My dog Otis has developed a system where he steals exactly one shoe from every pair by the door, hides it somewhere unfindable for days, then returns it, unprompted, precisely when I'm about to leave the house without it. "That's not a coincidence anymore," my roommate said, watching him drop a missing sneaker directly at my feet the morning of a job interview I'd been stressing about for a week. "He's timing this." I tested the theory, deliberately, hiding my own shoe first just to see if he'd notice a fake version of his own bit. He found it within an hour, dragged it to his usual hiding spot behind the water heater, and returned it that evening, entirely unbothered by my attempt to test him. "He's not hiding them randomly," my roommate said. "He's holding them hostage until you actually need them. It's a whole racket." I mentioned this to my vet, half joking, expecting her to dismiss it as coincidence. "Some dogs do form specific games around departure anxiety," she said. "If leaving upsets him, delaying you, even slightly, then being the one who resolves the delay, gives him a sense of control over something he otherwise can't control at all." I started leaving five minutes earlier for everything after that, giving him his ritual on purpose instead of resenting it. He still steals a shoe every morning, still makes me hunt slightly, still returns it right on cue like he's rescuing me from a crisis he manufactured himself. I've stopped trying to break the pattern. It's cheaper than therapy for both of us.

My Dutch coworker Bram told me my presentation was "not good, actually kind of confusing in the middle part," approximately forty seconds after I'd finished it, in front of the entire team, with the same casual tone he'd use to mention the weather. I was mortified. My American instinct was to assume I'd made an enemy for life. "You okay?" he asked, genuinely confused by my face, at the coffee machine ten minutes later. "I liked the beginning a lot. I said that too." "You also said it was confusing. In front of everyone." "Because it was," he said, entirely without malice. "If I don't tell you, how do you fix it before the client sees it? That would be a much worse conversation." I mentioned this to another American on the team, expecting solidarity in my outrage. She just laughed. "Give it two months. You'll start doing it too. It's contagious." She was right. Three months in, I found myself telling a different coworker her spreadsheet formatting was "actually pretty hard to read, not great," with zero cushioning whatsoever, and feeling strangely good about it. Bram caught me doing it, nodded approvingly like a proud teacher. "See? Much faster this way. Everyone knows where they stand." I flew home for a visit that Christmas and told my mother her turkey was "actually a bit dry this year, not your best one." She did not appreciate the update nearly as much as Bram would have.

i am holding hands with a girl at the pet store. i love how her voice changes when she speaks to different animals. round and bubbly for the angelfish, high and breathy for the calico kittens, sonorous and slithery for the python. she loves them all, even the great hairy tarantula that makes me cringe. i am holding hands with this girl whose halo of hair glows banana yellow under the heat lamps in the reptile section, who offers her index finger to teething kittens. she asks “can’t we have one?” in the voice she uses for only me. a voice i can’t describe without using her name, but i imagine joan of arc heard something similar the day she picked up a sword. she is still holding my hand, and i feel like i’d sink into cartoon quicksand if i let go. so i don’t. “are you two… together?” this is not unfamiliar, but the woman’s voice, the voice she has chosen, is angrily acidic. this woman has laced her tone with arsenic, without even a passive aggressive teaspoon of sugar to hide her poison. she inhales, puffing herself up like a frightened lizard before her final words. “there are children here, you know.” in the future, i think of a thousand things to say. we were children too. two girls holding hands after school. two girls holding hands at the movie theatre, two girls in a booth at tony’s pizza, two girls sharing awkward first kisses after two solo cups of wine in someone else’s backyard. two girls holding kittens at a pet store on a saturday afternoon. i know now that they see us through funhouse mirrors: distorted, disturbed, our monstrous bodies taking too much space, spoiling innocent spaces with our imposing sexualities. our innocence never ours to begin with. even with this, there is nowhere i would rather be than holding hands with her in a pet store, with her voice like rain on a hot day, her peach lips blowing kisses for fish, her grip tightening as if to say “i dare you to take this away from me.”

Autism is full of contradictions. I can seem emotionally calm while feeling everything intensely. I crave deep connection but struggle to express it. People call me both insightful and naive, independent and overwhelmed. Living in contradictions is almost part of the experience.

If someone is truly meant to be part of your life, timing won't necessarily stop it. Maybe it'll happen soon, maybe years from now, but what is genuinely meant for you has a way of finding its way back.