Take me back in time, maybe I can forget, If I'd turned a different corner, we never would have met.

Maybe it is my desire to write a novel of compelling complexity, deft nuance, and the subtlest but profound sensibilities that makes me see our story as an emergent, unfolding piece of literature.

I think of having met you at a wedding as delicious foreshadowing, of having waited for you, two years later on church steps at a fair, as the progression of torture found in love the heroine believes to be unrequited, of having attended masses and evensongs as a common conceit of spirituality in our conspicuously strategic plot, and of the paintings of yours that I own—and the way that I came into them—as proof that it is really yourself you are wanting to give me. The poem you asked me to write, the ones you did not, the parties at which I wanted you to kiss me, but where we instead shared cigarettes, or simply let our shoulders, arms, hands, or shod feet touch until the warmth passing between our bodies became us…

Someday our biographers will write about the dinner parties at my various and sundry residences that you came to, our first motorcycle ride, how we once drank coffee in our pajamas and socked feet, how I sent you postcards from New England, how I once ran smack dab into you on a date at a coffee shop and nearly decided to never see you again…

My beautiful, paradoxically detached man-boy, I love you. So there is more to come…