His ex-coworker’s husband, now part of his mind map’s constellation of wheelchair users and those who love them, might drift by as a data point, confirming his hypothesis about the pity afforded them—all because I didn’t work hard enough to convince him otherwise.

I didn’t tell him about the day my husband and I met to study together for grad school exams at ten a.m. and coffee turned to whiskey turned to singing in a round as he drove me home, or his first gift to me after two weeks of dating. Jumping eased my anxiety, I’d told him. He showed up to my door the next week with an indoor trampoline.

We all have collections of stills in our minds, people we gather as representatives of groups we don’t fully understand: a fervent doll-collecting aunt, the neighbor’s boyfriend who had that rare disorder. They, along with predictable images in the media, form image clusters that make up prototypes, patterns from which we will only deviate if we’re radically convinced.

Now that I’ve disclosed his quadriplegia to yet another stranger, added his image to the stack in my coworker’s internal card catalog, my husband is no longer afforded idiosyncrasies or individual traits—someone who writes me love letters and teaches improv and is very Virgo about our towel situation, and who, unlike me, is quiet and unassuming in grad seminars. As we parted, I wondered: Would my colleague go home, now, and express gratitude to his wife, “Thank God we’re not them” the subtext?

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