Only because I really liked doing this one, and because it may never see the light of day on the web otherwise. Oh, and I didn’t know how to combo the scans to make it all one pdf. Technological incompetent, c’est moi. So here: page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4.

He was sniffing a Cheeto. How was I supposed to deny that?

No cosmic lines, no cosmic lines. This one’s going to live, goddammit.

He brought back the keys and all the stuff I’d left behind, and he brought gifts — perfect, thoughtful things that he was always so good at giving. I’d forgotten about the keys. I’d forgotten about the dinosaur lunch box and the sock monkey hat, the strappy shoes and the sweater dress. Once you’re not allowed to go back anymore, you tend to try and forget.

It’s the process that interests me, right. The process of forgiving and mending and starting something new, in the hopes that someday you will be friends.

He looked the same — or I should say, he looked the same as when I knew him then. Hair cropped short, garbage bag backpack. He wrote me saying that he was leaving that evening, that he had some things to give me. He wrote that we could just “get some water,” which I thought was funny.

He ended up eating brown rice sushi. Salmon and avocado. He poured the soy sauce packet all over the rolls.

He pulled out the gifts: an envelope from Amsterdam covered in rabbits, a book of NINE PORTRAITS BY INDIAN STREET PHOTOGRAPHERS, a paper bag from Kiosk with the Florida coconut toast spread that I’d privately thought would taste delicious, a t-shirt from Yonah Schimmel’s knishery.

I tried to keep it together.

Then came the keys. That was a surprise.

And then he pulled out the giant Kohl’s bag from inside of his garbage bag backpack, and there it was, all of my shit. A pair of wool socks, pajamas, everything else.

It started to get shaky after that.

I asked about his family. He brought up the dog. The old guy. The unicorn. The mystical one. He’s 14, he said. He’s really old. He gets agitated and hot and sometimes we have to sedate him.

And then I couldn’t help it I was overwhelmed and I started to cry. In that stupid Midtown cafeteria that smells like a steaming buffet full of fish.

We’d hugged when we first saw each other, and we hugged when we said goodbye. The first hugs in a long time, and the kind of hugs that mean something.

I’m good at being friends, as I like to say. I don’t know how it happens, exactly, and I’m not sure when we will get there, but I know we will.

“Don’t get attached,” he said. “Things change, and it’ll only make you suffer.”

That was always my problem. The barnacle tendancy…

Dontcha just love silly 50s musicals?

Être en deuil. To be in mourning. The process of grieving someone who has died: it differs from place to culture to house of worship, the expressions of it, that is. The feeling is the same. That physical space of mourning always feels the same. The room gets foggy with the weight of it. I was in one today, and over the somberness and the tears, once I got past the thoughts of my grandmother and my cat and those poor girls and everyone else I know who’s died, all I could think about was you, the hash browns, all of the names I’ve yet to make up for you, the happy stuff. They were chanting it over and over and over and over, Amitabha Amitabha Amitabha Amitabha and eventually, I couldn’t help it, I improvised a harmony.

Things I learned this weekend:

The true, I won four years in a row playing the same. That’s the true. This year I play the same and I lost. What happen? I lost. That’s it.

I heart Nadal.