constance | Could you please knock me off my feet for a while?

There's this old friend I'm missing. And usually when I miss him, I miss the good things about being his friend. I miss the lazy Saturday morning breakfasts and the default companionship and the compliments he gave me, personal and generous and somehow managing to touch on the things I like best in myself but don't really talk about. I miss that we loved the same things and approached our love for them in such fundamentally different ways that talking about them was rarely just an exercise in agreement: it was a debate where trying to understand his completely alien point of view locked my own love in place all the harder.

So I miss those things, for obvious reasons, but sometimes I miss the other things too, the calls at three-thirty in the morning because he was having a sleepless night, me lying flat on the hardwood hallway floor because the only phone jack in my shitty apartment was in a hall nook, mostly asleep and just listening. I miss his cannonball-messily-in-then-leave-the-pool-immediately approach to dating; he made a lot of women extraordinarily unhappy during the years I knew him, but fair's fair, he also made them equally happy, and it was a revelation to see him picking himself up from his latest disappointment only to throw himself at someone new as though she were his last salvation, the love of his life. The idea that anyone could expose himself in that way, over and over, only to have it end painfully almost every time. Unimaginable, really, but because of him I never actually had to imagine it. Witnessing this behavior in him has made me strangely optimistic about love's possibilities and at the same time cemented my natural wariness but good.

He was one of my closest friends, maybe even my actual best friend, for a long time, and it's been several years now since I've seen him. The reason why we stopped speaking is an important one, though I can't really talk about it here. I will say that he did something that changed his life irrevocably, and I didn't know how to respond to the change and failed him in a serious way by not knowing how to offer my support. But I miss him all the time, even knowing that he has good reason to hate me. I wonder if he just hates me all the time, or if he maybe misses me sometimes too the way I miss him.

I've been thinking about writing him for a while now, because he lives in New York. I haven't been back since 2001, because New York to me is his city and most of my experiences there are made possible by him or guided by him or otherwise tacked around him, and it always seemed wrong to go back without planning to see him again. And it still does, and I'm going back now, for sure, this June. I want to see if maybe he might want me around, even just to meet up for a few minutes. Because I miss him, did I mention that?

Except I've been hesitating because I haven't been sure what to say. It would be awkward to fire off an email saying Hi, it's been a really long time since we've talked, and I'm not sure if we're Officially Speaking or not, so I'll understand if you decide not to respond to this, but I miss you all the time, and I was hoping that you might want to spend some time together soon, but even if you don't I wanted you to know that I'm thinking of you. But I'm increasingly convinced that there's not really another way to do this, so I just need to do it, sit down and write the message.

Right?

:::

On to more frivolous matters! Here is a conversation.

J: Today's a square root day.

Me: What?

J: You know, 3/3/09.

Me: OH. J, that's kind of a big deal!

J: I know!

Me: The next one's not till 4/4/16!

J: Yep.

Me: And then 5/5/25! And then 6/6/36!

J: You'd just keep going all day if I let you, wouldn't you.

Me: Yeah, I totally would. 7/7/49!

J: Man, I knew you'd appreciate it, but not how much you'd appreciate it.

Me: You should have known.

Me: Except it's not really a square root day at all, is it?

J: Okay, I don't even want to know what you're thinking. You have to be quiet now.