I saw blue – not indigo blue, not deep sky blue, not even Tiffany blue. It was sea blue, the simplest of all blues, nothing showy, right inside his iris. When he wore certain shirts, the color of his eyes didn’t pop out, and he didn’t even like them himself; he had admitted it once when he presented himself in front of class. They always appeared to be glossy, almost teary, which made them even shinier, like a gemstone – a gemstone that had been a bit roughened and never recut.

Sometimes his eyes were gone, almost like they had disappeared, and it was sad – almost pathetic – not only what I perceived from that stare, but what I had become from looking into the eyes of this boy. He had normal sea blue eyes, and every time I tried to crawl out of them my instinct told me to stay in, almost drowning. His eyes were like reading a page while distracted, then having to reread it; they told the story, and I was so consumed in the way they made me feel that I forgot to read it.

His words sounded like they were hard to pronounce and his letters had a thick, rich sound. I wondered what such an exotic sound was looking for in our lame American photography class. He showed pictures of his mother, the freckles she had underneath her eyes, her blonde hair.

I stared at the way his mouth moved. He had fast lips but the words came like a struggle and I wondered why it sounded like his tongue was attached to the roof of his mouth. He took thirty-one pictures, and he looked like for a second he was about to stutter; my bad, he was showing us the picture that meant the most to him. What was such a mystery doing in this boring class?

I wanted to taste his lips. I wanted to know if the taste of the chocolate milkshake he had drunk at lunch stayed on them, but then he laughed at something someone asked. I heard sunshine, bright and powerful and overwhelming. The sound that came out of his mouth was beautiful. For a second I thought that laughter could be a baby’s in a commercial, but then again he was twenty and babies couldn’t keep up with his laugh anyway.

He had callused knuckles. When he bumped into me on his way to our literature class, he knelt down and helped me pick up my old dusty books. His hands looked like they had been working at a bakery, getting bread in and out of the oven. I didn’t want to wonder what else this boy had for me, because here he was. I wanted to know what he had done with his lanky fingers.

I wanted to know if he had strummed his guitar. I wanted to know if the thoughts that came out of his head had once been translated to words and marked on paper with those hands. I wanted to think and think of his hands’ pastel color. I wanted to tell him that the color of his skin made his eyes pop out. I wanted to scream that I had been very attentive to his ways – not how he slept, but how he acted toward people. His hands were on the floor picking up the books he had made me drop, and I didn’t understand why I felt like he was suffocating me.