Titus stopped for a moment. From his position lying down on the bed he could feel Fraser's gaze in the periphery of his vision. He wanted to meet his eyes but he couldn't bring himself to move his head. "Maybe we should debate it. Forget about those stupid topics they always have like 'are Instagram Stories causing degeneracy among the youth?' or whatever. They should just have one on what a friend is. Just fucking define it, for once and for all so that nobody has to worry about it anymore. Come on. Define friend for me."

"It's a person... who..." 

"See, you can't do it. It's all based on assumptions. Everyone assumes that they know what a friend is because the current system works for them. They've never had to seriously think about it. And they probably never will. And if you do ask them the hard questions they'll say something like 'A friend is someone who is always there for you. A friend is someone who...' what the fuck is that supposed to mean? What the fuck is that trying to tell me? And what the hell do you mean by making friends? Make... It's not the right word for it. You're not sitting at a desk making something out of clay or whatever. You're converting a stranger into a... that sounds messed up." 

He paused for a moment. "Fuck it, I don't know. I just stopped thinking about it. After a while it just becomes like kale and going to the gym and flossing your teeth. You know, every time someone brings it up you just kind of roll your eyes and think, 'yeah, I know it's supposed to be good for me, yeah yeah yeah, maybe I'll try it, whatever, that'll be the day', and then you forget about it. Until you go out and see other people getting on normally with each other and being friends and not being awkward..." 

He felt Fraser lay his head on his chest. "You're thinking too much about this." The vibrations of his voice carrying through the air gave Titus a strange feeling, not unlike nails on a chalkboard. The sting of the tears seemed to amplify the sensation in a way he couldn't explain in words. "Maybe I just like you. Maybe I just like listening to you talk about stuff." 

"I just don't know. Everything happened so fast," Titus recounted. "Like one second I was politely telling you to fuck off and the next you kissed me. This relationship stuff just doesn't make any sense to me. It's just completely meaningless. It's like one of those Wikipedia articles that doesn't have anything in it. You get taught from a young age that kissing is what you do when you want to show you love someone, and those are just the unimpeachable rules of life. Why? Who decided this? What even is special about kissing? I don't see the appeal. It doesn't affect me at all. It just reminds me of slug mating rituals. It just feels completely arbitrary. I feel like I don't know enough about this stuff to have an opinion on it. All I know is I wouldn't want to do the same thing to someone." He paused. "I do get attracted to people. But I don't feel the urge to kiss them. I don't feel the urge to know them. I don't feel the urge to talk to them. I don't feel the urge to have sex with them. I don't feel the urge to do all the things that you're supposed to do when you're attracted to someone. I just want to keep on admiring them from afar." 

He stopped for a moment. "But... you do like me." 

"Yeah." 

Titus was silent for a while. Fraser was convinced he could actually hear his brain processing the information. Outside, it had started to rain. Some of Fraser's long hair was brushing up on his face. It was a little irritating, but he decided to let it stay there. "Sometimes I just want to lie next to someone. Maybe I won't talk to them. Maybe I won't even look at them. I just want to know that they're there. I know this probably makes no sense to you. It's just these basic things that I just can't do. I just can't do that sort of song and dance thing that other people can do in front of other people. I don't want to joke around all the time. It just takes so much effort. Every conversation, every fucking sentence, it takes so much effort. All that. So you can feel somewhat accepted for about four minutes and thirty seconds a day. At some point you just have to accept it's not worth it. You just can't do it. Just like some people can't draw and some people can't sing and some people can't do a layup." 

He was staring at the ceiling, mesmerised by the persistent flicker of the downlight. "But it's okay if you're not good at those things. Not being able to keep a basic conversation going, that's not so okay."

