“Okay, Cyrus,” Orkideh said firmly. “Now you’ve said this part, now it can be behind us. Can we just be friends now? And talk like regular people?” Cyrus paused for a second. He felt a flash of familiar shame—his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much. He realized he was perhaps doing what Sad James had once called The Thing, the overliking thing, obsessing over something in a way that others felt to be smothering.
