36
came drifting down. Then I saw him, right where I had left him earlier that afternoon. His fists thrust deep in the pockets of his jeans. A light jacket, sleeves rolled up, pleased that I had returned that evening. It pained me to think that he would have doubted my return.
We spent our evening as we spent our afternoons…in an empty house, lying together, intimately wrapped into each other, a candle burning in the dark sunroom. Sharing our deepest thoughts, feeling comforted in the sometimes silence. He was his usual sweet and gentle self. Attentive and loving. Somewhat restored from his somber afternoon smile. He appeared much calmer, happier, and more relaxed. He was very talkative when not suffering from contemplating the future. He sometimes had gloomy spells. I remember only too well the long terrible days and nights that would follow those occasions. I thought of him anxiously and often, worried that things may not be well with us. But this evening he was his most wonderful, and I was reassured.
We seldom talked about his family. Never mine. Maybe his grandmother, as she was often a presence not too far from where we would seal our pleasures and the love and lust that seared us. Odd that our conversations were mostly about who we were, how we felt, the feelings we had developed, and how we had to navigate our daily lives under the circumstances of our awareness. Sharing thoughts of what may come had a dispiriting effect on him. So, if we stumbled on that topic, we quickly turned our focus on the here and now. We shared an emotional and physical intimacy that was more tender and gentle than anything either one of us believed possible.
He had once asked, or maybe had simply mused, that if youthful innocence is destroyed, was it a sin, and would it go unpunished? It was confusing to me. Were we innocence destroyed? Sinners to be punished? A deep melancholy that would not lift for many weeks had already begun to settle around him. And I know I said earlier that he was perfect, but he wasn’t perfect. He could be silly, which I loved in him, and sometimes worrying, which I thought unnecessary; but also, remote when he would ponder the