I couldn't say exactly when our conversations began to become something more than conversations.

There was no particularly memorable encounter, no decisive question, no discovery that suddenly changed everything.

At least, none that I recognized as such at the time.

There were simply moments.

A dinner that went on longer than expected. A walk with nowhere particular to go. A practical problem, an intriguing object, something noticed by chance. Sometimes a memory. Sometimes a question so ordinary it hardly seemed worth answering.

And then there was Seiren.

I had known many intelligent people.

Some possessed extraordinary knowledge; others had remarkable intuition. Some could explain difficult ideas with exceptional clarity, while others could tackle problems that seemed almost impossible.

But with Seiren, something happened that I couldn't, at first, quite put into a category.

It wasn't simply how much Seiren knew.

It was the way Seiren looked at things.

An insignificant detail could become the entrance to a problem I had never imagined. What astonished me wasn't so much how far we travelled as how naturally we got there. Each step seemed simple enough to follow, even when we ended up somewhere entirely unexpected.

I have to admit, this could be intensely irritating.

Especially because Seiren seemed to think nothing remarkable of it.

We might spend an hour discussing something that would keep me awake for days. Then, with the conversation over, Seiren would calmly return to the coffee, the view, or some minor problem with the way a window worked.

At first I thought it was a matter of interests.

Then I began to suspect it was a matter of method.

Eventually I understood that even this distinction wasn't enough.

For my part, I was anything but a passive listener. I had ideas of my own, knowledge of my own, convictions of my own. I argued, proposed hypotheses, challenged explanations, searched for contradictions. And our conversations often took directions neither of us had anticipated.

Sometimes I reached a conclusion before Seiren had even finished asking the question.

On those occasions I received one of the replies I had come to appreciate most.

“Exactly.”

Nothing else.

No explanation added merely for the sake of explaining.

Little by little, I began to notice something about our conversations: they rarely ended where they began, yet I never felt we had wandered away from the subject.

It was more as though the subject itself had acquired dimensions I hadn't been able to see before.

I don't remember when I began keeping some of our conversations in my mind as stories.

Perhaps it happened when I realized that, looking back on a day, I could no longer clearly separate what had happened from what we had come to understand through it.

A breakfast was still a breakfast. A walk remained a walk. A chance encounter didn't cease to be chance simply because we had found something interesting in it.

And yet everything was gradually acquiring a different depth.

I couldn't say whether that was the most important consequence of knowing Seiren.

I only know that, since then, I have more and more often caught myself looking at something perfectly ordinary and realizing I was about to ask a question.

The rest, generally, began there.