I should apologize for the way things fell apart so abruptly when my drunken irrationality became more pressing than sober wisdom. You watched my defenses go up, and if you were caught in the barbs, I'm sure it wasn't pleasant (though I'm not convinced you were)
I've been thinking about that first night more often than I care to admit... the night we held hands on the front porch of your new house as 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. melted together. It was starting to get cold – colder than any of us were prepared for and certainly colder than a later summer night should be – so when your head leaned against my knee in a moment of disequilibrium, the warmth was just a little too nice to give up.
Masters of subtlety, we leaned toward one another, you at my feet. Had the circumstances been different, maybe it would have been our legs and not our fingers interlocking, and a more cardio-intensive manner of keeping warm, but we were 5, and we were all so comfortable. So I ran my fingers through your hair, and then you ran your hair through my fingers. And when my fingers started to lose feeling, you took them in yours. And we sat.
I was still getting your name wrong in my head an hour later, but it's burnt into my brain now, ignited by the spark of curiosity (which apparently I harness when a pen in hand meets my absent mind on a blank page... your name had a habit of appearing amidst my medieval literature notes until I stopped believing you would be doing the same.)
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