everything is interesting

He is perfectly average. His affluent background has not aided excellence, and his parents have long given up the expensive playthings and incentives. He has no aspirations, no inspiration, content in allowing life to float past him. He is not dull, but no-one knows him well enough to say otherwise; he has not yet succumbed to drugs or sex or alcohol, or rock and roll music for that matter.

She is a vibrant spark of life, ready to explode into full flame at any second. Spontaneous and creative, the world is a puzzle which she must dissect. Everything fascinates her, from the sciences to the arts to how people work, and she does not hide it. She seeks information, she desires experience.

She ends up at his house, quite by chance due to transport and timetabling complications. As his mother serves them lunch, he watches, carefully but silently, as she optimizes a hypothetical solution to the aforementioned complications on a napkin with a stub of pencil.

The second time she is there voluntarily. They sit in his room, bare as an asylum, a solitary window the only source of light. His conversations are dry and lack enthusiasm, so she talks, mostly.

The one time, she brings him a gift. It is a small orange sticker, perfectly round. On it are the words,"
EVERYTHING IS INTERESTING
" and she clambers onto his shoulders and pastes it on the ceiling directly above his bed, a small circle of colour in the whitewashed room. Already, it seems, she knows him.

She fascinates him like no-one else, and he begins to wonder why. She is certainly attractive, but not to the point where they all have dark fantasies about her. He's seen her naked only once, only kissed her about twenty times. But that's not it; he knows the connection is not just physical, not just romance. It's almost more profound or something (he thinks that's the right word).

When she is in his room, the sparks in her eyes transform the bare walls into multitudes of technicolour shapes. She shows him her world through their time together, and she longs for him to open up to her too. Slowly, painfully, their conversations become less one-sided. He begins joining in on her tangents of oil paintings, mine mechanics, train timetables, Baroque music, and Marxist-Leninism. She casts her radiant glow wherever she can in his life, and he is eternally grateful for it, though he does not realize it yet. Every day he wakes up, reads the words, her words, and that feeling rises up again. He can't yet describe it, but he knows that it's the feeling she has coursing through her veins non-stop, every moment in her life.

********

She will lay herself on the railroad tracks in eight years' time. He will become a world-renown artist, and wherever he goes he will give away, freely, the orange stickers he carries in his pocket.