Sometimes I forget that I once met you, because it feels like you’ve been here, by my side, breathing with me, since always.

We went to high school together, but we never overlapped classes, and then one day we were both sitting outside the counsellor’s office. You looked like you were about to cry, and I panicked and handed you tissues and some candy I found in my bag. Instead, you sneezed, but the tissues were still helpful. “Thank you,” you had said, after you had laughed at me, and I laughed at myself too and asked you what your name was. “Adriana”, you said and I remember thinking a name had never sounded more fluid and it reminded me a lot of your eyes, a liquid green, and of your hair, dark and flowing past your shoulders, and perhaps it was the way the light hit you, but in that moment, in the linear pallor of the counsellor’s office- you reminded me of all the songs we used to sing about the sea, and immediately I was taken over by wave after wave of possibility.

We were seniors and school seemed not to matter, so we went on adventures and I’d arrive back home at night with sore feet and an empty stomach and a hoarse throat from laughing so much. “Are you coming?“ you said, and when I was 18 there were many moments when I was confused, but this was not one of them. I put my hand in yours because it seemed to me there was nothing else I could do and you pulled me into the whirlpool of yourself. Suddenly I was in a different state by Sunday, running towards places I didn’t know, with your hand in mine always. You were exactly what I needed back then- I, who waded through the world like the crab ponds of our youth and you, who threw yourself into the water, without knowing its depth, without even dipping a toe in first to check the temperature. You loved me in much the same way you danced: carelessly and with your whole being.

We were headed to two very different places come August. You were off to Northern California and I was staying in North Carolina and that scared us so we promised each other we’d wait a year and go somewhere where people still spoke in tones of red and orange instead of blue and grey. We told each other we’d rent a car, and get a dog, and take our dog even though the car rental company said no dogs, and we’d drive across oceans to find the places where the people we longed to be lived. But all our promises dissolved in the August rain, because there were things that mattered outside of our world, and I stayed in my half of the country while you drove off to yours and my whole body ached with the grief that seeped into the spots you left empty. We had promised to talk, to write, to love each other still,  but the unspoken words and unwritten letters somehow got lost in the tumble of things, and it was neither your fault nor mine that we broke two of our promises, but I know I never broke the third. 

After the four years were up, I spent six months waiting for you to come back to North Carolina, until I realised you weren’t coming back so I decided it was time for me to move too. I followed in your footsteps once again, and drove to California, but I stayed in the South because I had started to believe in providence and I didn’t want to tempt it. I met you a year later, at a party and we didn’t do the small-talk thing because we had loved each other too well for that, and I asked you if you had gone to all the places you wanted to go, and you told me you had just ended up drawing maps all over your body, because it was cheaper than air travel, and you found it worked just fine, and suddenly I was telling you I wasn’t fine. “You look fine,” you said, and I know why you said that, because you only saw me when I was around you. I made sure we were always close to each other and I watched you the entire night. “Sometimes when I’m smiling so much my mouth starts to ache,” I’d said. “Good things can hurt too, “ you had agreed. 

I assumed our convergence meant there was no longer any dry land standing between us, but you were not so certain. You were a lot more cautious now than you were before. You were different and in the beginning I didn’t understand that. To me, you were still the girl who took all bad news sitting upside down on the sofa because the words had an easier time sliding down her throat, the girl who used to say that french toast was always the answer, even when you’d forgotten the question, the girl who told people she was from made-up places so that they’d finally realise they didn’t know everything. But I was gone for five years of your life and you had changed, inevitably, so I tried to fall back in love with you slower, kissed you harder when I wanted to say something more, so that the words stayed locked in my throat. But we had loved each other too well for that and it was clear in the way I breathed you, that I subsisted on you, and you eventually melted back into the pattern of our former life together, and the day you did you turned to me and asked me if years later, when we had more to our names than a Swedish futon, a copper percolator and a couple ideas, we’d remember this moment and so far I do. But I miss the futon, because when we’d get in a fight you’d feel bad about making me sleep on the floor so we always made up before morning and it became a rule between us, to wake up happy, because our 6AM cup of coffee was just about all the bitterness anyone could take that early.

And while we may have no bad nights, we sometimes do have bad days. Days of hoarse throats again, of empty stomachs and dinner going cold on the table. Days too of sore feet, when I leave the apartment, walking towards nowhere, or maybe towards Jerusalem, maybe along the Ganges, or maybe just to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes. But I always come back because there’s only one thing in this world that is black and white and that’s the way your hair looks sprawled out on our sheets, and everything else I just have to figure out as I go.

In many ways you make me want to be better, but in most ways you make me selfish, because all I want is to lie by your side till the dusk closes over this life and we must move on to the next one, where maybe you’ll come back as a dolphin and I’ll come back as a tiger, and I promise to learn how to swim if this is the case.