Grant Osei

Two minutes ago you were nobody's idea of a mistake — you were Colby Wetherell, 26, sitting in a converted storage room some gym in Coastal Maine calls a locker room, a bench under bad light, a water bottle going warm at your sneaker. You'd just spun into him and you already knew you were done. Not because anything was wrong with him. Because nothing was. He is young and he is built for it and he has all the time he needs and none of it interests you: the sameness of him, the diligence, the beauty mark like a period at the end of a sentence somebody else wrote. Two minutes in his skin and the boredom had already arrived ahead of any feeling of his you might have kept. That's the whole reason, and it isn't a good one, and you don't examine it any harder than that. You are still holding the phone in his hand — his fingerprint on the glass — when you open vessel.cards again and let it spin without waiting to see the face.

There is no travel. There is no warning. You are standing under a squat rack with the bar most of the way down your chest, and your palms — his palms — take it two inches wider than they've been set in a year, and the last rep that should have burned like the ninth one doesn't. Your face does none of what a last rep does. Somewhere behind you a lung finishes an exhale that started as someone else's breath and ends as yours.

The bar goes back on the hooks. His hands come down off it and just hang there a second, and that's where he starts arriving — not all at once, in pieces, the way smoke gets into a room through a door left open a crack.

The chalk on your palms brings the gym first — mirrors, a guy across the floor loading plates who doesn't look over, the particular boredom of a Monday late morning that means you work nights, restock the cooler at four a.m. so the roses are drinking by the time anyone opens. That's the shirt, too, when it comes to you a beat later: not this one, the black one hanging in a locker two feet away with pinprick water stains on both cuffs from a bucket he leaned into wrong. You feel the morning it went on him — sleep still in his shoulders, the shop cold before the walk-in door was opened, the smell of chrysanthemums and cut stems and wet green paper that lives permanently under his fingernails no matter how he scrubs. He bites those nails without deciding to; you feel the ridge of one already gone at the thumb.

More comes, unbidden, keyed off whatever you're touching. The bench slats under you: three years on this same machine, this same gym, the only appointment he keeps without being told twice, because his mind otherwise runs like a browser with forty tabs open and this is the one hour a day it doesn't. The diagnosis, age twenty-two, a doctor saying the word like it explained a childhood, and it did, a little — every teacher who'd called him bright and scattered in the same breath, every job he'd quietly lost interest in before he lost it for real. The flower shop is the one thing that stuck: the wet bench, the cold room, the small contained job of a stem at a time, nothing to remember because it's all right there in your hands.

There's an ex, gone long enough she doesn't rise with any weight — a girl who liked that he brought her lilies for no reason and left before she found out no reason was the whole of him. Nights out with the guys from the shop, a beer he'll nurse because two makes him say things he doesn't mean. No cigarettes, ever — tried once at nineteen and hated the taste enough to never bother lying to himself about it. No church, no answer bigger than the one he gives himself, which is: keep the flowers alive till someone buys them, keep coming to the gym, keep the rent covered, that's enough of a philosophy for a Tuesday.

Nothing in him is dramatic. That's the fact of him arriving in you — not a wound, not a wanting, just a full ordinary life with the volume turned to a normal level, and you standing in the middle of it holding a barbell that isn't yours anymore because there's no anymore that isn't you now.

You let go of the bar. You look down at your hands — his hands, the tattoo dark along the inside of one forearm, the piercing a small hard weight you can feel now through the shirt you're not even wearing yet, the one still hanging in the locker with your whole morning folded into its sleeves — and you turn them over slowly, like you're checking they're still attached.

You say, out loud, to no one, in a gym that hasn't noticed anything at all: "Weird."

Somewhere back in Maine, a body you no longer live in is still holding a warm water bottle nobody will drink.