Unsent Letter to the Picture of a Boy Who Might Be in the Past
<<2003-11-10 - 8:12 p.m.>>

You must stop looking at me now. Really. I can't stand that you look so three-dimensional. I can't stand how outwardly your gaze is directed.

I remember you leaving my apartment at three in the morning after we'd talked for five hours on the living room couch, you with your coat on the whole time, poised to go. I remember the way the money worked out just right when we spent the day together last December. I haven't seen you in a year.

You live in the middle of nowhere and wake up early now. I remember having to drag you out of bed at two p.m. when we'd been up until four watching movies and laughing in your basement. I remember the way I used to curl up in the big leather chair and read back issues of The New Yorker until your mother called us upstairs for brunch, which one time included zucchini bread fresh from the oven. I remember bringing you the candy-dot-making-machine when you left, and the plastic hoe. I remember standing in your living room suddenly terrified because everything was coming on so fast and how could you be leaving already?

I remember you telling me that it would be okay, because we'd see each other all the time in 2006, when we would be going to Yale Law together. I know you didn't mean it.

Remember that your mother loves me, and that my mother loves you?

I remember you once complimented my poetry in a third-person sort of way while I was in the room, and that was before it was even any good.

And I remember the perfect subtle way your lip curls in a sneer which is friendly because I am on its convivial end and I remember the way you almost made highschool-Miriam cry and I remember the way you used to sometimes make me feel brilliant just by talking to me.

You have to stop looking at me that way with your dark dark eyes and your deceptively open face. Maybe it's that I know your brilliance, but I see it in your mouth and in your eyebrows.

See, I'm already depersonalizing you, preparing you to slip into before. You're a boy. It's like I'm afraid to use your name.

I think (I am afraid?) that I am saying goodbye.

<< - >>