You've returned to my nightmares, but these tears are not for you. Seeing the closed eyes of your corpse should have meant closure, should have meant that I could continue on, knowing that you're eternally out of my life. Why then can't I let you go?

But the tears are not for you. What if I were there, standing in front of your doorway, ringing the doorbell? What would I say? He opens the door, looks at me, asks, "Yes?" and I stand there, my chin trembling but unable to form a word as my hands convulse and shake. What could I say to him, even as I saw your ghost floating in the foyer? How could I stay the dagger from his throat... or mine?

No, they're not for you. As I try to imagine my life if you hadn't died, if I had stayed by your side and refused to let you go, I stare into the frightening abyss. There I am, at twenty nine, managing the one strand left of my sanity. No, I needed to let you die, and I cried for you then. Eventually the dreams faded, and I forgot you ever lived. I was free and almost happy. I allowed myself to believe that it was okay, that your death meant life for me.

So these tears are not for you. How did my path come so close once again to where it might have been? I shouldn't be able to see my choices, how things could have resolved. Why is it then that I stand on the ledge, a hundred feet above the gravelly old trail running beside the creek deep in the ravine? And why is it so hard to keep from jumping, from feeling the cold air prelude the sharp rocks and the splash of the water?

I wish these tears were for you, because then I could mourn you and grieve and wake up fresh and revitalized. But when I close my eyes tonight you will haunt my sleep, and I will be unable to forget your soft half-smile once again. It's a curse to have you giggle at me across the Styx as if to tell me that you told me so, that you told me all your life not to take things so seriously, not to care so much: it's only life after all.

These tears are for me, and they are only for me. When I open these groggy, crusty eyes and your image fades once again to mist, I face the true nightmare -- that you may be freely over there, but I'm stuck, lost and lonely, over here.

If there was a turning point in my life, it was that night.

It was one of my favorite memories, when I had favorites, when the past to me was a prophesy to the future and not the life of some fictional character, living in another world far from here. As the candlelight flickered off your eyelids, I spent that long lingering look upon your face marveling at it as one might wonder at the radiance of the sun. I've described the night with so many words now that it has become completely devoid of emotion. This is the tragedy of time, that descriptions of scenes as monumental as these can never carry with them the tumble of the heart, the stutter of the mind. But it is not upon that gaze that I wish to expound; doing so has done little to reveal the actual intention of that evening, or the actual consequence of it.

I could sense, even as I drowned in my own chemical ecstasy, that I was never going to feel that way again. I was at the peak of a curve, or perhaps as fate would find me, the trough. I was turning; the acceleration had finally reduced my velocity to zero, and I sat for one brief intentional moment in your presence, in that room, and I felt the world stop. I lied to you in that moment, brushing the hair back from your face and pretending that we could remain in that pause forever.

But it was a turning point, and we both knew it as we extinguished the candles one by one. My whole life before that night was spent dreaming of just one moment of tranquility, of knowing what true love meant.

And my whole life after that night was spent running from it.

A dark mist prevents me from seeing you, but I know you're gazing at me with those curious eyes again. You seem to insist, tonight as you always do, that I linger far too long here, standing in this wretched misery just because I find the glimmer of the brackish water beside my feet mysteriously enchanting. Yes, I admit that I come here to find you. I want you to set me straight, to push your hollow body through mine so I can feel the ethereal chill of the physically impossible but divinely required superposition of our souls.

Why do I continue to seek you out, and why do you mean so much to me? Why can't I ignore you, like everyone else seems so eager to do? Why can't I imagine you as a person? Why are you always a ghost, dead and inaccessible? I should be able to envision how you were: alive, vibrant, shimmering with the thousands of other souls I knew... but now you're something less than that... something less than real.

Were there any words I could have said to save your life? How could I have stopped this? Why can't you understand the guilt I feel, the overwhelming need I have just to be here, to try to find you once again?

No, there you are right in front of me, gliding back and forth, staring at me but hidden, veiled in your precious mist.

I can't explain how strange it is to see your face, to hear your voice. You died nine years ago, maybe ten now. How then do I feel this flood of emotion when you laugh, when you swear off the cuff in videos I was never meant to see? How can I explain the way your quirky tongue turning a phrase in a flat, two-dimensional mirage fills me with inexplicable desire to reach into the screen, grab ahold of your locks of hair, pretend that you really are alive and that all of these breaths you're taking are real; that all of the syllables you form with your precious, perfect lips are not simply voyeuristic fantasies of your afterlife -- or mine?

I'm forming my thoughts carefully, dreaming that I might get one more chance to talk to you, to tell you everything you (could have?) meant to me, but it's a fantasy I'll never realize. It's just enough to make my heart sink every time I pick up the pen and try to write about the intimacy we never shared, shouldn't have shared, needed to share; how I try to tell you the future I saw apart from you in your eyes; how I try to ask for your forgiveness for being nothing by trying to be everything to you. As I watched the photons dancing before my eyes, all I could think was how foolish I was to ever believe that this terrible pen could produce the eulogy to do justice to your memory.

The past is as real to me as the present is, as I sit and read the nine-year-old words you wrote. I wanted to hate you after reading them, but I was the one who was aloof, distant. Your heart was in the right place, even if you were never able to act the part. When you sat, reading my story by the light of your candles and in front of a recording of David Bowie, did you imagine that you and I were the characters? You must have, and you must have known how deeply I was changed that night when I brushed your hair softly with my finger and watched you sleep. I imagined all these years that I felt what I felt alone, but maybe I didn't.

