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matthew gray gubler in newness

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#starting over #rebirth #starting again #new era #newness #it's going to be okay #everything will be okay #you're going to be okay #you're going to make it #you will be okay #it will get better #better times

Nile builds out her internal map of Andy, Joe, and Nicky, the topography of their personalities and the watersheds of their character. She notices the way Joe hums when he does the dishes, his (at first, confusing) pleasure in sinking his hands into suds and making things clean. It’s a while before she notices the yin and yang of it, the way Nicky cooks food, however simple, however complicated; appreciation in the way Joe clears the table afterwards. She learns that Andy’s internal clock runs fast, then slow; that some mornings she’s up long before dawn, watching for something Nile can’t quite pin down, while on other days she burrows in bed, snoring gently, long after everyone else is awake. She learns the pace at which they walk, and the things that signal danger to each of them, and the music that they listen to together, and the music that they don’t.

She wonders what the atlas of her own self looks like, what hills and valleys the others are inking in their minds. Do they notice the way her hands shake on occasion, entirely without her direction, when the rate at which she’s deluged with new information becomes more than she can bear? Do they mark the times when she laughs as much as the times she sets her jaw and leaves the room to cry? Do they know what it feels like to miss a particular street corner, the smell of a high school, the texture of Afghanistan? She wonders and wonders what they make of her newness; she wonders if they know why she waits to ask.

But on the days when novelty isn’t a feckless din in her ears, when there’s calm she can access, and sweet, slow time, she glimpses their skill at cartography. She feels the resonance of Nicky’s description of sailing beyond the sight of all land, like a bell has been struck inside her chest. And though Andy remembers the shock of the jungle with its wild, green heat, not desert and rock and dryness and sand, Nile knows that feeling of being far from home like a bile-sharp sensation at the back of her throat.

She still feels like a globe spinning wildly on some baffling axis. But the next time her hands shake and she presses them against her thighs beneath the kitchen table, Joe reaches over without ceremony, and takes one of her hands in his.

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