One day I’m gonna sit down and write a long letter to all the friends I have known – Neil Young, Harvest Moon
Dear J,
There were so many wasted years where for one reason or another, some I understand and some I don’t, some that were just plain laziness or some because in our youth we thought that life goes on forever and there is plenty of time.
We met when I hardly knew myself. I was a stupid cacophony of brutality and hope, of love and anger of not knowing how to be a friend and wanting so desperately to be one. I threw words out there nilly willy hoping some would stick. I hid my heart in one minute and then exposed it in its nakedness the next.
So, I wasn’t a good friend.
But you were – you persevered with me when others didn’t.
I look back on those years of confusion when I thought I didn’t deserve anything or you. I remember most the way you threw your head back when you laughed and the clouds parted and let the sky laugh with you. You were always late – to everything. It drove my anal arse crazy. But when you did arrive my whole world was better, suddenly safer and kinder because you were there.
I loved you so hard and so furiously that I laid in bed at night and wished I was gay so that I could love you completely and in the years where we were apart, barely a day passed where I didn’t think of the empty space that I walked through where once I would have bumped into you, into your kindness and yellowness, into your wide smile and your warm arms.
I missed laying in bed next to you talking until the sun cut light into the darkness of our secrets. I missed opening myself up to you and knowing that you would take my heart tenderly in your hand and return it to me safely. I missed you.
Perhaps we will one day be old ladies, lying in bed, sharing secrets in the midnight hour, our fingers entwined and I will lean across and tenderly kiss you and all those years of awkward growing up will tumble and fall over each other like grass blown into the wind and they will fall into us. Then we will know that we have always known each other even though we have been apart and that age forgives youth and that friendship does live on.
Love R