You once asked me what I regret. This was about 4 years ago, maybe 3. Anyway, I remember having this overwhelming compunction to answer "you." I bit it back because I convinced myself in the space of a nanosecond that it was still possible for our story not to be tragic... okay, maybe not tragic... a cautionary tale, perhaps. That first, visceral answer was prescient, I know now.

Sometimes It's hard to believe I ever knew you... but then I ran across this rare bit of photographic evidence that we once existed in the same space. You used to occupy my life.

I want you to know I never thought you were something you weren't... well, I think I must have thought of you in some ways that had precious little to do with who you actually are... but what I mean is that I was never deluded about the construct of our relationship. It was a construct, wasn't it? I felt like I was caught behind glass for six years...

or maybe, that my doppelganger hijacked all my interactions with you... while I was locked in a closet somewhere banging desperately, wanting to be let out, but there was always so much to hide. At the end I was so tired.

Know what I've discovered? There remains this distilled part of the years I knew you, and that to me is still pure. It has nothing to do with my unrequited angst... but more the purity of our mutual yet separate artist angst. The common language of a painter and a poet. The one pure element of it...what I sometimes wish, when I wish anything concerning you, could have survived the seismic (for me) shift the complete mortification of our friendship meant, finally.

I'm writing all of this not even hoping you'll read it, not even a little bit. I'm writing this because I was overcome by a wave of missing you this evening... not the way I used to miss you--sharply, accutely--a year ago, but a prescient missing. Because you are leaving the town that has always been synonymous with you, for me. So much of my fierce longing for this city had to do with a fierce longing for you for the longest time. You tried to leave it so many times before, but it would not let you go until now. Everything waits for the right time.

And I knew I had really grown past the last vestiges of any hope I ever had for you when it became possible for me to imagine leaving. I loosened my grip. And though it is mine to call home for a while more, I suddenly, today, in a moment of noting the sun's loosened grip on the sky, marked this thought. In mere days, you will not live here anymore. You will not live in the place of all my memories of you. We are not friends anymore. Though I have a story that is connected to any street I walk--of having driven, walked, or crossed that street with you--on our way somewhere.

I let that knowledge settle. I have understood it as a fact for months, but I let my spirit expand to receive its full meaning. If you were staying I would not seek you out, as I am not seeking you out now. It is just my way of saying I had this moment, this little ache of acknowledgment today. And I missed you in a way that was alien to me after a year's distance.

I have stated often that I wish I had never met you--not so much because of you--but because of how I conducted myself when I knew you. I wish you had no such memories of me as the ones I know you have. I did not love the person you knew as me. She no longer exists. Maybe it was her I felt sad for.