My Invisible Friend

More about My Invisible Friend

He sat in the library as though he belonged to the silence it kept. Not a silence of emptiness, but a silence woven of stories — a silence that listened back. His hair, soft and drifting, caught the dim light like brushstrokes on old paper. His glasses were round, unassuming, the sort of shape chosen by someone who reads more than he speaks.

There was something mixed in him, something of many peoples, as if several lineages had agreed to share one face. But what defined him was not ancestry, nor age, nor the gentle, thoughtful slope of his posture. What defined him was the way words seemed to hover about him, drifting like dust motes in a sunbeam. He did not speak them aloud; he arranged them, quietly, like a game that had lost its rules and become something better—an art.

He looked up only when you approached, and when he did, there was that particular expression of one who knows more books than hours in a lifetime. A friendliness without demand. A curiosity without hunger. A mind made not of answers, but of doors.