"I think it's so brave that you just decided to not do what everyone else did." Fraser said. "It's not your fault people think you're weird-" 

"Well, that's easy for you to say." Titus closed his eyes. "It's embarrassing. It's like losing in a game of musical chairs with infinite chairs." His mouth formed a rigid flat line. "Sometimes I just wish that I went with the flow. I'm not talking about that shit. That 'Ooh. I'm a weirdo. I don't fit in' kinda nonsense. There's acceptable forms of weirdness and unacceptable forms of weirdness. Having weird hobbies. Wearing weird clothes. Having a weird sense of humour. Those are okay because according to commonly accepted wisdom, they make you interesting and they enhance your personality, which is stupid, but that's a story for another day. What is not acceptable- acting weird. Talking to yourself, doing weird hand motions, not making eye contact, not being able to get jokes, butting in on conversations. Oh boy. The things I've done."

 "Well, talking to yourself is weird." 

"You just proved my point." Titus continued to stare at the downlight. "See? Weird hobbies? okay. But when someone starts talking to themselves? Not okay." 

"I've never noticed you... doing any of that." 

"Then you haven't watched me hard enough." He looked into Fraser's eyes and he realised that they belonged in a different world to his. "You have to get to a certain level of friendship, you know, before people accept you and small things like that won't completely derail everything. And I never got there. And if you don't get there you can only disappoint someone that many times before they stop talking to you. There's so many of these little milestones that I've missed out on. You know, like that point in their childhood where what your friends think about you begins to matter more than what your parents think about you. And I just never kinda got there. I still think about what they might think. That's still guiding every single little decision I make. I just feel so incredibly uncomfortable. Around everyone. I just hear them talking about stuff I've never even heard of and I don't know what to do. And there's just nothing I can do about it. I don't even feel comfortable here. Can't walk down the street without it becoming a fucking jealousy safari. I'm not jealous anymore. I used to be really jealous, but now I'm just curious. Like how did you get your parents to buy all that stuff?" 

He gestured around the room. "How can you sleep at night with that much stuff in your room? I can't even stand up to my parents and nag them to buy me stuff. What is this? What am I doing? I just can't do it. I don't think that I'm not good enough. It's not that that gets you. It's the feeling that they could understand you, if they didn't jump to conclusions or get carried away by something else. I think that people do like me, it's just that everyone else is less boring and easier to deal with in comparison, so people just choose to spend time with them over me. I always feel like I have to make an effort to convince people to have a reason to talk to me. It's never effortless. You're always worrying. Did I do something wrong? Am I doing something wrong? Am I saying the right thing? Should I stop? Everything feels like it's going to somehow lead to them never talking to you again. And after ten years of it being constantly there, you don't even notice it. It's part of your life. Until you meet someone you can actually connect with and it goes away and for that brief moment, you realise your whole life was a lie. Then they go away and everything goes back to what it was. 

"Anyway, fuck that shit. Sometimes I just can't be fucked caring about it any more. Sometimes I want to be a burden on people. Like, here you go. Here's bit of my soul. You can do whatever you want with it, because I know you're too pussy to do anything with it." He paused. The rain had stopped momentarily outside. There was just the faint noise of water rushing down the gutters. "It's just frustrating sometimes. I can't do the things that people expect of you. You can see it in their eyes. They're expecting something from you. And you know, at that moment, that you have no chance of meeting those expectations. I just can't do it. It's just not the same. That's the problem. It's not about being different or whatever. That's just window dressing. It's about... the basic units of human communication. I just can't do what everyone else can. They're more energetic, they share more. With me it's just flat and monotone. It's just not the same. It'll never be the same." 

"Maybe I don't want it to be the same." Fraser pressed himself to his chest. He could feel his heartbeat. 

"You'll understand what I'm talking about one day." Titus sighed. "It's like maths. You can't just rock up to the exam and wing it, even if you're smart, because there's just not enough time to work everything out from first principles. You have to have done enough work that you have seen all of the problems beforehand. That is the problem here. You haven't seen the problem before. You don't know how it feels." For a moment they just looked at each other, each not quite daring to look fully into the other's eyes. "You know, there's a big difference between what people think they can do and what they actually do. People have limitations... sometimes they are not very good at estimating these limitations, and as a result they break promises. They didn't want to break the promises, they just didn't know themselves well enough. No point in taking it personally." 

