Waiting

The first time we met, I was warned that you were terribly shy and probably wouldn’t speak at all. Instead, you sat down at my kitchen table with your clove cigarettes and talked my ear off for the next several hours. We knew each other instantly. That sudden shock of recognition, of karmic connection.

You let me read your poetry. You agonized with me over straight boys who had turned your head and at the gay boys who bored you. I taught you to use liquid eye liner and you taught me to use blush to enhance my cleavage.

You used to drop acid late at night and get lost walking in the city. I gave you a card with my phone number, with directions of how to tell where you were, and instructions on how to reach me, no matter where you might end up. I took your calls with no thought to clocks or obligations.

Once, you got smashed at a party as Lena and I steered you to the car, poured you into the backseat, you said to me, “What would I do without you?”

“Easy. You don’t do without me.”

We were almost unbearable in public. At restaurants, grocery stores, pizza joints, we would laugh and laugh at almost everything we saw. You could always make me laugh. Through lovers lost, schemes gone awry, medical humiliations, and far too many experiments in better living through chemistry. You made me laugh through some of the worst moments of my life.

You took me in when the world fell out from beneath my feet.

I took you in when the world fell out beneath yours.

It was at your house that I had my mad, summer affair with Martin. It was largely your doing that the whole mad affair started in the first place. With me, bent over your bathtub, in my ridiculously-short-shorts.

Friends tried to tell me they didn’t trust you. I understood. Your lack of respect for personal property was legendary. But I would answer, “I would trust him with my life. I wouldn’t necessarily trust him with five cents. But I would trust him with my life.”

Ironic, that in the end I stole from you.

During the worst days of the end of my affair with cocaine, I dropped by your apartment in a paranoid psychotic haze and finding you gone, fished out the foiled paper from my cigarettes and wrote a single word on the back of it. “Help.”

You came.

I sat you through the longs months you got stuck in the window seat of your apartment. Days and days without sleep or food, and I would find you there. “Baby. Baby.” I would hold you and rock you and call your soul back to your body from that dark, dark, place.

When we lived apart, our letters flew back and forth like homing pigeons. Funny letters. Serious letters. Mad, stream of consciousness letters with sentences that went on for pages. Letters so voluminous we would inscribe the envelopes with, “Warning: Contents under pressure. Do not puncture or incinerate…”

I still have them all, you know. Tucked into a box. A large box. Some day, when my heart can bear it, I’ll put them in order. Re-read them all. When my heart can stand it.

And in the end?

Your lover became my lover. No one meant for that to happen. But intentions don’t count. It did happen. You refused to be angry at me about it, and like a fool, I prodded you to anger. Looking back, I know how stupid that was. Looking back, I’d give almost anything to take it back. But at the time, I thought it would help. I thought you would yell at me, and we could get it out, talk about it, try to salvage the damage.

Maybe too much damage had already been done.

I look for you, you know. I google you. I search the phone directories and the Social Security Death Index.

It’s been six years now. There are days when I can hardly bear the silence.

I cling to this. We’ve found each other in a thousand lifetimes. And we’ll find each other again. Probably not in this lifetime. But we will find each other again.

Because…

We must.

How else can I be whole except with you?

And so, my heart waits.