The Earth, Further and Further.

1.) Still seeing so much good in the world despite being abandoned, neglected, disregarded, put-down, belittled and otherwise shit on by nearly everyone I thought I needed love from. 

2.) Remaining love-driven above all else! For being an endlessly self-regenerating watering-hole of love.

3.) For keeping myself beautiful in accordance with my own personal conception of beauty, in which beauty in aesthetic appearance is the highest plane in a hierarchy whereby inner beauty is a prerequisite to outer beauty. A striking and attractive face can be just that, but there must be a beautiful person—a kind, compassionate, sympathetic, thoughtful, loving person—within to turn those looks into something beautiful. 

     3.5.) I see myself as beautiful because I know what fills my heart. I know with the certainty that only I can know, that my intentions are pure and always rooted in love. Despite what may gurgle up from below from time to time, I do not allow myself to act in vengeance or spite or jealousy, nor in greed or competition. (Although perhaps sometimes in fear.) To be filled with love is to be beautiful. 

4.) For purging from my experience all feelings of embarrassment and of being offended. Embarrassment is nothing more than handling a situation badly. To never feel embarrassed is a statement of grace. And to never feel offended is a statement of logic. The thoughts and behavior of any person outside of myself have no logic or reason to cause me distress. People simply are how they are, independent of who happens to be around. Sometimes, when I happen to be around, people are rude, tactless, inconsiderate, and worse. Only my reactions to these situations reflect back on me, not that I’ve been in them. 

     4.5.) I’ve bettered the rest of my life in internalizing these idea(l)s. 

5.) For endlessly self-perfecting in these qualities. 

that we were slowly cooking ourselves to wake in the light; this morning forcing its way between the fibers of my curtains and our reluctance, and I was taken by surprise at how much warmer I felt when he said

“You are a beautiful person.” 

How much more deeply those words warmed me than had they been “you are beautiful.” Because, who cares? A compliment to my unmovable genes that could go unspoken and make no difference.

But to be “a beautiful person.” I felt seen. Not for the fortune of my predetermined design, but for my own way of bringing this design to life. I felt seen, and it made me feel all the more beautiful. I felt seen and that made all the difference. 

My body: this is just a smaller apartment I inhabit much like my actual apartment. I can alter the style of my hair and the clothes I decorate myself with as I can alter the color of the walls and the rugs and drapes. But there is a life in here, it’s because of me, I’ve done something here and everyone who comes through feels it. It’s not the paint or the furniture or even the souvenirs of all my life up to this point or how I’ve arranged them around. You can feel it in silence and in darkness. It’s the magic that makes these floorboards and drywall into a home; it’s a magic that makes these bones and cells into me. 

In bed that morning, this one—he knew it. He knew me for the feeling of me, me in silence and darkness like that we shared in the night, and he saw in me the beauty that I want always to be seen. 

The firelight of a single flame caused everything to shake. It was the shaking of the flame that kept me from drifting into a dream. But I couldn’t blow it away just then. Its dance was too hypnotic, a sorceress in movement like a siren to sound. The windows all were shut, the door sealed, I even held my breath in stillness—but the flame kept on reaching and resting, shivering and stretching, bouncing and jiving. If I have a soul I am seeing it now. Unpredictable glowing dancer: needing a stage to dance, needing a wick to burn, just as I need the heavy weight of my own breast in the cup of my hand, the sound of a distant train bumping over the tracks, a cushion below my head, a table of elements and the light of a candle to convince me that it all exists. 

The left hand group of surviving figures from the East Pediment of the Parthenon, exhibited as part of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum.

[Below is a little history lesson, followed by some personal thoughts.]

I just read of the Elgin Marbles in a textbook from which I’m studying for class. The author, T.H. Leahey, writes: 

…the Elgin Marbles [are] named after Lord Elgin, a British Hellenophile who brought them back to England for preservation. The Elgin Marbles are large flat slabs of carved stone that were part of the decorative frieze around the top of the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens. In the Museum, they are rightly given a large room of their own, mounted high around the walls to give the viewer some sense of the original experience of seeing them. They are indeed marvelous works of art, but I was disappointed by how little about the marbles was told by the Museum’s labels. They discussed the purely formal, aesthetic properties of the Marbles, pointing out, for example, how the figures on one echoed the forms on another across the room. They did not reveal what the figures and forms meant, what they people, gods, and animals were doing. At first, I thought this formal approach simply reflected the fact that archeology developed in Europe as a branch of art history and therefore stressed aesthetic appreciation, whereas archeology developed in America as a branch of anthropology and stressed cultural interpretation…

