for N

I have written about loss in the abstract, loss in the unrealized and unrequited. But I have never been struck by loss in the real before. Crazy Sorrow in the flesh. Now that I have, I do not know what to do with it. Words have become impotent, have become far too little.

I have struggled with how to describe Nathan so that strangers might know him, might know what has been lost. It is not enough to say that he was one of my oldest friends, one of the first boys I ever kissed, and one of the funniest people I've come to know. It is not enough to say that he was a little too pale, a little too thin, a little too hapless. That he drove a motorcycle to our rural high school, which made him something of a shadowy god.

I must start again.

He was the only person to ever ask me on a date. I was fourteen years old. He showed up at my house with that shock of black hair, blue eyes like planets...All lax and swaying and fluid with whatever drug was at work in him. Some kind of tranquilizor, he said. And yet he was never tranquil. In the backseat of his friend's car, I wondered if he even knew who it was that he was kissing.

An utterly predictable story: irreverent genius of a boy can't keep to his own head. Resorts to drugs and arcane books. Cuts himself. Drinks turpentine.

I was the only one who wrote to him at rehab. Nathan and I--we never quite made it to romance. Our affair was an epistolary one. He wrote beautiful letters. Joking and acute and searching. Looking now at his sixteen-year-old thoughts immortalized in hurried pencil, I find myself truly haunted.

So many myths surrounded that boy. How he would wake up in the woods. Once he even called to tell me that he'd come to, alone in a shack somewhere, surrounded by old war bonds. I imagine this scene now as I did then. He's laughing and a little disoriented, all those forgotten bills falling like snow. My voice is at the other end, unsure what to say. He had no idea how he'd arrived there.

The myth where he fucked a girl on the roof of her car. In broad daylight. In some suburban driveway. That may or may not have belonged to her parents.

I met that girl at his funeral. Turns out he'd married her.

The last time I saw Nathan, he asked me to be his girlfriend. Though there was something there-- something never directly acknowledged, something accumulating in all those knowing looks and shared humors, in that fluke of a first and only date, in all those letters sealed shut by our own tongues--I knew better than to accept. I was sixteen by this time and ill at ease with bodies. I preferred our written intrigue. I shyed away from anything that might upset the unspoken, charged subtlety which had been thus precedent. So I told him no, that it would be a bad idea for us to date. He asked if he could kiss me. This, too, I deemed a bad idea. He said, Please.

And so we kissed awkwardly for a few minutes. I watched a mimosa tree over his shoulder the entire time. Then we said goodbye. Then we said, see you around.

That was three years ago. Last week they put him in the ground. He died the day before his twenty-first birthday. His mother's eulogy: He was my blue-eyed, curly-haired boy...

I wrote him one last letter. I pressed the envelope with a seal of black wax. They buried it with him. It's all I have thought about in the following days. My words against his unfeeling breast. I keep catching myself wondering when he will write back. How what is quite possibly the most important thing I have ever written is now six feet underground.

In my last letter to Nathan, I made a promise. One day I will write a poem deserving of your myths. When I have the words, when I have the heart.

His mother approached me in the chapel. She'd found all my letters to him. She asked if I wanted them back. I said yes and thanked her profusely. Even though I knew how much hurt I was inviting in. Even though I'll read and reconstruct the whole thing until I am devastated.

The things we do to our own hearts.

I miss you, sweet-furious crow of a boy.
Your scars, and your grin, and your mettle.