Dr. José Ganéa.

At twenty-six, the young scientist Dr. José Ganéa found love for the first time. He found it as one finds the loose coins in one’s pocket, or else like a note fallen on the street. It was the time of the year when it was becoming warmer, he was sitting in the square outside the scientific research laboratories he had recently been employed at when he saw her. She was sitting across from him, legs crossed at the ankles, reading. She was wearing a yellow dress, as yellow as the sun on a summer day, and her hair, though loosely pulled back was fluttering over her face. José thought to himself that he had never seen her before, or else she was someone that he saw everyday, but familiarity had made her invisible to him. Whichever it was, he felt that he had finally found his way home.

As he sat thinking of all this, the girl looked at her watch, folded the corner of her page, and stood up to leave. At this point of time, José had two options. The first was to chase after her, ask her name and see if she would like to go on a date with him. He would find out that she was rather flattered, and would like to be picked up from the old Hotel de Palais at 7pm tomorrow evening. The second option, of course, is that of the cowards way. He would hesitate a few seconds too long, and even if he did finally leave his seat to chase after her, it would be too late. At 7pm tomorrow evening, he would be eating alone.

Unfortunately for Dr. José Ganéa, prolonged years of a studious lifestyle and minimal interaction with others had left him as a coward. Thus, at 7pm the next evening, Dr. José was eating alone, lamenting what could have been. For the next few days, he kept watch for the girl with the yellow dress. Occasionally he saw her, but found that he was still too timid to approach. After three weeks, he found courage enough to sit on the same park bench as her. Such a glorious conquest in his eyes, he did not notice for his own elation the three glances she sneaked at him, nor the way she seemed to be awkwardly curious, like one who is out of practice at something, yet is still attempting to do it.

In a way, without realising, Dr. José was forming silent shapes with this girl. Without words, the particles of himself had begun to reach out for hers, and with an unconscious surprise on both sides, hers began to reach back. Primitive shapes though lines are, this silent act of geometry was enough to form a kindredness between them, of which was completely unexpected. One would not be frowned upon for suggesting that perhaps the reason which Dr. José Ganéa finally found the courage to speak to this girl was indeed because of the geometry their bodes had unconsciously formed.

Of course, nothing about geometry was mentioned, merely the common conversations of two strangers who wish to un-become so. And although the unconscious shapes that each had formed around the fingers and knees and ears of the other, it did nothing to ease the uncomfortable silences made when a person such as Dr. José, who had spent too many years becoming familiar with the matter under a microscope discovers the mistake of having devoted very little time to familiarizing himself with women. This in itself would not have been a problem, and indeed, he wasn’t completely isolated from women. He worked with females: the almost completely asexual bland sort, constantly found in the laboratories, with frizzy hair and a stunned stare when forced to look elsewhere other than the complex life in their microbial experiments; he spoke with his mother and two sisters weekly; and he occasionally gave the girl who worked at the café a small smile. But although Dr. José had been around females all his life, few could truly say they have been deprived of this experience completely, he had never really encountered one of this sort: a woman.

There was something different about this woman compared to the rest of the females Dr. José had encountered. Instead of being a somewhat smaller version of a man, who sometimes wore skirts and snapped at you when the moon came too close, he found this woman to be softer, almost as if fuller and more tightly pulled together and so entirely complex in construction that he found himself wanting to trace his fingers over her skin to find where the joins could be, but being almost too afraid to breathe near her for fear something terrible and too big to understand may happen. She seemed almost entirely made-up yet more real than any female he had ever encountered before, the sort of powerful sense of awe you get when looking at a mountain or the sea for the first time, she was a sort of natural wonder and Dr. José Ganéa wanted to capture it all at once.

And it was this realisation that pulled the breath out of Dr. José’s lungs and made him stammer and blush each time he looked directly at her eyes. Or maybe he simply felt all this inside in one of those out-of-body experiences where you feel everything and nothing all in the same moment as you continue acting like a normal human being while you feel like this, this is what it must have been like at the beginning of the universe, this everything and nothing is enough to make anyone explode.