He looked to me as he took a seat. Seven am in the dining hall is always this way, all horizontals. Lines starting, ending, still straight over the scattered tables, boxed chairs, flat utensils. I pick up the paper cut out of a fork, put it on my two dimensional tray, take a seat.

He looked to me as he took a seat. I know what it is like to be without courage. Advertisers will say you can get those things in a breakfast cereal. They lie.

He looked to me as he took a seat. He had a single bowl of cheerios and glass of milk. He didn’t have a tray or plate or piles of wasteful foods.

He looked to me as he took a seat. But in the second of our eyes meeting, and in seeing that here was someone I would love to know, I faltered. The carefully built up courage, the captain crunch cereal and its three dimensional cylinders, the seat closest to his table but furthest from him.

He looked to me as he took a seat…and didn’t look to me again. Because I was the vertical, and I fell before his very eyes to fear, to failure. He stood, and all that was left to the horizontal planes, a cheerio.