I watch him thinking about dressing, sorting shirts with languid but strangely staccato grace, muscles and mindset in checkerboard accord. You’re beautiful, I tell him, the word settling on his shoulders as dust might. He doesn’t flinch but contracts bodily, a movement between sigh and shudder, almost imperceptibly fine except for the slightest shift of the eye. ‘Thank you,’ he says, stretching a shirt over his frame. You are, though, so beautiful, and you don’t get told enough. ‘Honey,’ he says, ‘knowing you believe it is more than enough.’ I see him dressed, a clash of reality and perception.