I thought I had discarded the emails your ex-boyfriend had written me, long after he was your boyfriend. He signed his emails "agape" even when I lashed against him in my proto-agnostic rage, and I resented myself when he died for never taking him up on his offer of coffee. It wasn't necessary; when we sailed on that boat on the Ohio River, we talked and sang enough for our entire lives. I can imagine him living in Missouri right now, preaching in a tiny church in a needy town. How could I really feel his death? Ten years on, I knew we'd have never said another word anyway. His death was immediate, when he boarded his bus and I boarded mine as we poured out of the convention hall that cold February afternoon. Everything I heard from him after that was from beyond the grave.

You asked how he and I had "clicked." It surprised you, shocked you to know that we had something to talk about. Who had we each become to you? I glaze over, reading emails that were written from your heart but clearly not to me. Who were you writing to? Were you writing to Daniel? It's my address in the "To:" line, but you never told me you loved me and here were words so sweet, words that ended with a declaration of love. Did you expect somehow you'd get us both?

I know where you live now. I'm embarrassed to admit that, but Daniel told me. He wants to take a train and he wants to find you. I keep telling him you're dead but he won't listen. He insists I send you a postcard, at least. Just one, he says, from Baltimore. How am I supposed to explain to him that he's reading the past, that you're not alive anymore? How can I convince him that when he reads, "i like getting mail and i think my favorite type of mail is postcards and i think my favorite person to receive postcards from is you," that he's reading what was, not what is?

How can I ever convince him that even if he sent you a thousand postcards, you'd never respond?

I wrote you this poem with magnetic words on my refrigerator this morning:

friend –
she soars Over mist
the garden rain shines
rose pedals sing her music
in her very be(d) i dream
beauty is you a-live

You and I were never us, but we have always been.
I am, and we are, but you need to be.

There are no complications.

"I hear Boulder is sunny 200 days a year," he said, staring out at the overcast gloom outside, "and LA is like 75 all the time."

I shrugged. "So what? I'll take variety any day." Of course, I'm one of the most routine people I know. I'll admit that readily to perfect strangers when I first meet them. I go to bed every school night at 11:22; I wake every morning at 6:57. It's what I do – routine keeps me moving forward, keeps me sane. This minor detail about my wanting variety in the weather shouldn't have been so easily disclosed and passed on.

It was probably Nathalie who enacted this change in me – in subtle, unnoticeable ways. Her unpredictable nature when we were in college led me to brief periods of intense joy and sorrow, and those puffs of intensity became all the more meaningful when superimposed on my methodic lifestyle. She connected in some intangible, intimate way with my soul; I once commented that she, who condemned the thought of a world beyond the observable as the "pretend world," taught me more about the mystical than most self-proclaimed spiritualists. Maybe I felt that the unpredictability of the weather in this city was in some small way connected to Nathalie and moreover to my soul itself.

As it was, however, the comment slipped through, unexplored and largely unnoticed.

“Do you think he’s ready for this?”

As the plane swooped and dove unmajestically above Indianapolis, I sat, looking across the aisle and the other three seats at the ground enveloping the entire opposite window. In between pitches and jerks were long periods of smooth drifting as the circles became lower and the approach final. In my landing, I experienced a vague memory of the last time I had flown into this airport, more than ten years ago.

( ... )

When the first rays of sunlight pierced the window and hit my closed eyes, I floated up from my sleep like a diver returning to the surface. I took my first breath of fresh air and tried in my grogginess to recollect the reason I was here. I could wade through the evening as the moon, bold and orange, rose slowly from the east, and as we sat, alone in the universe that was nothing if not one. Staring past each other into the dimly lit humanmade courtyard we were reminded that this is all layers, and we peeled back the benches, the buildings, the cobblestone walk. Soon we were seeing the abyss beyond, and we lingered on the precipice.

We turned and faced each other and unceremoniously removed our shoes, our socks, our shirts. We stood naked on the ledge, weightless and natural. The words, continuing to flow from our lips became a driving harmony to the beating of our hearts, and we took each other's hand patiently, slowly, as if memorizing. The stale air gave way to fresh breeze as we tipped and lunged, soared into the nothingness.

But the sunlight revealed the bruises from the fall, and as the world slowly came to focus, I realized with a sense of dread that I had not been dreaming. The softness of your hand had been too real, the breeze too cold. I could feel the jarring pain of the ground as it crashed into me; what had been a void became a courtyard again: here now were the bushes, there now the trees. The layers filled my eyes and ears; the empty smell of nothingness became the rich tapestry of pine and lavender and clay. And I remembered how I had been naked with you, how my soul had been bared, and I felt the shame and fear envelop my every fiber. As my eyes focused on the window, my heart pounded. I tried to comprehend what I had done.

Then a sound, a rustling, from beside me, a soft scrape of skin on cotton. I turned and wanted to be guilty; I wanted to be told that I was alone, that I had imagined it. I wanted to be confirmed that my understanding of illusion was wrong again; that the abyss was a lie, the concrete real. The ego demanded it.

But you lifted your head slightly, opened your eyes in narrow slits as you recognized me. I tried to find hollow distance in your creases, in your tangled hair. But as I looked, I saw only my reflection. Your hand reached up, touched my cheek; your head fell back to the pillow. And I, amazed, felt the calm come over me.

I closed my eyes and drifted. Our souls lifted with each breath and resumed their dance.

As we spoke in bright moonlight,
the water recognized the water,
and it was nice to take a swim.