Journal
And its all in my head, (our past, our future)
I can’t get you out of my head
Mind reader, you can see inside my head
Seeing you it all comes to a head
The thought comes into my head
I’ll love you until I’m dead
There’s a part of me that’ll always love you.
The part of me that’s still 13, the part of me that was the beginning of who I am now, not the child but the person. You watched the change, you changed yourself, and we survived that terrible process together, the death of the old us, the horrors of becoming, the fear and loneliness and hope and desire.
And that’s the foundation of who I am today, and you’re there too, imbedded in the cornerstone, along with all the joys and disasters, and I can’t not love you. I love you like I love summertime, or old musicals, or a favorite book. But it’s more than that. I don’t love you like a friend, or a brother, or a lover. Maybe I love you like I love myself. You’re a fragment. You’re a coin I flip, tails for a grudge and disappointment and bitterness, heads for overwhelming tenderness.
And our bodies never meet, you’re so careful to stay a few feet away, but the meeting of our minds is tangible enough for the brush of your fingers to seem irrelevant. And it’s so tragic and so romantic and then tragic again, isn’t it? You’re divorced and too young for that, I’m a virgin and too old for that, and we won’t say those words but we know it in the sidelong glances, in the shapes we draw around in our conversations.
In the scandalously intimate front seats of the car, in the dark and deserted corners on our evening walking, in the quiet of the galleries where we pick apart the art like it will tell us something about ourselves, I can’t bear to look at you for fear of what I’d do. And we’re two ships in the night, a long day together and then a long year apart, and maybe a year becomes forever, because despite our best efforts and egos we aren’t psychic, or perfect, but I think, I hope, we both want otherwise.
And I think about other things too, about your fingertips through my hair, about how we’d laugh, and it would be so strange, wouldn’t it? But if you were the last man on earth, I think we’d be grateful for the apocalypse to leave us to our own devices. And you’re nothing without an audience but I would laugh enough for a whole auditorium, just you and me and the end of the world. But these are foolish things, flights of fancy that die in the sunlight, in the statistics. So I stop thinking about them, about you. And I can go without thinking about you forever, but you’re always there anyway, in the map of my subconscious, in chess and in that christmas card, in showtunes and in shame and in shivers, in dialects and old sci-fi and always, always, in dreams. I hope I’m more than just an old face to you.