Subsequently, however, I learned the the story was less simple: no one really knows what the Elgin Marbles mean. Traditionally, they are thought to show the Panathenaic Procession. Once a year, the leaders and citizens of Athens staged a grand parade to the Parthenon to honor their city’s special god, Athena. However, detailed interpretation remains lacking, and some scholars think the marbles commemorate a legendary sacrifice by a mother of her two daughters to gain an Athenian military victory. Had she had sons, they would have died in battle, so she gave her daughters. That the Marbles are something of a mystery is especially surprising because the Parthenon is not especially old. The Parthenon whose ruins we see today was erected in the heyday of the “glory that was Greece” era, during the leadership of Pericles (495-429 B.C.)… as a replacement for structures destroyed by Persian invaders. The Greeks were inventing philosophy, science, and history, yet we have no discussions of the meaning of the Parthenon frieze. People rarely write down what they take for granted… Often, our grip on the past will be loose, for much quotidian detail is gone forever. 

I feel it is certainly worth it to include that mini history lesson, but it is truly the last 2 sentences from the above passage that resonated with me. Is the same not true for our own personal histories? Our lives? We remember the memorable, the battles, the disasters, the greatest of celebrations and spectacles, but are bound to lose the mundane quotidian detail that is the brick and mortar of life itself? Must the answers to the whys and hows surrounding those saliencies slip away as mundane details are wont to do? Must all we leave behind be big, empty questions? 

When I’m reflecting on my young life in old age, I don’t want to lose the detail to the blurring of time. I love this life and I want to keep it forever. A greedy memory hoarder is what I am! 

I need to take pictures of everything.
I need to write everything down.

I don’t want my future-past to be like the Elgin Marbles, with memory filling in the gaps between what was once one memory, one whole, now fragmented into superficial pieces, artifacts as broken evidence of a dissolved intangible, as the last remaining proof that it existed at all—with the “it” to be determined by imagination and reasoning over knowing. I need to get to work on a death bed time capsule. 

NEW PLAN: Once every 3-5 years, I will make a time capsule. When I’m dying, or feel that the time is right, I will open them all up in one beautiful ritualistic evening of nostalgia and reflection. I will start on the first of these this week! What a shame should I die suddenly. I feel a deepened commitment to longevity! 

This morning in the midst of a nightmare, I achieved lucidity, as I am wont to do in the midst of nightmares. Something about the absurdity strikes me as so irrational I realize it must be a dream, allowing me to wake myself from the unpleasantness. 

I dreamt there were snakes crawling into my body through my feet. At one point my feet were stuck together by these awful things worming their way inside of me. I tried pulling them apart like the two pieces of bread stuck together by a stringy mash of melted cheese. Once I was free to walk, I found a doctor, a beautiful woman in all white, she stayed calm and pulled from a jar a glowing white worm which she told me to swallow. She said its presence would “overwhelm” the others and they would leave. Then she held a lantern up to my body and my skin appeared transparent, revealing the squirming shadows inside of me, writhing around in my legs and sides, but she said, “It’s okay, they won’t harm the baby.” At this I realized there was something small growing in my womb, it rested peacefully, unaware of what was going on all around.

Soon, these snakes began coming out of my every orifice. The beautiful doctor stood behind me as she pulled them from my body, and I was calm and not afraid, though also not fully present as I put all my faith in her. Then she told me, calmly she told me, “grab that one and pull it out” and I suddenly saw a tiny hissing snake head before my eyes, emerging from my mouth. I grabbed and pulled on it, but it bit my hand. “Smash your fist into the wall” she told me, still calm, and I did as she said. It was just after this that I became lucid to the dream state and I took it all in for one more moment before opening my eyes. 

Most people wake from nightmares upset, but I was delighted! What a dream to interpret! What a wonderful gift from my subconscious!!!

THE INTERPRETATION:

The snakes: I kept referring to them as snakes in the dream, but in fact they were parasites. I once watched an episode of House where he made mention to these parasites that live in desert sands, and if you walk over them barefoot they will crawl into your body through your feet. This information was filed away into my brain and therefore accessible as material for dreamstuff. 

Those parasites are all the bad feelings, all the toxic feelings that have been feeding on me, depleting me, stealing my energy, all those parasitic things, etc. 

And what’s more—“everyone in your dream is you.” That’s a staple of dream interpretation. This beautiful doctor, she is me! My inner strength. The one telling me, “No, these feelings don’t have to be inside of you.” Remaining calm and positive in the face of a troubling situation, shining her light and making me transparent, seeing, not ignoring but acknowledging the bad things inside of me and casting them out. 

