There is a betrayal of sorts in finding happiness still in spite of - or perhaps because of - circumstances surrounded by loss and distance. There is, and will always be, the bittersweet sensation of longing, of fading away from the narratives of daily lives among the people whom I profess to love. I have already been erased, sort of, in the life of who was, for the last three years, my most important, but that is a story that is not quite as sad and not quite for now.
Everyone I love is back home, but perhaps not really, not anymore. We carve new shapes into our hearts in the image of the people we meet everywhere, anywhere. I have been away long enough to have new figures in me. It has been a year since I left all that was familiar to melt away in a new home, to melt into a new self. There is always truth in the things we say in jest, and there is so much truth in the insouciant claim that this has been my best life yet. I like who I've come to be, and is that not always the most important thing?
Two memories of late.
i.
London, UK. September the 16th. Two kindred souls in a small and mildly confusing apartment, with half-packed bags strewn all over the floor and a table full of cheap deli meat and alcohol. Ten in the evening, cool summer night following an overcast day that was the last day in their week together. All the metaphorical walls and guards have been down for at least ten years and counting until the reasonable lifespan. "We've seen each other through puberty," they said. "Whatever I do now can hardly be worse than that."
There is a unique sort of introduction to a person that can come only by being with them all the time, such as in traveling or in marriage, I suppose. You may think your thirteen years of being the best of friends has introduced you to all that there is to know, but all then you find all these minute details, new prisms of their iridescence. I knew you well, perhaps the most, but I know you better now still. Isn't that lovely?
We were tired, but we felt alive. We had been drinking for days on end, but tonight, we were drunk. The drunkest we have been together, but not quite enough to lose our sensibilities. After all, iron grips on consciousness are what we are known for. We fear the ugliness of our souls too much to be fully vulnerable. Alcohol does a funny thing to our dynamic. Suddenly, you were the dominant one, the doting one. Suddenly, you were a little different, like holding a familiar object under a different light. It was disorienting. It was all new.
For all intents and purposes, if we had wanted to fuck, this would have been the moment to do it. But we did not, and I don't think we wanted to. We talked about it, talked about us, and how the astral bodies that orbit our existence, and the stars in our peripheries and horizon, how they all wondered when - not if - you and I would. This was a topic we had always come to accept but shrugged off from our shoulders like settling snow, among other things. But tonight. Oh, tonight. Suddenly, we paid attention. And certainty -- well, certainty is fundamentally more desirable for people like us.
But here is the thing. With misty eyes fogged up with inebriation, I looked at you with so much fondness, perhaps more fondness than I have ever felt for anyone, romantic or otherwise. But my love for you is not the kind that would spur me to explore the topographies of you with my hands and lips. My love for you goes beyond that, I think, into the realm of the abstract where we could truly exist as one. Two souls much alike, compatibly melding together even without the clumsy attempts of lovers mistaking sex for unity. No, you are my most important person. You are my best friend, and despite what those around us have come to expect or wish, I think this platonic pureness is too valuable to risk for maybes and what-ifs.
You are my most important person. You are my best friend.
ii.
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. September the 20th. Almost strangers, but not quite that anymore. Autumn begins in the coldest capital, but words are relative though the cold is not. Ten in the evening, after another party with more clear-cut spirits. The late hour is never a deterrent for the lonely and the thinking, and perhaps we were a little of both.
Ten in the evening till two in the morning. Empty streets, dim light posts, the frigid air. I had my arms out of your car's window as we sang along to songs we both love, and you would look at me to whisper secrets you have not said out loud in a long time. You showed me hilltops from which to breathe in the twinkling lights, the signs of life and whole universes within cramped apartments. You told me histories, his stories, her stories, as we drove through forgotten corners. The city never looked so beautiful.
With age comes the acceptance that reckless abandon is no longer within my domain, but for one night, you lent me access to what you - in your fewer years of being - still held. For that, I am grateful.
