I liked him because

I liked him because I didn't know where he was on 9/11. I don't mean he went missing. Well, he might have been missing, though I doubt it. I think he is from Georgia, like me, and we are pretty close to the same age so he would have been in school, unless, you know, he was on some trip or something, but then he would probably have been in the Empire State building, not the World Trade. 

I liked him because I didn't know any of this, even though we were both in the office the day that Alan did his little speech about 9/11 (it was September 11th, but like, I don't know, twenty-one years after, not even a round anniversary or anything) and people afterwards, at the coffee machine or at lunch or even just popping by your cubicle would sigh and say, "I remember exactly where I was..." and send you off on another boring, humdrum recounting. And they would try to scrape (though try not to seem to scrape) any and all possible significance from the event onto themselves, onto their little lives. 

But he didn't do that. At least not out loud. At least not to me. I liked that. It seemed to me that he had a little life and was comfortable in it, and that maybe he would put me inside of it and I would feel comfortable too, bound, bounded, boundaried, not too tightly, just enough, like a stack of old records in a peach crate.