And the baby? My future self, perhaps? My better self? Rebirth and all that. Becoming a better person, growing, changing, ridding myself of what’s unwanted and nurturing and protecting that which is. 

In light of recent events, this nightmare gives me great hope. 

The Six-Word Memoir Project

The above link will direct you to Smith Magazine, home of a global project known as The Six Word Memoir Project. (See also NPR, The New Yorker.) I heard about it in this TEDtalk by Sebastian Wernicke, in which he uses only a handful of examples to illustrate a point on brevity. But one of the examples he reads is: 

FOUND TRUE LOVE, MARRIED SOMEONE ELSE. 

(It turns out to be by Dave Eggers.) 

When Wernicke read that aloud, the audience had a laugh. I had a pang of heartache twist through me and onto my face in an expression of horror. My overwhelming empathy! A memoir, a LIFE in six words defined not by wealth or status or success, not even by travel or activity, but by love, and lost love at that. I wonder, how many among us might borrow the phrase for their own 6 word memoir? At present I might write mine as: 

RESEARCHER ON LOVE. LOVES THE SUBJECT.  

or

LOOKING FOR THE ANSWERS: A DERAILMENT. 

But in 15 and 20 years I should hope to rewrite myself:

MOTHER AND WIFE, BURSTING WITH LOVE. 

or 

FULFILLED. INSPIRING OTHERS TOWARDS THE SAME.

But definitely NOT something like, FAMED PSYCHOLOGIST WITH GREAT DINNER RECIPES, or NEW YORKER blah blah blah (blah), or  WRITER, etc., or REDHEAD, etc., or any other epithet centered on any identity outside the realm of love.

The implicit instructions to writing a 6 word memoir are to decide what matters the most to you and then assess how you’ve done for yourself with it. Even if I do become a famed psychologist, writer, lifelong redhead and urbanite, none of those things even make the running for the theme of my memoir, of my life! It’s love. It’s always been love and it will always be love. 

FOUND TRUE LOVE, MARRIED SOMEONE ELSE. My heart gulps at the thought of it and my head bows to the many who read their own lives in those words. I’ve heard enough explicit confessions, witnessed enough passive complacency, been told about enough regret, enough uncertainty, enough longing to know that Dave Eggers wrote a common story. 

It freezes me with fear, because I know the the truth to my own words, that nothing else runs against love as monarch of my meaning in life. The subject is set, but what of the predicate? What if it’s not up to me? If it is beyond my control? I can only love as I love and hope for a garden to grow. But what of the weather? What of the wild? What if I, too, have him only briefly before he swims back into the vacuum of the world, a diamond slipped from my hand into a city of broken glass? What then? 

A memoir in 6 words:

TENACIOUS YOUNG LOVER FEARS FUTURE PREDICATION

If I reminded myself that I will never play like Mozart, I would never sit down at the piano. If I allowed myself to think that I will never write like Shakespeare, I would never pick up a pencil. And where would physics be today if every scientist post-Einstein suffered the paralyzing pressure of never measuring up? We have learned to revel in our efforts for our efforts’ sake. It would be an act of impoverishing deprivation to allow comparison with living gods to incapacitate our ability to enjoy our own achievements and pleasures. Thus, we have learned to take pride in lesser victories: a perfectly paced trill, the recollection of just the right word, the wrong answer bringing us one step closer to the right one.

So why can’t we allow ourselves to do the same thing with love? It seems perfectly healthy for those who want to paint to keep on painting, regardless of whether immortality may ever be achieved. But it seems fraudulent to feel content with anything less than maddening, commanding, utterly stupefying love. Love is supposed to slam a brake on the axis of the Earth, and anything less than the impossible perfect is romantically unacceptable. Everyone learns that Romeo was of little more than misguided callow passion, and yet still we cry, Wherefore art thou?

My life is essentially as good as it is ever going to get. I am swimming in a sea of golden hearted friends, I am well-liked, excelling in graduate school; I am well-fed and well-read. I dress myself to express my inner mood, which I am allowed to feel and nurture and coddle and cry about if I feel like it sometimes. I recently wrote out my gratitude epiphany (below), but where I’m going with this is not quite as positive. 

My life is full as a soap bubble filled with tremulous light, and yet I feel as though constantly quivering on the cusp of the instant it all bursts. I am aching for someone to love and share this light with! My life is filled with love, but it feels like a belly stuffed with grains when the body aches for nutrients. Food is food and love is love but nothing compares to fulfilling the craving! And what I crave is so precise, so rare, a delicacy.

