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It had become a routine in the last few months. He would leave the station, and instead of turning left, he would turn right. It was a small change, really. He was still going to flop onto a couch, watch television, read, drink, play his guitar. The only difference was that he turned right. Well, that wasn't quite true. When he turned right, the couch was a bit warmer and more comfortable. The television was turned up louder, and was infinitely more interesting (though less often attended to). There were two beers on the table instead of one. When he played his guitar, someone listened, and he actually cared if one or two of its strings were out of tune.
It was never properly acknowledged, when he started to turn right. It just happened easily, slid into being without comment, like a cloud drifting ever so slightly over to reveal the moon. Suddenly there was light, and that was the way it was, and had it ever really been different? They had always been this way, unconsciously crammed to just one half of the couch but fitting perfectly anyway, as he read aloud instead of silently, and occasionally had to explain the meanings of words, digressing into historical context as he went along, earning looks that were fonder than they weren't, notwithstanding the obligatory eye-rolls. He took those teasing glances as payment, returning cheeky grins of his own, until one or both of them declared the book a bore, or got distracted by a word, or two, or three, and they ended up in a heated debate on some issue or another, or leaping up with sudden clarity to announce a perfectly plausible motive for murder, and of course it was the aunt who did it, leaving the book forgotten on the table between their beers.
It wasn't long, after he began to turn right, that he started to keep his glasses in his car, rather than by his bed. Contacts began to itch at the end of a long day, after all, and he was rarely home until late. It took him far longer than it should have to come to this decision, but he figured he could allow himself some irrationality in this case. He hadn't worn glasses in years, except when he was alone. Soon enough, they too were forgotten, like the book, a nightly fixture of the table by the couch, carefully, quietly placed there when he inevitably fell asleep as he sat with the television on, pulled into pleasant dreams by the warmth of not being alone.