friend

In your youth, you were an emblem of youth. The sound your legs made as they moved beneath your skirts was a secret language, in which they bragged of their own strength and dared every boy and girl you passed to make their way up your thighs. When you laughed, you threw everything into it: stomach, lungs, shoulders, eyes. The conviction with which you spoke made a riddle of every contradition, and a saga of every lie. Your breath burned like a high in my throat when we stood close enough to trade secrets.

I'm not going to say that I loved you, because I hope you can make up your own mind. 

In later years, I no longer knew what to make of you. It seemed incredible to me that you retained the same electric blue eyes. You were a stranger and I missed you so much that sometimes at night got sick to my stomach. Once or twice I vomited in the kitchen sink by starlight, always missing a strand or two of hair when I tried to hold it all back.

I felt the same self-righteous disappointment with you that I felt with poorly cast movies made from the beautiful books that I had kept under my pillow as a child.

"No but she was suposed to have wavy hair," I would whisper to my bored companions in the listening dark of the theater. Or else I would scoff, "He would never have worn Adidas!"

With you I thought the same sorts of things, only there was no one there but you to whisper to. And that, of course, would never do. I think I bit my tongue until it bled.