I’m thinking of receptors and molecules, how they fit together like lock and key. Some locks are better than others, binding only with the perfect match. Others are more easily confused and deceived, such as by drugs. Me, I do not get intoxicated with the generic version of my desires; I wish that I could. I wish I could be as these girls I know that always have men around, all of whom make them equally happy.

And why am I inculcated with guilt and shame to confess these feelings? Feminism has had the very unfortunate effect on romantic love of making us believe it should always be of secondary concern. We regard the thirst for love as a gluttonous lust, even as pathetic, as some symbol of dissatisfaction with the self; it is not a respectable ambition. When someone aspires to succeed in sports or academia or their career, we say they are dedicated, committed, passionate! Why don’t we give the pursuit of love the same honor? We all know that love can make us happier than all else, so why not devote ourselves to finding it, developing our techniques and strategies, studying ourselves, seeking mastery over it? Instead we turn our attentions to our appearance, our possessions, our resumes, our bank accounts.  

Well I speak with conviction and confidence when I repeat that I am brimming with self-satisfaction. Yes, I have a fabulous pack of friends who care for me deeply, and yes all of my needs are met: my emotional needs, my physical needs; they are beyond met, they are indulged regularly. I sit on the throne of my cozy bed swathed in silk and down and I feast on the banquet of life. And I am grateful for every morsel, yes. But without a love to share it with, without shared romance I do not feel truly full, fully satisfied.

Sharing. Sharing is a gift, it is an act of giving. I want to share my life, my treasured life, my very life with someone. But it cannot be just anyone, and I don’t even know who it can be, I’m just hoping I’ll be able to recognize him among the throngs of ordinaries. Not only am I hoping he’ll be there, that there is such a he, but I am trusting myself to find and identify him, based solely on intuition. This is absurd. Love is impossible. 

I’ve made offers to share my life, the life I find so beautiful, with men I’ve thought I could love, and I’ve had this, my most esteemed of gifts, rejected: a most disabling dismissal. I can’t bear how disappointing it was this last time. I have post traumatic stress. After my car accident, I was jumpy for years anytime I found myself in a car. I had anxiety around the stimuli associated with the past trauma, and now I will have that same anxiety with what is supposed to be the best feeling a human being can experience. No feeling is more satisfying, more elating, more thrilling than that and now I question if I could ever again relish those thrills. I will be cautious, I will be suspicious, I will be on guard. Because I can not suffer the trauma of that disappointment again.

I fell from too high. I broke my heart like a bucked-off jockey might split his skull. I won’t get back on that horse I’ll just walk beside him from now on. And should he knock me down again? Will I abandon him forever? Is this how it goes, giving up on love? A fall in several steps, each one representing a disappointment of unrealized hopes and beliefs and dreams? 

Or I could be like that madcap jockey who gets thrown from his horse but continues to climb back on the wild thing to see where it takes him, regardless of the consequences at risk. How committed to love am I, really, if I allow the setbacks of injuries to dampen my courage, to constrain my ambition? I remember when Keri Strug injured her ankle during the 1996 Olympics—she kept going and she won. That is my inspiration in the savage sport of love. 

In fact, I wrote an analogy of love and sports around this time last year. Upon review, this may be one of my favorite pieces of my own writing. 

a panicky pedantic articulation
a familiar frustration:
semantic overcompensation

I haven’t had a lot of nice things to say about love lately. Maybe it’s because the whole idea is a crock of shit, or maybe it’s just because it hasn’t given me a fair shake. (Remarkably me and just about everyone that I know.) Regardless, I was a strong advocate of this fundamental human belief just a short time ago. After all the battle scars I have walked away with, I still swore I would never give up on the fairytale. The idea that the perfect someone was out there waiting was a necessary delusion, as it probably is for everyone because ultimately no one wants to be alone right?

As life goes on however, the majority of people don’t necessarily grow up or become wiser, they just become less idealistic. Dreams die hard when you’re half way through the race and realize you are nowhere close to the head of the pack—you’re just thankful that you aren’t the schmuck behind you. A series of defeats starts to slow your pace in order to get you ready for the very real conclusion that you will one day be dead. Your weight, your hair, the aches, the pains, the lack of energy: all signs on the highway of life that get more noticeable as you travel down the road. It’s laughingly nudging at us, reminding us of what’s really important:

Time.

