CARTOON-BUBBLE MUSINGS


I used to pray for us to be alone, because I envisioned that we'd never run out of things to say. We're both such freaks, such word addicts, so similar yet careening down radically different paths. I used to dream of possiblities floating over our heads, little cartoon-bubble musings matched with cups of coffee.

But on that day, the last day as far as I'm concerned, we sat in a room full of goodbyes and leavings, as filled with last-minute emotion as it could possibly be, and found nothing, nothing on earth, to say.

I remember sitting next to you, so close I thought I could smell your toothpaste, almost touching your knees, and occasionally trying to look into your eyes. That was my way of testing myself to the extreme, because there's nothing like looking someone in the eyes to hold you to the earth. But with you, it was different. Our silence filled me with a warm happiness, like I had swallowed something too hot too fast, and was standing outside, wrapped up and comfortable on a snowy day.

I forget sometimes your gravity, the little kid spirit trapped in a tall, strong body, and it makes me smile to think of you. The memory of your agile mind pushes my own to new extremes. You're too far ahead of me, too far ahead, too much of anything and everything.You're more alive than my fragile half-frozen body can stand.

I wish someday we'll be able to lie separated by thousands of miles and two years, and talk on the phone for hours. We'd talk to each other with trust and without fear, free for once to let go of our minds and our conversation and let things go where they would. Or perhaps we'd just run up the phone bill with periods of silence, necessary pauses in a book without pages.

And either way, either way or both ways, we'd still be friends, you in college and me not far behind. You driving and me forever standing, watching you leave, marveling at how close we are yet so unfathomably different.

Yours, _____



the love letter collection
submitted 10:10 PM EST
monday, october 20, 2008