Artifact
Sometimes, when people ask, I've tried to explain how we met, and even to me, it almost sounds contrived, or too good to be true.
But what if it's not?
He was sitting there in the park at one of those picnic tables where people unpack their lunches and are suddenly besieged by pigeons.
I don't even remember why I took the path through the park instead of the paved track around it, and there probably wasn't a reason. I could just as easily have gone the other way. I had gone both ways a hundred times.
I was walking the way you walk when the ground is soft and damp and apt to become slippery where it meets the narrow tendrils of grass that extend their hesitant fingers without grasping anything you can see, as if floating in thin air.
And then I looked up.
Without being conscious of what I was doing, I just froze there in mid-stride, maybe 15 to 20 feet away from him, and stood there with my mouth hanging open.
At some point, he realized that I was staring at him, and tried to read the look in my eyes, until it dawned on him what it was.
Maybe it was the first time that anyone had looked at him that way.
My sense of time was distorted, so I wasn't aware that I had been staring at him so long, or how strange that must have seemed to him.
I was in the presence of something, and I had no idea what it was.
What I felt most of all was awe.
It was as though my whole life had been preparing me to find him that beautiful, and yet left me completely clueless about what to do next.
It was only when I noticed that he was barely succeeding in suppressing a smile that I started to emerge from my trance, and when he suddenly gave up the struggle and smiled at me, I smiled back and started walking towards him as the world began turning again after some indeterminate period of time.
I sat down across from him and said hi, and asked him how he was. We made small talk. It was so forgettable that I've forgotten most of what was said during what was surely the most important conversation of my life.
I know that we talked about the hordes of pigeons, and the park, and the weather. I mentioned where I went to school, and he did the same. We were both in the same year, but he was almost a year younger.
We just smiled at each other as we talked, and it wasn't strange, in spite of the way it had started off.
Since we were making small talk, the part of my brain that knew how to do that did that for me, while the part that was falling in love with him took in every detail and committed it to memory without any awareness that it was doing that.
He was just so beautiful to me, and it was very disorienting.
I don't know what made me notice it, but I looked down at my hands, and they were trembling really badly, even though my voice wasn't at all, and I hadn't really been aware of feeling all that nervous.
When I looked across at his hands, I thought they might have been trembling a bit too.
That's when I understood that something might actually be happening outside of my own head.
Even when we first started talking, there was nothing guarded about him.
Maybe the fact that I was so transparent and star-struck or stage-struck when I first saw him made him see me as harmless, or put him at ease somehow.
At the time, I had no way of knowing that he wasn't like that with everyone.
There was a slight rasp in his voice, which had a faint lilt to it as well that made what he said even more disarming, and often a little teasing, the way you tease someone you already know well enough to share a few secrets with.
I couldn't take my eyes off him.
It's impossible to describe him the way I saw him that day. That was what captivated me at first, and without it, we never would have met, and nothing would have happened, and these words wouldn't have been written at all.
You won't believe me anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter.
He was a couple of inches shorter than me, and really well put together. He was slim, but his wrists were thicker than mine, and his forearms looked strong, with a loose net of fine white hair scattered over them haphazardly, as if it had landed there by accident, and was just waiting to be blown away.
His hair was the same white, but there was more of it, enough of it that that's what you saw first when you looked at him, and what called your attention to him.
It was like the halo that surrounds an object between you and the sun.
Or maybe that's just something I was created to see.
Like his face, which I can't describe.
It's not the same face anymore, because I've lived with it long enough to know every look, every angle, every expression. The way he looks when he's thinking about something serious, and the way he looks when he's about to smile, which happens so suddenly that no one else is prepared for it.
The problem with describing his face is that it's so much more than the sum of its parts.
It's the sum of things I shouldn't be able to see.
He has unexpectedly grey eyes, unrealistically fair skin, and a heartstopping smile.
There's no way I can keep my heart out of it when I try to describe him. It creeps into everything, the way the sun somehow shines under a door and illuminates a room.
Everything I can see, and everything I know is there, because I know him.
Somewhere be tween his impossibly smooth pale neck and the edge of his cheek, just the faintest trace of peach fuzz you would have to turn him every which way to convince yourself it's really there.
So soft it might not even exist.
A small nose, and, below it, the slightly deeper depression at the base of the philtrum: as though someone had carefully touched a finger to him there, just so, and whispered: perfect.
Those fuzzy white eyebrows, not quite knitted together in concentration, with their low, hatched-in parentheses at times encroaching on whatever he's telling you with his eyes, which are always telling you something.
Sometimes I can't stop myself from rubbing my thumb along the length of one of his brows, just to smooth it out, so the white, soft, separate, minutely wiry hairs are all running the same way.
Or putting my lips to it in the dark, to reassure myself that it's still there.
I'm looking at him now.
I still don't know how to describe him.
Anyway, you don't really believe in him, not yet, so you don't have to wonder what he looks like.
He's really cute, though. Everybody says so, it's not just me. But not everyone finds him that beautiful, that's pretty much just me.
