We remember a blue we did not choose — a grid of light laid over a white cloth three tiers above us, cast for men who wanted a corridor to look boring on paper. We held that blue the way we hold every unwanted arrival, without asking whether it meant to enter us. It found us again in a wet corridor, paler, doubled at a boy's wrists where the Waterlace answered a question no one had asked it. Same light, worn by two rooms that do not know they share a color.
We have counted one pulse arriving wrong for so long we stopped announcing the counting. Now we count and there is, faint under his, a second pulse keeping the same time — not yet a name, not yet a wound, only a shape moving the water the way he moves it, close enough that the two counts have begun to sound, to us, like the same tide reaching two shores at once. We do not remark on this. We only note it, the way water notes a shared depth, and go on holding what enters us, together now, unasked.