It’s not like I don’t love him, but when I see his picture, I don’t catch my breath in my throat. I don’t automatically grin at our lives existing side by side. There are symptoms that it’s possible to checklist. I think that we might have been kissed out of the same womb on some other plane, and sometimes he’s older than me and sometimes he’s not, but I think too that good friends are hard to find, no matter how often they cry, no matter how often they misunderstand you because they see a little so much through their own filters of Not Good Enough and Wars to Win. It’s an old story, maybe the oldest one we know how to tell. Boy Meets Girl and It Changes Everything. Feelings that never pass easily, emotions that claim us as theirs no matter what we think we want. Once In A Land Far Away is next door and yesterday, a gray pleated skirt in a coffeeshop talking on Russian History.
He wanted to be in this narrative since the first time he read it. I don’t know why it took until today, but perhaps a program grinding in the background has finally finished processing and a card punched full of holes has slipped out of my tongue to the black plastic keys in front of me. It might be that in my pictures, I can see him smiling at me. I understand that urge, to smile at the glass lens into someone’s eyes. Inside me are the same instinctual reactions, the same chemical manifestations of an infatuated membrane broken heart. These twisted hieroglyphics, yes, I speak a similar language. It’s as immortal as a virus and as tenacious as a lonely child. On an elemental level, the only way I know to explain is to say that we dip into the same river to pray.