their thoughts on love

explorers vs thinkers

Hope was an explorer. Every time she would meet someone, she would explore everything about them: their features, their way of speaking, their likes and dislikes, and everything else she could think of.

When she was a baby, Maverick would always laugh when she would reach up to touch his face and toy with his hair. When she was learning to walk on her own he would hold a finger out for her to hold onto as he led her around on adventures, teaching her about everything he knew about. As she got older, she started asking her own questions. Her first word was "Why?" and she used that to question everything and everyone around her. Of course, when Maverick couldn't answer her himself, he and Hope would walk hand in hand to Silas, who would explain it in the simplest terms he could think of.

One day, she pointed to a refrigerator and rubbed her arms as if she was freezing. Maverick walked her over and asked Silas how refrigerators got cold.

"There's a fan that blows cold air out to keep things cold."

Maverick nodded and told Hope that, "Refrigerators blow on the food."

Silas rolled his eyes and went back to his book.

When she was a baby, Silas would push her hand away when she reached to pull his glasses off his face. He didn't like how she explored and the way it involved him. He asked his sister why she always tried to pull his hair and steal his glasses.

"She's trying to explore the world around her," she answered as she folded Hope's clothes.

"Can't she explore using her eyes instead?"

When she started to figure out how to run, he would always be watching nearby as Maverick pretended to chase her around the living room. He watched the way she ran, and was able to track her progress. One day she ran across the room in about forty seconds. Another, it took about thirty. He congratulated her with a smile and a nod of his head when she looked up to him, knowing that they both knew what she had done.

As she got older, and when Maverick wasn't around any more, she started to take on some of Silas' personality. One of the first things her mother noticed was that when Hope wore sunglasses, she would use her ring finger to push them up, an action she recognized from her own brother. A few years later, people could tell that they were related by the look they gave people when they were bored or annoyed by them: their head tilted to the side and down a bit, their eyes lowered to look lazily narrowed and their eyebrows slightly raised.

Her uncle, while boring sometimes, was someone who she always looked up to in a way. She started exploring books, and by the time she was six, Silas had already taught her to read short children's chapter books comfortably and fluently. He taught her about anything she wanted to know about, and even if he didn't have an answer right away, he always had one the next time she saw him. There had been a few times when he spent half the night learning about something while she was asleep so that he could explain it simply in a few sentences. That was how Hope knew her uncle loved her. She was always confident in his answers and he would never complain about answering a question for her, unless it was personal.

"Uncle Silas?"

"Yes, Hope?"

"Why did Uncle Maverick die?"

He knew she didn't truly understand, being a child, but he still did something he regretted for the rest of his life: he ignored her. She asked again, thinking that he hadn't heard her the first time.

"Hope, please don't ask me that again. I don't want to talk about it."

Being an explorer and a persistent one at that, she continued to question him. "Did you like him?"

He rubbed his forehead, "Hope-"

"Did he know about everything too?"

"Hope. Go watch tv while I finish cooking, okay?"

Hope, disappointed, nodded before running over to the couch. She had no idea why he was upset, or why he didn't answer. While she was confused, though, she never took it to heart. In fact, Silas is the only one who even remembers that it happened. He repeated things his father had told him in his mind every time he tried to excuse his refusal to answer:

There are no excuses for thinkers. We accomplish, and we don't accept anything less than success.

Hope, it seemed, had learned the opposite. She was obsessed with pointing out the imperfections and making her own childish excuses for why they existed.

Once she pointed at a missing brick in a wall and said that it "ran away." Another time, she told her mother that the reason why the cookies were burnt was because they were "sunbathing," a new word she had just learned. Silas always corrected her when she said things like that, but she still enjoyed her reasons more. He secretly enjoyed them too.