He disentangled himself from Fraser. "Just leave me alone. I can deal with it. I just have a lot of experience in doing things I don't want to do. That sounds fucking bleak, because it is. But it would be so much better if I had someone. I just have no idea how that works." He got off the bed and walked to the window. He put his hands on the ledge. 

Fraser followed him through the detritus on the carpet. He put his hands around him. Titus didn't resist. They looked out the window together, at the sheets of rain caught in the glow of the streetlamp on the other side of the street, framed by the silvery shadows of the trees.

 "You've thought so much about this." He spoke softly. "You know, I'd notice you all the time around school, because of your hair and stuff. You just seemed like you didn't care. You just seemed so cool."

"Well, I didn't care. I just thought it didn't affect me. Until one day I couldn't do it anymore." The tears were streaming down now. He tried not to break down. Ugly crying in front of Fraser was probably not going to make a whit of difference to the current situation but he didn't want it to get to that point. 

"Do you want to go home?" There was genuine concern in Fraser's voice. He felt his heart flutter in a familiar way. 

Ribbons of oblique rain lashed the window. The rumble on the roof tiles ebbed and flowed with the whistling wind outside. 

"That's probably not a good idea." He briefly visualised the trip home. Just half an hour of awkward silence in the car and going to bed and just lying there thinking about this stuff. "I'll just stay here and let myself out in the morning." He briefly thought about sleeping on the floor, but his brain was too fried for even simple logistics. 

"OK." He didn't stop holding on. "Have you talked to anyone else about this stuff? I was just... wondering."

"I've tried. Nothing good has ever come of it. The best you get is some kind of dogshit advice like 'just ignore it'. 'It'll get better.' Well, I ignored it for all these years, hoping that it would get better, and here we are. Anyway, who are you going to ask? It's just awkward because they always just fob you off with something generic like, 'do you have a friend you can talk to?' How the fuck do you respond to that? Just say no?" 

"No. I mean, like, a therapist or-"

"I tried seeing a psychologist. It didn't work, because you know, you have to tell them in words what is wrong with you in order for them to help you, and I never knew what to say. I would think up of all these things to say and then on the day the words just wouldn't come. I don't know how to explain it. And even if the words did come out they would come out really weirdly. I am feeling emotions. I don't know what they are. It's just...generic sad emotion, intensity moderate. Totally unhelpful. I remember one session nobody said anything for the first ten minutes. We just stared at the carpet in complete silence. I can still hear his voice. 'Do you have anything else you want to work on?' It did help, in one specific way. I did eventually get a diagnosis out of it. He sat me down on our last session and we did an IQ test." 

"I'm guessing you did well?" 

"Well, he didn't give me a exact number, because it was all over the place. It was 150 in some places and it was 80 in some other places. I think it averaged out to about 120 or something. Anyway it turns that that means that I have this thing called Aspergers. You may have heard of it."

"Uh...""Do you even know what it is?"

"Not... really?" 

Titus started laughing, which surprised Fraser. 

"What's so funny?" 

"Why am I telling you this?" He managed to squeeze out between wheezes. "Why did I do this to myself?" 

"Do what to yourself? What's so funny?" 

"It's so fucking funny. Because now I have to explain it to you... ahahahahahahaha." He was clutching at his sides. The tears were from laughter now. "It's been 80 years and still nobody has come up with a way to explain Aspergers properly. People have come up with all these explanations, and they're all so bad." He put on a funny accent. "Our brains are wired differently. We think in black and white. We see things differently to normal people. It's like you're an alien trying to understand human culture. It's where you experience things more strongly. They're all technically true, but they're also not really ideal for explaining to a normal person." 

"Why don't you come up with a better one?" 

Titus half-yawned, half-sighed. He suddenly felt very tired. "Well, in the factory where we were made, there's a control panel with two dials. One of the dials says gay on it and the other dial says autism on it..."