You see, (and if you dont I will quickly point out to you,) love is an enemy of your time. 

Love sounds groovy doesn’t it? Affection, kissing boo-boos, wild crazy sexual maneuvers you didn’t think were possible. Comfort. All great justifications for man and woman to feel compelled to achieve this blissful state of happily ever after. Sadly, we know from the heart wrenching tales of others, as well as our own painful experiences that we aren’t all cotton candy and teddy bears on the inside. We have all been on the other side of the coin, we have been the ones bitched about to the sympathetic ears, and we have been called an asshole or a bitch by those naive and biased sympathetic ears. Love, as our already unrealistic, cinematically-influenced culture sees it, is the ultimate idealistic notion, and idealism is the blinder of moderation, consideration and truth. 

A relationship, as many comedians have time and time again pointed out, starts out showcasing all the finer points of our character. We express our selflessness, our compassions, blah blah blah, our ideals. We all believe in our ideals to a certain degree because in a perfect world, that would be us to the last detail. The other reason is that if you don’t believe in your bullshit, then 9 times out of 10 your prospect will see through your hollow banter as well. Half truths inevitably pave our roads to half successes because we would rather use maneur instead of mortar. (Most people don’t have mortar handy anyway.) 

Love is built on WEs and OURs. The most illogical thing two individuals can do is to think they could even remotely successfully achieve this WE and OUR bullshit. I have a will of my own, and so do you. So why is it that people could even desire being subjected to the expectations and willful demonstrations of another? Normally, there is a passive and aggressive role in a relationship—and this is the problem. Wearing the pants is not new psychology by any stretch of the imagination but it serves memory to point it out that WE and OUR is a clever way of saying MY!!! Eventually the aggressor takes control of the relationship and the passive person starts to suffer at the the lack of decision making they actually contribute to their own lives thanks to this WE/OUR propaganda. Their life, the one they were accustomed to freely decide upon and alter any way they felt fit, suddenly became the sole intellectual property of WE/OUR incorporated. Your life is no longer your own, and your hopes and dreams are now OUR hopes and dreams. Your clock is still ticking and time is running out with less ownership of it. “Love” is the enemy.

We all have good or best friends but on the whole most friendships never reach the critical meltdown that relationships do and here is why: Friends love, respect, and care for each other, and some occasionally even fuck and are fine with this. They say sex is what ruins it all for people but hark for I say this is bullshit. It’s the childish human tendencies we never grow out of that ruin the experience. It’s codependency. It’s two people having two different agendas and not compromising. It’s people holding expectations of your behavior to cave for the sake of “love” while you simultaneously expect the same. It’s when people fail to express themselves independently for fear of misrepresenting their Significant Other. 

Ownership. The dead end result of a relationship is always ownership. People make great pets, but they are so much more. Your partner says a lot about who you are, as they reflect your tastes. Nobody wants to look bad, especially at the expense of someone else, so it’s more than likely that instead of accepting you for who you are, there are definitely going to be some changes to cover up those blemishes. Now don’t fret because these “blemishes” are mostly trivial and highly disposable things like your friends, the way you dress, and/or the hobbies you’ve invested your life in. All the better to just not be a part of your life anymore. Now let’s throw in the social pressures of material wealth, quality of life, planning for OUR(my) future. But wait there’s more! Add in a dash of jealousy, the fact that there are plenty more qualified candidates, better looking and more successful even, cellulite, pot bellies, age undefiable wrinkles and many more tragedies that could at any moment culminate into something that is nothing less than near fatal and will be sure to breed a healthy cynical outlook, much like mine.

To end on a positive note, if you read between these lines of cynism, love is not the enemy, but the manner in which we approach it—with forceful expectations that the person we claim to love adapt to our own will. As an aspiring psychologist and longtime studier of human nature, I do think that understanding these traps is the foundation to avoid falling into them. But I also think it takes a lot of work, which we’re all happy to put in, at the beginning, but that work ethic typically loses momentum over time. What is needed then to keep it from petering out after a year, a marriage, a baby? My hope is that within the next 23 years I’ll have an answer for that one. 

I will never utter the phrase “I have nothing to wear!” again. In fact, it is my intention to swear off complaining in general from this point forward. I feel like an ungrateful spoiled brat. You know who has nothing to wear? Some guy living in a yurt in the middle of some primitive culture with nothing to warm him up but the flames he kindles himself by rubbing 2 sticks together. Certainly not central heating and a fluffy down comforter and a silk chemise like me! I live better than the equivalent of royalty of some tribe somewhere right now. It is remarkable. Even by the standards of my contemporary compatriots—living in trailer parks and public housing, off of fast food and cheap beer, insulated from high culture and opportunity—I live in utter luxury.