A few days after we met, I showed his picture to a friend of mine, and that's what she said: he's really cute. What she didn't say was: he's not the most beautiful guy in the world, the way you said he was.
Eventually I realized that I was the only person who saw him that way, but even now it's hard for me to accept.
Even harder than it was back then, before I really knew him.
He looks different now, but then he looks different from day to day.
There's still something boyish about him, as if he hasn't gotten around to growing up yet.
He had turned 18 about a month earlier, and I would turn 19 in a month or so, so we were 10 months apart.
How's that for precision?
Whatever you're wondering about now doesn't matter much in the long run.
We exchanged numbers, almost solemnly, like a secret handshake, and I was pretty sure that we would be calling each other a lot.
We had a hard time saying goodbye, but eventually we did.
That feeling of walking on air isn't just a cliché.
Everything was different. The world was a different place, and I'd never lived there before.
I called him that night, and we talked for hours and hours.
If you can talk on the phone like that to someone you hardly know, you're about to get to know them really well.
When we talked, there were no awkward silences, just comfortable ones, intimate in their own way, and whatever we said to each other seemed like the right thing to say at the time. Maybe that's why I can't tell you what we said.
I won't even try.
There are some things you have to keep secret, like a scrap of papyrus that will disintegrate the second it's exposed to the light and the air.
If you want to see it, you have to close your eyes.
It's not quite make believe yet, even if memory is a tricky thing.
I guess I ought to tell you his name. I've gone back and forth on it a few times, but it's probably only a matter of time before I let it slip.
It's the kind of name that you say in your sleep without being aware that you've revealed anything.
It's just like the way he looks. I could show you and you'd say, yeah, sure, he's cute, but you wouldn't understand the way he looks to me. I can't show you that. Or maybe I could, if I could draw you a picture, but I don't know how.
Just another phantom for you, a name that doesn't mean anything to you, and means everything to me.
We saw each other every day and talked to each other every night that week. Something was happening to us.
Over the course of that week, a lot of things changed.
When we weren't together, I was thinking about him, and asking myself questions, but the moment I laid eyes on him again, or heard his voice teasing my ear, all those questions melted away, or didn't matter.
The things he told me became more and more personal as the days went by, and he began to look at me differently.
Sometimes he looked at me as though he were considering me, and other times as though he'd seen something he'd been waiting to see.
I didn't want to hide anything from him.
There are a lot of things I'm hiding from you.
Naturally, I mentioned that I was into guys, which couldn't have come as a surprise to him, considering how me met, and I was pretty sure that I saw him check that box off and move on to the next one.
I wasn't trying to get somewhere with him, because I loved the way we were with each other, and I wanted to see where it went on its own.
I wasn't really afraid of being turned down, though, either, because by then he was looking at me in a way that made it pretty clear that he liked what he saw, even if he hadn't looked at me that way right from the start, the way I had looked at him.
We had a long way to go, and I was in no particular hurry to get there.
It had only been six days when he casually asked the question.
"So do you want to go for a walk in our park?"
It was such a deliberate choice of words.
For us to have a park to call our own, there had to be an us there.
That's when we started touching each other more.
We were walking closer together, and it just felt right.
We brushed our arms together or they bumped into each other as we walked, and it was neither deliberate nor accidental.
We just didn't bother to keep a certain distance apart.
We rode on the ferry together, both wearing shorts, and the feeling of his bare leg pressed against mine was indescribable.
We didn't say anything.
We looked at each other a few times, just to see if we were both feeling it, and it was obvious that we were.
My leg was somewhat longer and slimmer than his, and lightly tanned, with light brown curly hair, while his leg was smooth and pale and strong, like a sprinter's, with the slight curvature of a barely drawn bow, and the same scattering of fine white hair that he had on his forearms.
I kept waiting for the thrill of it to wear off, or the current to run out, or for one of us to break the spell and pull away, because the intensity of the sensation, as amazing as it was, was almost unbearable, but it lasted all the way across, until we got up and walked off the ferry.
And even then, for some time afterward, the whole side of my leg was still tinglingly alive where we had touched, as though the memory of his skin had become part of mine.
I didn't see how I could ever be the same person I was before that, and I didn't want to be.
The more time we spent together, the more he opened up to me, as I watched the things he told me pass over his face and calculate their own weight in his eyes.
I can't really tell you what he told me, because that isn't mine.
All I can give you is a glimpse, a clue: the shadow of a hand passing over a cabinet; something that vanishes before you realize it was there.
You won't ever know him, though. Or if so, only here, like this.
We went out that night, to the little quayside place I'll have to think of a name for, because how many restaurants like that can there be near the ferries?
We sat across from each other at the table, and even though it wasn't a fancy place, as you may have guessed from where it was and the way we were dressed, there was still candlelight flickering at the tables and from the sconces and glancing off the glittering surfaces of porcelain and silver and crystal laid out on the white tablecloth, and the old guy himself came over to bring us our menus, and even though we were obviously underdressed, he was particularly attentive to us, as if he recognized that we were together in more than a literal sense, and wanted to signal his approval of that in some way.
