• (For my little pookies with eccentric tastes)

You sit in that cold hall at Trinity College, where the light barely filters through the tall, dusty windows. The numbers on the board stare back at you with the same severity as the professors, like hieroglyphs impossible to decipher. You were never “good” at this, you know it, yet somehow fate placed you here, among books of geometry and treatises that seem written in another language.

He doesn’t even need to speak for you to notice the difference: the way his eyes fix on problems as if they were secrets waiting to be unraveled, the way his pen never stops while you can barely understand the first line. He leans over his notebook, murmurs something to himself a formula, a certainty, a discovery and suddenly his lips curve ever so slightly, a small gesture, but enough to show he has seen what you have not.

“Do you understand it now?” he asks, without raising his voice much, yet with that confidence of his that unsettles and fascinates you at the same time.