This is something I wrote in Madagascar after I got the invitation to my ten-year high school reunion a little more than three years ago.
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I have recently been engaged in an elaborate fantasy that I am living with, and wholly in love with, JD. She and I were in the same grade and occasionally shared a class (I can remember junior year honors chemistry with Mr. L who was old and pink-skinned and had freckles that, upon closer examination periodically proved to be scabs) during 4 years of high school. She was short and skinny, I guess 100 pounds, naturally dark-skinned so as to seem non-chalantly tan year-round. She had big brown eyes and an elongated pear-shaped nose that made her look like a small brown dog. I haven't seen her in ten years (except for once – see further down), but even when I saw her with regular frequency I didn’t pay that much attention to her. She was so perennially happy and affable that she seemed almost asexual. In high school I was a sweaty, masturbating fiend with a mullet and gave little thought to anybody whose image I couldn’t use to lacerate my shame and self-loathing.
I didn’t have any friends in high school. I spent every lunch period sitting in spiteful silence with B, a kid who I never liked much and whose company I kept out of fear of ridicule because there was no one else I could have eaten with. I did have acquaintances formed in the unoccupied minutes of class time with lab partners or whoever was in the neighboring desk, and a few of these acquaintances were shaded with a mischievous comfort and candor (even if it never turned into party invitations, or phone calls, or idle hanging out in more domestic quarters). It would be a stretch to put JD in this category. I, to the best of my recollection, never sat next to her, never got assigned random group work with her, and never bumped into her passing by the library with her friends on their way to lunch at some exotic off-campus location like Taco Bell or Arby’s.
But I did like her, very much if only in a we-will-never-have-sex-and-you’re-way-too-happy-to-be-interesting-to-my-inner-inadequacies-so-I-don’t-much-care-if we-never-have-a-substantial-conversation-over-the-next-4-years kind of way. I always noticed when she was around. I liked it. It made me think good things might be possible, however improbable. I never pined for her, but I did have a kind of vague crush on her. She was always smiling and hygienically positive and supportive of people in a way that I took to indicate she was probably good at Trivial Pursuit and knew how to play Scrabble and had never once told her parents that she hated them; she was a beautiful person who was easy to forget.
I’m 28 years old now. It’s 5:08PM. There’s a pale white moon just coming out over the treetops in the east. The sky is still blue. The sun is a big orange diffusion in the west, going down. My ten-year high school reunion is in 4 months, and I have just alerted the organizers that I will not be able to attend (but “I miss you!”). I am sitting in a small cement health clinic in a town of about 5,000 people in Southern Madagascar. There’s usually never anything to do at the clinic and I daydream a lot. I hope that she sees my name on the list of people unable to attend and, if she does, I believe that she will e-mail me shortly thereafter and then it will only be a matter of time until we are sharing an apartment in residential Hollywood and regularly exchanging casually sincere “I love you's".
The last time I saw JD was in July of 1996 at the Krakatoa Coffee Shop in Fig Garden Village Shopping Center (Fresno, CA). I had just turned 19. It was the summer after our first year at college. I still hadn’t found a summer job and would sometimes drink freely refillable black coffee, read, and stare in vague directions while enjoying the pose of contemplation that was little more than a cover to more fully appreciate the physical dilation and mental quickening from 4 cups of late afternoon coffee. J showed up, smiling, and cheerily recognized me alone at a table (was I reading The Painted Bird?) and joined me. I don’t remember anything we talked about, but I started by saying, “So Ms. D, how is life in the Ivy Leagues?” (When I get nervous I try to be arch and condescending). She went to Yale. I was jealous. I have a vague recollection of learning from her the specifics of train travel from New Haven to New York. This was the one and only real conversation I have ever had with JD.
I miss JD. I don’t resent myself for missing somebody that in retrospect I hardly knew. How much do you have to know about a person to like them? How much do you really have to know to love them? This has nothing to do with the elaborate and fairly superficial relationship fantasy above, but I love JD. I’ll probably never see her again. If I do, I don’t know how our conversation will go. It will probably be short and end with something like “It was really good to see you again.” “You too.”
Getting older is scary. Being alone is scary. There are nights here I can’t sleep until late. When it’s night in Madagascar and there’s no moon and I am alone the mudbrick house I live in creeks wickedly, and the hissing cockroaches shuffle against each other, jockeying for space in the crooks of the door jam and window frames sound like someone trying to get in. The blanket feels too hot and the air too cold and I can’t sleep for hours until late when I just stop caring about what might be outside and fade away. 
I don’t want to fade away. I want to love things and be in love with things. It’s easy to do this when you can take a thing (is my memory of JD a thing or a person?) out of the confusion of its present tense and transform it into an emotional trinket, a comfortable keepsake. Is it wrong to take the thing of my memory of JD and try to dress it up in real-person clothes and make it move and talk like a real breathing person? Shouldn’t one at least ask permission for indulging in a fantastic romance with the long-distance vapor trails a person leaves in their wake?
I want to talk about you now. You have come this far with me, living vicariously through the shadow puppetry of my remembrances or quietly occupying some unnamable mental restlessness following the cartography of my ebbing psyche. I can’t promise you that I would be able to devote a reciprocal amount of attention to your stories. I might be impatient for you to reach some kind of point. Have you been impatient with me so far? I’m finding this very hard to write because there is no means to breach the silence set up between you and me. I can reach you, move you, but I can’t feel you. You can't reach me. We live in different tenses.
I've been trying to describe an absence through a fond recounting of something that once filled a small place in that absence. That absence is in constant flux, persistently evolving and changing shape. You are the only constant in that space. I want to caress the lip of your absence inside of me, my finger trailing over the fleshy ridge between our two tenses. See if you can feel it, these words tracing themselves through the vapors of your body. I love you. Now stop. I want you to read me naked. Am I asking too much? Take your clothes off. I want the air that brushes up against your body to move alongside my voice, inside your own, while you read these words:
I’m dying. I am alive. These two things are separate and side by side, contracting and expanding in the space of the other. Occupying the other, retreating into isolation. I want more than anything to feel you inside of me.
I don’t want any specific piece of the past back, I don't want any transmogrification of what ten years of an ever-evolving present has done to someone who I was too afraid to openly cherish when I had the opportunity. I want my emptiness, my absence. I want the fluctuating contours of it, glistening with moist time, to surround me, slide its wet grip down over me, over all my length, then slowly back up.
You can put your clothes back on now.
Is memory rhythmic, undulating in compulsory cycles of focus and release? What separates a question from its answer? I’m writing now 3 days after I began this. JD and I have divorced. Maybe the cruelest notion about something that functions in cycles is the implied promise of return. Has anything left that could actually, necessarily return? Things have changed and redistributed themselves, but everything that was is.
Isn’t it? I’m asking you. And because I have a question and now you have an answer (at least some answer), is what separates question and answer the same as what separates you and me? How many of you there are, how many answers. How easy to confuse an answer for an explanation, a memory for a thing, a distance for an empty space. How easy to fall in love with what can’t answer back, some gaping orifice that couldn’t possibly have said fuck me, but instead, mutely, dumbly becomes a receptacle for the undulating strains of someone groping towards a wet and inconclusive spasm in whose saline glue everything will be held together for a spell, until the ejaculate dries and flakes away and JD begins to resemble all the other things I can’t remember.
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