We dance around each other with polite smiles and perfunctory "how's it going"s - the familiar language of white collar workers. Our conversations are brief, focused - you are after all a busy man, and I am nothing if not efficient. There is no idle chit chat, no talk of our lives outside the 9 to 5, no parts of our identity revealed beneath the impenatrable armor of crisp white shirts and collared silk blouses.

But there is no rhyme or reason to the way my heart stutters when I talk to you, the way my eyes catch on the lines of your retreating figure, the way my mind analyzes our every interaction in excrutiating detail, wondering if that tiny tremor in your voice or hint of color in your cheek was simply a figment of my overactive imagination.

You will never know this, of course.

We are, the both of us, professional to a fault. And though I may not know you well (or at all), I do know this -

this is not the hill that we will choose to die on.

---Carousel