of performing. Something had been divided that used to be whole.
My attention,my focus,my singular, uncomplicated dedication to the future I had planned.
Felix was waiting outside.
He had remembered my test was today without being reminded. He was standing there with that easy stance of his hands in his pockets, and when he saw my face he read it immediately not the details, just the shape of it and he did not ask how it went. He just fell into step beside me and said nothing for a while in the particular way he had of offering silence as comfort rather than pressure.
I appreciated it. I also, for the first time, felt something that frightened me.
Resentment.
Not of him,not really,but of the situation,the fact that for the first time in my academic life I had sat in an examination hall and thought about something other than the work in front of me,the fact that the walls I had built so carefully had not just been keeping love out they had also been keeping me in,Focused. Undistracted,pointed entirely at my future.
And now there was a crack in them.
I went back to my room that evening and I opened my books and I tried to read and the words sat on the page like objects i could see but not enter. Flourish watched me from across the room with the knowing eyes of someone who had been exactly where I was sitting.
She did not say I told you so.
She just made me tea,set it quietly beside my book,squeezed my shoulder once and went back to her own studying.
That small kindness almost broke me.
I drank the tea,i read the page again and again. And slowly, stubbornly, the words began to make sense again.
But something had changed. A door had opened in me that had always been shut. And I was beginning to understand that open doors, unlike open books, could not simply be closed again by an act of will.