The Title is ______.

old friends

people from my past occasionally flash into my mind and make me remember parts of myself. the other day, i thought about someone i have not seen in years. i found myself wondering how he was doing and if he is happy. I also wonder what it would be like to see him now. while it would be nice, i am not convinced it would be sustainable. He and i used to see each other once a year at a family conference during the summer. our parents were friends, so we became friends at a relatively young age. we started spending time together more specificly when i was in high school. i always liked how tall he was and how strong. he had a really nice face and smelled like cedar and old spice. he smoked cigars and other things and drank too. sometimes he would make out with girls and then he would hold them and then eventually they would hurt him and he would get really quiet and go off by himself. sometimes he would let me sit with him and we would think big thoughts and dream big dreams and watch the stars come out and the sun come up. he drank coffee and skipped required events but did so in a quiet and deliberate way that made me love him. he was intimidating to be on the wrong side of and when he grew angry it made me afraid, and still i loved him. he was the first boy i ever wrote i song about. i dont think i ever showed him that song. we never fully understood each other but each of us longed to be known. he was powerful and angry but gentle and controlled around me. he talked about important thoughts and ideas and whispered to me that sometimes he considered suicide. sometimes he would find me and want to talk, which usually meant lying on our backs listening to water crash on the sand in the night. we were old souls in young bodies. truly beautiful things wounded us and we starved for them. we communicated strongly in languages that did not use words. i would sing songs and he would draw pictures on scraps of paper and show me his photography. he would play the guitar while my fingers itched to move like his. he loved dark things, dark music and movies. he wanted a woman to love and protect and take care of and i wanted to care for and love and protect someone too. in that way we loved each other fiercly, but it was always temporary. at the end of the week we would go back to our lives and forget about each other, but not entirely. he had clear gray-blue eyes that were often sad and had grown old much faster than he had. he sent me a school picture one year. i never threw it away. it is still at my parent's house in a box somewhere along with other memories. he told me about girls he had loved with his whole heart and i told him about boys that had broken mine. together we nursed the deep wounds of heartache and he would hold me because he needed to and i needed to. he was older than me and it showed. he would swear and grumble in the morning and i would tell him not to and he would look at me. not for very long, but steady and strong, like his body was. he was patient with me. his face rarely changed and when it did it was barely perceptible--just the slightest shift in muscle tension right above his eyes. his eyes were foreign and untame and slightly defiant. it was a quiet dare for anyone to try to mold him. he would look at me and i would say i was sorry. i would not bring it up again and he would stop swearing for a while. he had broad shoulders and strong arms that would stiffen and betray his opinions on god and life and people. his voice was soft and low but carried an intensity that made you pay attention to it. he enjoyed the company of others until they reached the age of five or so and then he tolerated them. in many ways we could not have been more different, but something about the combination of time and place and circumstance made it work. he was the reason i wanted to come back the next year and the year after that, but there was never the certainty that he would be there although i was certain he cared for me in his own way. it was a safe place for me. it was a place we could come and be completely divorced from our day to day lives. and maybe one of the only places where we could be completely ourselves because there was no risk and no responsibility. eventually real life won the tug-of-war and we both stopped returning. every so often i revisit it in my mind, but i dont think i could go back. in fact, the very idea makes me afraid. I have frozen snapshots locked in my brain that i am afraid would be permanently altered if i tried to. so i guess for now i am content to live with my memories and hope that my old friend also remembers.

posted by k.o. @ 5:06 PM