Feeling: comforted
Listening to: Default - Who Followed Who
Reading/Watching: nothing

I called him at nine p.m., to let him know I was in town, and ask if he wanted to get together sometime to catch up. By ten, we were sitting at a table in IHOP, ordering drinks as an excuse to hog the table, and talking a mile a minute.

After the first thirty minutes, all the ice in our glasses had melted, and the water for my hot tea was cold.

After an hour, the waitress had learned that she didn't need to check on us.

After two hours, she silently dropped our check on the table.

After three hours, we were talking about things deeper than school, work, plans, and past.

After four hours, my eyes were heavy and my head ached, but I was still smiling and didn't want to leave. We hugged goodbye three separate times, lingering outside our cars to talk a few minutes longer, promising to keep in touch this time, and even when I said I'd better go before I was too sleepy to drive home, it was still too soon.

He is still just about my height, maybe with an extra inch or so. He still has those amazing blue eyes with the dark rims around the iris. He still opens his mouth to speak before the words are ready to come out, and then launches them into the air, crowded, as if the second sentence is shoving from behind the first.

He still loves music, in the way that made us understand each other so well when we were younger. He still intertwines God with every aspect of his life, although he's older now, seen and felt the shadows on the underside of religion, and has lost the blind prejudice of youth. He still tells stories in perfect chronological order, never starting from the middle, and never takes offense when I interrupt him (in fact, I think he expects it).

He was my first unboyfriend, the basis for my novel, the boy I wanted for my first kiss. It is nearly five years later, and I'm unsure whether he's received his, and unsure whether he ever will. He's like a choirboy still, and somehow it doesn't sit oddly, as it would with any other man of twenty-one years.

He took my hand when I mentioned difficult things. His eyes softened. And he genuinely grinned when I told him about the man I love, without jealousy or wistfulness (things I'd once wished for).

I still love him, as deeply as I did then, only now I realize its shape and color for what it is: the kind of perfect friendship that expects nothing and gives freely, and knows what we mean before we have to say it. It just took some growing up on both sides for us to realize that it only seemed intense in comparison to the lukewarm companionship of highschool buddies. He loved me for all the things I didn't yet know I was.

I've missed him. But I think it's best for us to meet the way we do, every year or two, for hours at a time, to remind us of where we came from, and who we're becoming. It's a sort of centering experience, reminding me that even though there are a lot of things I want to leave behind in Hometown, I shouldn't remake myself completely, because who I used to be was still pretty damn good.

If we can keep circling, like satellites, and reunite as best friends every two years for the next half-century, I will be happy.

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