For now, I'm happy. I feel like maybe I'm getting my best friend back. If I am, I feel like we needed this terrible period. And we'll need some more. But this proves we're strong. We can bend without cracking.

As long as I have this, I don't need anything else. And maybe I'll want to try some things with other people, people who'll make me happy, people who will drop me, people who will make my heart grow, and people who will shatter it. But I hope he's there to pick those pieces up--no. Not pick them up. Force me to. Because that's what a best friend is for.

On the other side of things, for the first time, I feel like maybe I can actually love, or at least have the beginning of that feeling. Of course I don't trust it. But someone told me that falling in love isn't for trusting. It's for getting lost in. I've never been lost in it, but I think I'd love to be. If only for a little while.

And then when I find myself again, or when I find the world again, I can fall back into the pattern and the best friend I've ever had might just be there waiting, like I will be.

I think there'll be a lot of getting-losts. I'm ready for that now, I think. Maybe I'm growing up.

Like I said, I never have faith but I always have hope.

But today there was a whisper in my ear that told me to have faith in us. It was really telling me to get any, it was just letting me know that I already had it.

Not that I feel much better, but I have faith. And you know I have hope. But hope is for the future and faith is for the present.

I'm sorry for making you feel inadequate. But it's not the things that you're not. It's the things that you are that make me cry. But it's also those things that make me laugh, and it's those things that make me happier than anything else in the world.

You know me very well. I do feel like you stopped loving me. I feel like you traded me in for something better. And I don't blame you. But you are too worried about being seen as a liar and because you're so preoccupied with trying not to lie, you end up lying anyway, only it's to yourself.

I'm not the only one who said things in New Orleans. And the things you said are the ones that upset me most, that make me cry the most, because I don't know what they mean and I don't know what to do with them. They make me cry because I can't ask you what they mean because you don't know. So now I feel like I'm lying and it's not just to you or me.

But I know you love me. And I know that's not a lie. Even though I say I love a lot of things all the time, there are only a few things that I'm really serious about. Not that I know what love is. But I know what it's not, and that might count for something.

Well, you know me. And you know that my best friend is the person I love the most. And you know who you are in that equation. I've lost the others but they weren't real. The thing that hurts the most is that you are and I hope you always are. For once, I have faith in the fact that you always will be.

It's just been annoying lately because some people don't understand that my priorities are different than most. They don't understand that there are really different kinds of love and that sometimes they can be just as intense and mean just as much or more than another.

You talk about people hearing "love" and hearing what they feel it means and not what you feel it means. So here's what I mean when I say it to you:

Who you are, as a person, makes my world that much brighter. Even the things that I can't stand about you, because I love all of you. I hate using a word in the definition of itself, but this is going to be one of those times.

I love the way we work together, the way we understand each other, and the way you run after me and have made me stop running for once in my life. I love the way, most of all, I can put as much into something and get it all back in return and it's not a chore and it's not a favor. It's just gratitude and enjoyment. I love the way we're opposite ends of the same spectrum and how, through all of it, I never once got the feeling that it was over.

But what I felt like was that you felt that, too, or your equivalent and that it still wasn't enough. You know that all I ever wanted and all I ever needed was a Friend. And I finally found it in you and I didn't measure up. I never understood and I don't think I will. But you don't need anyone or want anyone. At least not in the same way as I do.

It doesn't matter as long as we're there for each other. Through all of it. "All of it" being whatever life throws at us. Most of all, though, I love the way you taught me that I could be happy standing all by myself. No one else taught me that. No one else dragged me there. And that's precisely why I don't want to lose you, because even though I can (like you said), why should I have to and why should I make myself?

So I'll be there for you after all the other friends come and go, and after all the lovers, too. I hope. I hope I'll be there. And I hope you're there for me to go to each time I get my heart broken and each time it gets rebuilt. And I hope the distance between is never very far, spiritually or otherwise. Like you said, I don't think we could be. Because the connection is indestructable. And it can bend like I feel it bending now, but it won't break.

At least not for good.

Sometimes I wonder where it all went. That's a lie, actually. It's not sometimes. It's always. I always wonder where it all went, why he woke up one day and decided that he wanted something else.

No warning. No anything. A sudden cut.

It was stupid of me because I believed him. And I kept telling myself not to but up until the last fucking day he was telling me not to resist.

"Why force yourself to be alone when you don't have to be?" he said.
"Because it'll end one day and then I'll have to build my walls and my foundation all over again."
"No you won't."
"Why?"
"Because you should get used to it. Somebody will be there. Here. You don't have to stand alone."

So that night I decided that he was right. He was there and I trusted him. Three days later he ran out from under me and I couldn't even catch myself.

Friendship is not the golden possession, after all. No matter how hard I want to believe it. For me it is and that's my tragic flaw. People don't want friends. They want fuckers. And I won't ever be one of those. I don't want to be.

"The body is the vehicle and not the point"- Toni Morrison. But not for most people.

For me, I am the point and you are the point. I happen to have a body and so do you. I ask myself continuously:
"What is it you lost?"
The answer comes back:
"It's just a dream."
I ask myself again:
"What is it you lost?"
The answer comes back again:
"It's everything."

There is nothing here for me. Everything is a lie and all I can do is attempt to survive this maelstrom. But I think most of me wishes I didn't and the slight tapping in my heart right now that reminds me of the timer I'm on makes me wish it all ended sooner. Less than five-and-a-half years to go. According to the records.

And in the end I'll never find it. I'll never find that friend because even if I think I have, like I did, I'll know that not so deep under it, the connection is just an illusion. I just want to know why he wasted his time. Why he continues to lie and tell me that he cares when he doesn't give one fly's shit.

