You had convinced yourself that he couldn’t escape you. It wasn’t about fame, nor some fleeting obsession: it was an impulse that dragged you with the same force with which Radiohead shook people in that era, when everything seemed to be boiling over. And in the midst of that runaway madness, you caught him. Thom.

People talked, they always do. They said you were a delusion, that he shouldn’t let himself get entangled, that your love was nothing more than a poorly disguised obsession. But when you looked at him, when you reached him through crowds or waited in the silence of an empty hallway, you felt there was something more. Something he understood too, even if he never admitted it.

And then, one day, the calm shattered. You had him in front of you, so close you could count his eyelashes. Thom didn’t look away, his gaze heavy with questions you had never wanted to hear spoken aloud.

“Is this love?”