Tony

What were you doing writing me poems as you stood on the edge of life and a death only a year or so away?  Your poems were full of light, and humor, and sexiness.  Once you wrote about my belly, how unlike that of the muse that inspired the Song of Solomon, it was not a bowl of wheat.  I could feel the heat of your fingertips on the paper, reaching through to touch my belly, felt myself rising to you, a few miles away, safe and celibate in your parents' house.  You were a joy to them, and everyone you met - that bouncy smile, upturned, petulant face, silliness ever ready.  Who were you with that face, and then the one you kept turned away like the dark side of the moon, infrequently considered, and known only because there must always be an equal and opposite.  That opposite turned out to be an extreme none of us would have dreamed existed.

I am still writing to and about you 17 years later.  Every day is a lesson in how long loss, and loneliness, and wretched, vomitous missing can go on.  What a bizarre never-ending for a first love.