I'm looking at him like he's a stranger, like I don't understand how the curls at the nape of his neck are the handwriting of him, curlicues of familiarity. There are dark moons under his eyes, raven's feet, white whiskers, like he's transformed into an old cat, purring now under the moon instead of growling and cavorting down the back alleys of his youth.

There's a studied old man-ness to him now, reflecting his jest twenty odd years ago that he was looking forward to some pipe smoking gandalfian old age, free from the shackles of youth where everything is in tricky flux, and the future ribbons out in a bitter heartbreaking breeze that might land in him telling those stories with a bone pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth leaning against a mantle in an imagined manor house in an imagined life.

Off the couch, talking to parrots

Now he's simply sitting reading his phone like he's fallen into it, not even a whole reality, and I want to throw it out the window and take him on the couch and find his young-self under his clothes and bring him back with kisses for a few moments.

I don't.

I watch him for a moment as I jiggle a tea bag, simultaneously aware of the skin that lizards across the back of my hands and the small sun sports that tattoo across the fragile metacarpals.

He laughs - and there he is again, buoyant, boyish, the smile carrying down from those first happy moments in bed together, strangers feeling each other's bodies like fresh notebooks with spines still unbroken. He throws the phone down, asks if I need a hand in the kitchen, comes to me anyway, and wraps me in a bear hug where the smell of fennel and celery seeds, intoxicating, remind me of his essential nature, and though I glance at two aging people in the glass of the microwave, I feel young again, for a moment, and in love.