On David.

The terrifying act of holding out your hands, bloody and empty, and hoping someone recognizes their reflection in them.

There is a man I watch at the Thursday night reading group at the little bookstore on King Street—the kind of gathering where people argue too much about whether faith makes you foolish.

He always sits near the back, thumb resting on the page he’s about to reference, speaking as though he has made some private peace with uncertainty.

I envy that peace like oxygen. Once, when my sister asked if I was happy, I launched into a fifteen-minute analysis of what happiness even means, dissecting the question until it lay lifeless between us. She just wanted to know if I was okay.

This is how I move through the world, grasping for solid ground in every interaction, every choice.

But not this man. When Lola poses those impossible questions about consciousness and free will, he responds not with the desperate certainty most of us cling to, but with something far more unsettling: genuine intellectual humility.

I first noticed him when he pushed back on a conversation about moral responsibility—the night Nisha was eviscerating poor Tom's take on moral luck.

His rebuke wasn’t the performative disagreement people use to prove their brilliance, but a quiet correction delivered with the tone one might use to mention that it's raining.

"I think you're conflating bad faith with self-deception," he said, and then proceeded to untangle the distinction with such clarity that even Nisha, our resident disagreeable skeptic, paused. Considered. Nodded, sharp and final, like a period at the end of your sentence.

I wanted to interrupt, to share my own careful theories about moral luck. The very concept I'd been obsessing over ever since luck put me in certain rooms, and I’d convinced myself that understanding it might somehow absolve my guilt over every thoughtless word I'd ever spoken.

But something in his delivery stopped me.

It wasn’t his grand pronouncement about constitutive luck that caught me. It was how he leaned forward with a calm he wears like a coat I'm desperate to steal, and spoke. Just a sentence. A clarification, really. So clear, so free of the need to win, that I held my breath.

The lack of desperation undid me.

It was the first time I’d heard someone say 'I don't know' without apology, without flinching, and mean it as a statement of strength, not weakness. That simple phrase, delivered with his calm, direct gaze, cut through the fog that usually muddles my brain.

The next Thursday, I overheard hear Lola say 'David’s point..'
Learning his name felt like stealing a secret.

It was the beginning of the hunger.

David. The name sits in my mouth like a communion wafer I'm afraid to swallow.

I've begun to catalog his gestures, his habit of touching his temple when he thinks, the way his fingers worry the corner of whatever book he's brought.

Last Thursday it was JK. Rowling, naturally. The spine cracked and comfortable in his hands like an old friend's shoulder.

I've started arriving early just to watch him choose his seat. Always the third row from the back, always the aisle chair.

There's something in that choice, close enough to contribute, far enough to observe. I wonder if this is how he moves through all of life, a careful calculation of presence and absence.

He could swallow me whole and never feel a thing.

The hunger has teeth now. It gnaws at me during the day, through the interns’ bright, stupid chatter about purpose and truth, as if those are real things, as if they won’t choke on them someday.

I construct entire arguments we'll never have. Ones where he strips away whatever mask I wear to work, to coffee shops, even to my own bathroom mirror. Would he call me out if he saw how much of me is performance? The thought makes my stomach drop and my skin flush hot.

I think about his thumb pressed to the hollow of my throat, how my heartbeat would rabbit against his palm. Some mornings I trace his lips in the fog on glass, erase them, draw them again.

I can’t tell where the wanting ends and the needing begins. If I pressed my mouth to his, would I taste his certainty?

I don’t want to be loved. I want to be known. I want to press my ear to his chest and hear nothing, no second-guessing, no static, just the ruthless, steady clock of his conviction.

I want him to see exactly how much of me is scaffolding and still not flinch.
I want to come apart in his hands.

But when Thursday comes, I sit three rows ahead of him and say nothing, my prepared wit withering like cut stems.

He takes his usual seat, but his thumb did not find its page. Instead, he stared at the scarred wood of the table as if reading an indictment carved there.

When the talk turned, inevitably, to the burden of choice, he remained silent. The silence was deliberate, possibly pained. It hung in the air, heavy with whatever he was holding back, and somehow we were all attuned to it.

I felt a reckless urge to cross the impossible distance between our chairs, three steps, yet leagues wider than the Vltava to say… what?

That I understood the weight in his stillness? That his quiet felt like an invitation into something private and possibly ruined, and yet I still longed to be let in, not to fix or own, but simply to witness, to be close.

Afterwards, as the others dispersed into the indifferent street, he lingered by the coffee table. I pretended interest in a display of brittle, yellowed maps. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped thing. He turned, and for a suspended moment, our eyes met. Not the glancing acknowledgement of acquaintances, but a raw, startled connection.

He looked at me like he hadn’t meant to, and I looked back, unsure if I was supposed to.

I forgot what I was holding. I think I stopped breathing.

His eyes held a profound fatigue, a loneliness as deep and cold as the Moldau at midnight. It mirrored my own.

Neither of us spoke. We just looked, as if each had stumbled across the other in a room we thought we were alone in.

He looked seen. Then, he lowered his gaze, murmured something lost to the clatter of the clerk’s keys, and vanished into the rain-slicked dark.

Walking home after the discussion on suffering and meaning, I caught my reflection in the bookstore window and saw my mother's hungry face staring back.

That same desperate wanting that once drove her to collect remedies for ailments she didn't have. The recognition was a blade between my ribs. I stood there for a long moment, unsure whether I was grieving for her or for myself.

