Habits

Craig was sitting at Starbucks, again. It was what he did every day. He liked to spend his mornings and evenings there, sipping the same coffee every time.

The guy liked to watch people. He knew exactly what everyone else's habits were. He knew this one guy with short, dark brown hair, who always entered the coffee shop at 8:30 am, who always ordered the same Mocha Latte.

Then there was a young girl, not older than seventeen, he believed. This girl always picked up a large, black coffee with three sugars, before she went to school.

One of the employees was late for work every day. Craig figured out that his name was Adrian. He always looked like he had partied the whole night, and not gotten any sleep, because he had to hurry to not be late. The guy's hair was blonde, not too short and had some highlights. It was greasy and never fixed. Adrian gave the impression, that he didn’t care. At least that's what Craig thought about him.

Craig loved to sit there, on the same little couch every day. He wasn’t like everyone else. Since he was young, he had always loved to figure out people's personality just by watching them. He scanned every inch of their bodies, listened to their voice carefully, even bumped into them innocently.
No one ever noticed that there was something wrong with him, not even the guy himself knew it. Though, he would find out soon.

There was one boy, Craig couldn’t figure out. He had longer, black hair with a colored highlight, dark brown eyes and was dressed in mostly black. His personality showed through his style.

Craig was almost afraid to talk to this guy. He never liked talking, was always the shy one, who chose the back corner to sit in class, and made his way out of school as fast as possible. He was never one to talk to teachers or hold speeches.
That's the reason, he used to just sit and watch. He could make out everyone, knew what a person was like by just one glimpse, learned about their habits and likings faster than anyone else.

The guy knew exactly how often you were going to get yourself a cup of coffee at Starbucks, where you always sat, the time you arrived. He could tell every day, you entered the shop at another time, if you chose to take a newspaper or not.

Everyone had always been afraid of Craig. They all thought he was creepy, the way he would stare at them from time to time, listen to their conversations. For Craig, however, this was normal. It was one of his habits, habits every human had. No one can make out their habits on their own. They always need someone else to tell them. You might think, you get your coffee at a different time each day, but you're wrong. If you just watched yourself you would notice that you enter the shop at exactly the same time every day, always take the taxi to get there and take the same newspaper with you, every time you were at the coffee shop.

Everyone thinks about habits as bullshit. But they describe, who a person is. If you didn’t have any habits, you were not human. Even if it's only your fable for sneakers or high heels, whatever you chose, it's a habit of yours, though you wouldn’t notice. You wouldn’t notice, that you always wore the wrong shoes or clothes, not if your shirt was wet, because you went through the rain with only your hoodie, but wore your Protest jacket, which is waterproof, on the sunniest days of the year. You wouldn’t notice, even if you did it every time.
You're human after all. Humans aren't supposed to know things like that.

Craig, however, was different. He understood things like that. He managed to see things about a person, they didn’t even know themselves.

This black haired guy. He was a mystery to Craig. This boy didn’t show any kind of habit. He never showed up at the same time, not even approximately. One day he would come at 8:00 am, the next day he would be there in the evening, or not at all.

The boy never ordered the same things. He had had everything on the list at least once, some things more often, others less.
Never would he put the same amount of sugar into his cup. Once two packs, another day none at all.
Sometimes he would take a look at a journal, sometimes he would take it to wherever he sat down.
The boy didn’t sit at one table two following days. He would change it, no matter who the place belonged to, who always sat there. He didn’t care if he destroyed someone else's habits, not if their day was horrible, because he didn’t let them drink their coffee, like they did every day.

Whenever a person couldn’t go through with their habit, Craig noticed, their day wouldn’t go right. Either they wouldn’t make it to work on time, something there wouldn’t be as they wanted it to be, or if they would have a fight with their loved one. Habits are who a person is. They define a human's personality, just like their style does. Without habits no one could make it, they would be stressed to death. A person without a habit would be lost.

Craig couldn’t find an explanation for the boy's behavior. It was impossible for him to be like this, why was he still alive?
Most people, who didn’t build their own habits over the years, didn’t make it. They would get depressed and suicidal, most of them would die.
A therapy or a psych ward only gives people habits. There they have to get up at a certain time, have breakfast, go to their therapy lesson, have lunch, another therapy lesson, some time off and dinner. Everything was planned through, the kids in these clinics just got better, because they built habits. Some of them started to not attend part of their lessons, it was their habit. They would always skip the same therapy hours. Not that they noticed, but they did it. Others would stay up late and not make it to breakfast on time, guess what, they always came late on the same days, it was their habit.

No one was able to tell things like this, except for Craig. Craig was not normal, he was a freak, what he called himself. He knew that something wasn’t right with him, but everything he came up with made sense. Absolutely everything Craig said was right. His memory was the best you could find in miles. He noticed everyone and everything, he remembered every smell, every color, every sound, he remembered everything. Everyone wished for a memory like Craig's, but no one had it, they were all normal.

The more strange it was for him, that the boy he saw at Starbucks didn’t show any kind of habit. Not once in the whole month Craig watched him, had he done anything that would turn out as his habit. The boy creeped Craig out.

Craig wasn’t one for being scared or disgusted. He appreciated every new detail, he could find, was it the color of a flower, everyone loved, or the smell of vomit, everyone hated. He didn’t like everything, but he didn’t hate it or think of it as disgusting either. Craig was thankful, whatever he would get, he would take it and thank for it.

One day, when Craig sat at the coffee shop, he always used to watch people, something strange happened. Craig didn’t feel too well that day, he had the feeling that something wasn’t right. He would've rather stayed at home, than gone to Starbucks, but he couldn’t have lost a day of finding new, interesting people. Craig knew it wasn’t good to go there, but he did it anyways. He wanted to know, what was wrong about it.

The whole morning Craig had had a headache. He took aspirin, it didn’t help. He tried another painkiller, it didn’t help either. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, Craig never had any pain at all. Nothing hurt him, he hadn't ever had a headache in his whole life before.

By noon, everything started to get more painful. Craig imagined voices in his head, voices that weren't his own. He couldn’t make out, who talked to him, or what, but he was sure that is was someone. Someone he knew, someone who was watching him.
Craig took a look around the whole coffee shop, his gaze landing on a person, he should've known was there.
It was this boy, the same boy, he had been watching for over a month, the boy who didn’t show his habits, if he even had any.

Suddenly, a name popped up in Craig's head, a name he couldn’t put to a person. He had never known anyone, called like this. Craig thought it was creepy, but he immediately knew, who this name belonged to.

Alex.

It was the boy's name. The name fit so perfectly. Nothing could've described him better than this single word. Funny how much a name could say, it was something Craig had never seen before. It was like, he had known this boy for ages, like he knew every single detail of his history, like it was him.

They both just stared at each other across the big room, for a long time, neither of them breaking the stare. They were curious, curious who the other one was, who they were watching, with such disbelief.

Every thought Craig attempted to make, was drowned by blurry sounds, sounds Craig couldn’t relate to anything else.

It was if everything he had built in the nineteen years of living, he had tried so hard to understand, didn’t make sense anymore. Every purpose he had was gone. It was like Craig was like everyone else, just by the stare of this boy.