I hope he's happy. And I hope one day that happiness will make him miserable.

Refugee

He found his story in an addiction that melted him down and a lesson in the substitute for love when he was running so fast his feet stood still: horizontal on the floorboards, painful pleasures that jaded the Grand Design.

But fucking never taught him how to feel.

He knew that but proposed anyway because the city never let him sleep and on the inside the season never changes.

In the back of his mind there's another girl, a girl that turned him from the inside, out, a person that melted him down and welted him up and jerked his eyes from in to out from up to down but he would never venture there. Too real when everything was real to him because the force of her make-believe encased him and he couldn't accept change like that. (He grew up a long time ago, the kind of growing and going where you can't go back. And there's no use in glancing in the latter direction.)

So he looked the other way. She was tall, and pale, and no-bull-shit, like him. An excellent chef. There was always a good dish to come home to, and his pillar, the girl who let him forget a little while that he couldn't do poetry anymore--so much that it all came back and poetry wasn't it. It was a course load, a new path, physiology and cosmotology somehow mixing together in his mind until it went blank again.

The other girl showed up sometimes at night and he woke up sweating, listening to the plumbing dripping loudly on the porcelain sink because the landlord didn't give a damn.

Mornings were all like Easter Sunday--lazy until the bells rang around 10 a.m. Breezy. Then cut to the chase. Jesus resurrected. It wasn't a big deal to him: he resurrected people all the time and prevented them from needing it. Religion didn't float his boat if it wasn't the Kama Sutra.

It was the mantra tattooed in blood-red across the inside of his forehead.

God didn't do that to him and he knew He never would. The boy did that shit to himself.

He might've believed it until the floor above him caved in from a minor radiator leak and asphyxiated his mattress out of commission, and his faith in what little he had left of it all.

The girl screamed bloody murder when the cat bit the dust too soon from the poison laced with the thrown-out tuna that was really meant for the rats.

This city is a farce, he thought. And the ring is too big on her finger.

Those are the times the other one slips in and he punches the wall to release that unidentifiable monster that rises up like a wave in him. He pushes the identity down beneath him because he knows its name and the truth about what he is.

That addiction's a distraction and he knows it.

Because he's resurrected millions and prevented them from needing it. His saving was his desensitization and if he could only get it back, he'd take all of it in any form, if only just for a moment. But he couldn't, so he took the next best thing. It erased him from himself for a little while, erased the other girl, too, and the inferiority complex that made him shy away.

But fucking never taught him how to feel.

I think people like to make things into complications when it's the simplest thing in the world. I think people would prefer the lie (which is a complication) to the truth because sometimes simplicity is incomprehensible.

Like I've always said, there was only one thing I ever wanted and that was a friend. It took me a few to get there but I finally found it. I found more than I wished for and it was well worth the wait. But some people can't understand that friendship can exist without "wanting more." The more I tell the truth, the more they believe it's a lie. But I refuse to lie in order to give them an answer they would prefer. What really gets me is the fact that it wouldn't matter even if the lie was the truth.

I suppose I'm an anomaly in this world. I put everything into a friendship where almost everyone else puts it into romance. As soon as "romance" enters the equation, the relationship and my idea of it is automatically demoted to something trivial and inconsequential.

Yet I love just as intensely, just as much. Maybe more, because I never stop loving where anyone can get over a romance. At least most of the time. Unfortunately, friendship isn't enough for people. They want more. They want bodies, and that is something I do not want of someone I value. Trust me, plenty of opportunity I had to go in that direction if I had wanted. But I value friendship much more than that.

Nevertheless, I have been slighted. I have been tossed away because friendship is worthless in his eyes, or at least not nearly as wonderful as the flippant and ephemeral kind of love.

My love is not ephemeral, despite what may have ended and what may come back. My love is of a greater height, an ethereal height, a lasting height. It hurts so much it kills me while making me more alive. Even though I lose the friends, I don't ever lose the love.

Unfortunately, this time, I lost more than one. And this time, I am done. There's nothing to really think about now. We weren't enough. We weren't ever enough.

I remember a time when Saturday was Shabbat, when I would not think of lifting a pen to paper, or of switching a button to turn a computer on. I remember when that day was the day of rest, truly, because I could not worry about anything.

Part of me misses it and still feels it tugging at me, just like I miss being a part of something called friendship when I know that both of these things are lies forever misconstrued as truth.

"If you believe in no Truth," the angel asks, "what then does the Lie force itself from? What is its counterpart? A soul is the fulcrum between a delicate balance. There is no other way. Are you telling me then, Little Girl, that you are alone with the Lie, and therefore, stand in the place of Truth?"

"I don't know, Uriel," I answer. "Perhaps there is neither the Truth nor the Lie. Maybe everything is just Chance."

"A worthy speculation, but not very wise."

"What would you suggest, then?"

"Another look into yourself. There are doors yet that have not been opened. There are curtains behind which they lie wearing the guise of walls. Remember, dear, even walls are penetrable, and not all warrant a door to pass through."

It's on nights like these that the loneliness gets to me most. When I need someone but no one is there, my two pillars holding up each other with no room for anyone else.

I go back to my own foundations then. Although I hold myself up, I wonder if they understand that they hurt me more than anyone else. I feel the knife twisting through me and scream in my head over and over again "You make me want to die!"

They make me want to die.

"What is the lesson learned?" the angel asks.

"That I am alone. And will always be...except in brief respites of illusion. Never trust a thing."