...in a kaleidoscope

~I am excited because it’s your birthday, and we are going uptown on the C. We think we can trace Holden Caulfield’s footsteps.

-I always try to begin at the beginning, but it seems you were right. The origin of anything is indeterminate. Before the train there was a kiss on an escalator. Before that: waiting on a curb for a bus: a dance: the first day of freshman biology.

~It is snowing in Middle Village. We are sharing headphones, shut off from the world but connected to each other by wire and rhythm. The flakes stick to our lashes. Even though it barely fits, my hand is warm in your pocket.

-That same winter we are crowded into the back of your father’s van, sandwiched between a drum set, bass guitar, and our friends.

~We watch her vitals on the monitor as the hospital machines beep and click. The way I hold you when we find out and brace myself against the wall to sustain the force of your embrace. The way we make love after her funeral, as if it means nothing else can get erased. How we know it can never be the same again now that we are sixteen and someone our age has died.

-I always made you apologize. Even now my email inbox can trace back far enough: I love you so much/You mean everything to me/I’m sorry. You were not always wrong. I was almost never right.

~Tell me why an email from 2005 can make me cry.

-I live with a man now. We play cards at night, make the rent, and hardly ever fight. If I told him that the only reason I know how to love him is thanks to you, he would not understand, but it would still be true.

~The only good advice I ever gave you was a proverb from a journal: Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, he turned into a butterfly.

-The difference between me then and me today is when something good happens now I have to tell myself not to forget it, whereas remembering used to be automatic. This, I believe, is what Conor Oberst sings about.

~I saw a boy on the train yesterday who reminded me of you. He wore his bangs swept over his left eye and even had the same Adam’s Apple.

- The last time we had one of our lunches where we try not to talk about the weather I wanted to say sorry just one more time. It would not have even made a dent, but I should have said it.

~I still think about: Sitting on stoops in the summer. Chipped nail polish. Melting popsicles. The warm noses and wet licks of dogs no longer living.

-I am always writing letters to people that I will never send. I have never written you one, but I suppose this counts. The reason I have never formally attempted one is because thoughts of you come to me like a kaleidoscope: a picturesque novel of you and me on the bus, on the train, in English class, under my umbrella, on your basement floor. Coherency is overrated, you would say, but I feel life revolves around the construction of narratives. Ironic, you would say, because I have never been coherent.

~Incidentally is still my favorite word.

-You were the space between every synapse-that instant which said: you are for me, as I am for you. Not the period or last stitch but the dash and first inch of thread which, after starting it all, Continued.