And what did I do to deserve this life? Nothing! Sheer chance, sheer fortune of the circumstances of my birth. The unbelievable majority of all of human history was dominated by the rule of men, and men ruling other men. I am living in the evolutionary apogee of the human experience of freedom, and even more-so as a woman! I get to sleep with whoever I want to, pursue any career of my choosing and stand a good chance at being successful at it, I can eat whatever I want and even have someone else cook it for me, listen to any type of music at any given moment. I can live alone with tons of space. I can scream that God’s not real from the top of my lungs pretty much wherever, with no consequence. I can draw a caricature of the president blowing the pope if I want to. I can express my feelings and opinions in any conceivable medium and not only is it allowed but it is encouraged!

My problems are so trivial. My romantic woes boil down to basically one complaint of too much equality: I fantasize about romantic courtship, but instead I am initiated into an unspoken, unacknowledged game of manipulation. Where calls and texts are deliberately ignored or delayed, where we both try to sell the other one on this illusion of ourselves at our hypothetical bests. I don’t want to play this game and I never have but it sure beats any historical alternative! Subjugated polygamy, rigid social government, not being allowed to say no! Women were cultural slaves for most of human history. Forbidden to have opinions let alone express them. I am vividly imagining how trapped it must have felt, living in such a Puritanical world. Not being allowed to make any choices for myself, being someone’s pet and not even getting to choose the someone. How can I ever complain about anything?! My life is amazing! 

I feel like we all—the people in my little world—we privileged elite that pout and insist that we aren’t because we refuse to believe that what we have is enough—we are at large a shameful lot. Our culture is one that endorses the belief that enough is never enough, that to feel satisfied and content is lazy and to strive endlessly for more is honorable. How is it that abundance yields only greed and desire, and rarely satisfaction much less a true feeling of fortune? Political freedom, sexual liberation, equal rights, civil rights, these beautiful luxuries of liberty have turned most of us ugly with entitlement. I can no longer allow myself to perpetuate this state of taking those things for granted. 

Just when you feel humanity has failed, someone comes along and does something astonishingly selfless, totally disregarding normal conventions, while openly exposing the deepest of vulnerabilities. There is something strangely inhuman about apologizing of one’s own free will—Not out of the pressure to make peace or to manipulate a situation in your favor, but out of the desire to make someone else feel better even at the expense of your own vanity. For a person to reverse their anxieties and abandon their prejudices almost defies human nature all together. To then admit it freely to the person you feel you have slighted and honestly apologize without seeking some sort of retribution is virtually unheard of and truly demanding of respect. Often, it seems, a cold mood will develop in these moments, as they are so jarring and unexpected that the recipient has a freeze response, uttering something clinical like, “Thank you, that means a lot to me.” But it is my intention to embrace these rare moments of human beauty with new warmth. I can only apologize for having not done so more often in the past. 

I’d like you to know that I love you, now, because I know you will someday be someone I miss. For all we are is this—As two kindred souls who spark in occasional passing yet never create a current. You are cute with your expressions, and funny when you curse, and you smoke cigarettes with the same European fluster with which you do everything; at once both not-giving-a-fuck and boiling with anxiety! I can anticipate your mannerisms and the way you laugh at your own jokes. I can predict the intonations of your voice as you make them while you speak. And I like all of these things about you. But we have nothing really to say to each other. It is little more than an acquaintanceship, and we are both more than satisfied with this. But for this reason we will surely become lost in one another’s tides, as surely as two grains of sand in the sea, drifting from the shore of a present moment into the depths of some forgotten past, until one day by chance I may remember you and in that instant the lost eccentricities of you will spin again together in my mind, and with this image I will miss you so terribly. I’ll realize my age, how much has passed since I last saw you—It will seem longer, relative to the closer friendships and relationships in my current life, as I will miss them more regularly and these revisits to them in my mind will distort the perception of the lost time between us and other losses. Should I run into you in twenty years, I’d find only a glimmer of this young man I know in the eyes of his much older face, a glimmer much like that you’ll see in mine, and with that we’ll spark again and feel a sudden sense of connection to each other, but of course, we will have nothing to say to each other then, as we have nothing to say to each other now. But I do love you now. You are a stake in my reality, a character always in the background, a pale of camaraderie that would feel incomplete without you. I do love you now, because I know you will someday be someone I miss.