The rain had begun to fall heavily. My coat clung to me like a second skin, damp and suffocating.

By the time I reached my door, my hands were shaking. Not from cold, but from the terrible understanding that he was as alone as I was.

That night, I sat at my desk by the window overlooking the wet, black roofs. The arguments of the evening were meaningless noise.

I took up my pen, driven by a compulsion as undeniable as thirst.

"Dear David," I began, the words bleeding onto the page, "Tonight, in your silence, I recognized the shape of my own solitude. When you look at that scarred table, what do you read? Is it the same indictment I trace upon my own skin each night?

The others kept talking about God like He’d left a forwarding address. But you, you just listened, as if their words were stones you were weighing in your palm before deciding which to pocket and which to toss aside.

I began to suspect, David, that you come to these meetings not to participate in our collective attempt to make sense of existence, but to observe us in the act of trying.

Like a biologist noting the nesting habits of captive birds, you study our discussions with quiet amusement, as if our efforts at order were both touching and futile.

When Lola speaks, I watch your face, not hers.
When Nisha nods, I see only whether you notice.

I watch you laugh at Kellner’s bleakest paradoxes, not with defiance, but with the ease of a man who carries his own gravity.

I have mapped the contours of your calm and clarity.

Since that Thursday night I noticed you, David, you have become not just a figure in the room but the room itself.

My palms now get stupid when you talk. Not sweaty. Stupid. They forget how to be hands. They hang there, useless clots of meat, while you dissect some idea with terrifying clarity. It’s humiliating.

The arguments about faith and folly now reach me like sound through water. What I really hear is your slight breath intake before you speak, the way your fingers tap once, twice against your knee, as if counting down to some verdict only you can deliver.

In those small gestures, I recognize what draws me here again and again. What I'm really listening for isn't your words but your certainty itself.

I tell myself this hunger isn't for you, not entirely. It's for the solid ground you walk upon, the unshakeable 'yes' and 'no' you pronounce without apology.

It’s pathetic, maybe. This hunger. For that unflinching 'this is what I think' you drop like it’s nothing.

I watch you do it, and something in my chest crams itself against my ribs. I want to steal that certainty, swallow it whole. It terrifies me how much.

I starve for that certainty, and seeing you embody it is like watching someone feast while I press my face against the glass.

David, your unsettling clarity did not liberate me, it became a cage.

Because your clarity left no room for my doubt and doubt was the only language I had left to speak.

At least until I saw the weight of it in your silence. And I realized certainty is just another kind of armor, and you wear yours like a man who knows the cost.

You must know this, David, certainty is violence. To say ‘I know’ is to draw a line, and I’ve learned to distrust lines. Because they have been used to shut me out, silence me, or define me. I know what it’s like to be on the losing side of someone else’s truth.

I need you to understand, David, I didn’t choose doubt because I’m cynical. I inherited it, like a new language, when everything that once felt solid— identity, faith, love collapsed.

You see, David, doubt became my mother tongue after certainty abandoned me the winter I licked salt off my wrist to quiet the hollow in my belly. Too hungry to stand and too afraid to check if the eviction notice was real. When even my own name felt like a lie I was too tired to correct.

Certainty broke me, David. Doubt saved me. And I need you to know why I live here now, in the questions. Why I’ve made a home in them.

But what unravels me is how you are anchored where I am adrift. Your certainty isn’t loud; it’s atmospheric. But I wonder if that anchor is made of lead. Does it drag you down even as it holds you still?

For so long, I had only seen the stillness, and not the strain beneath it.

Today, you wore that grey sweater again. The one with the tiny hole near the elbow. And for three hours, that hole was the most important thing in the world. A flaw. Proof you exist in fabric and time. Not just the idea of you I’m feverishly constructing. It wrecked me. Just a hole.

Do you know what it’s like, David, to sit across from someone who has never hesitated?

In your presence, I am startlingly aware of my own reflection.

You are whole. And seeing that wholeness is like holding up a shard of mirror to my own fragmented self, revealing every jagged edge, every poorly mended crack where fear and hunger bleed through.

So when your eyes met mine for that instant, and I saw how trapped I still am, I couldn’t help but wonder if you saw it too.

Do you ever feel observed, David? Not by the room, but by another prisoner, pressing their face against the glass of their own confinement, seeing only you? Is this letter the scratching of my fingernails against the wall between us? Or merely proof that the wall exists?

Did I reach you or am I just documenting our separation?

I want to say I’m sorry for how much I want from you, but that would be a lie. I’m not sorry. I’m just afraid that wanting might spill out, and you’ll flinch, and I’ll have to live with that.

You don’t owe me a single word.
But if you ever want to sit in the quiet with someone who won’t mistake your silence for strength or weakness, my door is open.

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🍿 Author’s Note

Contrary to popular belief, I do like love. I just prefer it the way I prefer my coffee:
Fictional (see: David, who is, alas, a figment of my overactive imagination).
Theoretical (see: this essay, which is essentially a 5,000-word sigh)
At a safe distance (see: my newsletter, where I usually write about the existential dread of mismatched socks)

This is wildly out of character for this space, but it is a spiritual fuck you to Troy, who once said he couldn’t conceive me as a human with emotions. (Troy, if you’re reading this, I forgive you. But also, never speak to me again.)

If you’re here for my usual why all cats are secretly lawyers content, apologies.
If you’re here because you, too, have fixated on a near-stranger’s elbow hole, welcome. We meet on Thursdays.