"I liked it, actually," he admits with a faint smile as he leans back into the ground and sucks in a deep, slow breath. He lets it out just as calm. "And nights when I couldn't take it, I bounced or handled tables. It wasn't so bad."

He nods along about the poem, because he happened to like it as well; there was this gentle, pervasive love in the words, the kind of thing he could wrap around himself when he felt lonely or awkward. Poems like that were the kind of things he could recite to himself while he was far from home that made the world seem smaller, easier to handle.

"I don't recognize any of them, no. Not even from some charts I saw of distant galaxies. Ones far from Earth."