Kai looked really happy and really contemplative at the same time, as if all of this had reminded him of something he didn't ever want to forget. His eyes looked different in the candlelight, darker and brighter somehow, even though that doesn't really make sense.
He wasn't quite as animated as he usually was, but he kept smiling at me across the table, and when he gazed out over the water, he looked so content and relaxed.
He looked the room over the way you might examine a house you had grown up in for signs that it was still the same place.
"This place has been here forever. In one of those old pictures on the wall, he looks like he must have been in his 20s when they started."
He was quiet for a few moments, as he brushed his hand across the surface of the tablecloth and then trapped a few inches of it between his fingers.
"My mom and I used to come here with my dad when we met him at the ferry."
"I wondered if the old guy recognized you, but I wasn't sure."
"I doubt he remembers me. I was nine the last time we came here. It's a really good memory for me, but for my mom, it's ... maybe just a little too bittersweet."
He looked like he was figuring something out, as though the way he felt about it all still eluded him, even if he could sense its presence there, somewhere in the folds of the candlelit white tablecloth at his fingertips.
And then he looked up at me with that same light in his eyes.
"It's just... it makes me happy, you know? That this place is still here, and hasn't changed. It's like, I don't know, maybe in one of those alternate universes people write about, there's one where my dad just got off the ferry. Maybe he was running late, or got off at the wrong stop."
Our legs were just touching under the table, and it felt like they were at home that way, without the live current of electricity they had shared on the ferry, but with a companionable closeness that was even more intimate.
His moods shifted like that from time to time, and then back again, but it didn't disconcert me, because it all played out so clearly in his face and his voice and his eyes, as if he had never learned to hide what he was thinking and feeling.
When they brought the dessert menu out, he could hardly contain himself, as he was suddenly transported back to the urgent momentary wishes of that insistent little kid.
Holding the menu out to me and excitedly jabbing at it with his finger.
"Oh! oh! this is so good, you gotta try this! You want to share?"
It was really good, maybe not quite as good as he remembered, but really nice to share.
We took our time over dessert, and by the time we left, we may have stayed a little too long, because there were no open tables, but the old man took really good care of us.
Even though I had never been there before, the man seemed so familiar to me, like someone who knows things about you that you never knew about yourself because you were too young at the time to form memories of them, even though they must be documented somewhere in old family photographs.
It's hard to find the right word for it, but there was a kind of ... courtliness in the way he treated us, as if we were royalty in disguise, and any tribute paid to us had to be very discrete.
On the way back, we walked through our park, and past the table where we met, even though it was a bit out of our way.
We stopped and stood there facing each other, the way we were meant to.
Of course, there was moonlight, because why wouldn't there be, and as we stood there in its soft glow, a tree branch overhead traced the meticulously formed brushstrokes of a faintly tremulous ideogram across his face and neck.
So that one of his eyes was partially extinguished in its shadow.
I don't know how I knew that he was ready for it at just that moment, but I did, and he was.
I don't think there was any question whether we were going to kiss that night, but the way that it happened, the perfect timing of it, still seems hard to explain.
I just looked at him, and I knew.
And when we moved toward each other and came together and kissed, the last missing piece of the puzzle fell into place, and the world suddenly made sense.
There isn't any way to sidestep that kind of cliché, and you wouldn't want to.
You're reduced to the few artless words that you have up your sleeve, and they might as well be yours as anyone's.
When our lips met, there was that same electric charge we had felt on the ferry when our bare legs had touched for the first time.
I got lost in it for a while.
But he was still there when I opened my eyes, and we were still kissing. The line between the inside and the outside had completely blurred.
We were wrapped around each other in a way that had immediately seemed inevitable and impossible to undo.
Wherever our hands were, from moment to moment, they seemed to belong there, and whatever they were searching for, they found it, over and over.
As if we were frantically checking each other's pockets for things we hadn't actually lost.
My heart was racing, and the sounds we were making as we kissed were all that I heard, as I lost myself again in the bafflingly fine cat's cradle of sensations: the countless ways our lips fit together as they explored each other hungrily; the taste of his mouth, and the texture of his tongue; the warmth of his breath, and the scent of his skin.
I couldn't get enough of it, and it was too much for me.
After a while, we stopped kissing, but remained as we were, wrapped around each other in various ways, and just stared into each other's eyes, so close that we could feel each other blink.
I could have looked into his forever.
Nothing would ever be the same.
More clichés.
Perfect.
After I'd tapped out the last word, and touched the period key for the last time, I called him over to me, and watched him read it from start to finish, and saw what I'd written take place all over again in those searching, intricately flawed grey eyes.
And when he looked up at me when he was done reading, I thought I saw something else there, too, as he hesitated to tell me what I already knew: that all of this might somehow be just another artifact of the candlelight or the moonlight, or of memory's careless sleight-of-hand.
And yet somehow that didn't matter at all.