When I saw her again after three years, I fell in love. She did not catch my attention because she was particularly beautiful. If anything she had always been kind of plain. It was what I saw her doing that made me freeze. It was her dancer’s legs doing a final grand jeté off of the highest building she could get to the fastest, which just so happened to be my old apartment building from when I still lived in the city, and from when I still thought about doing what she was doing. It was the way she did an almost pirouette as she plummeted, and I will not say “as she fell” because that would make it sound like it could have been an accident, and it was the opposite of an accident, she knew what she was doing. The local news went on and on about how witnesses said she looked almost like a bird, said she almost flew, but she was not just a bird. She was a bird and a ballerina and a battle weary soldier, bloodied and bruised from years of wars that she couldn’t quite win. Wars to claim the territory in her mind that was never meant to be anything but her’s.

When I say that I fell in love with her, I don’t mean in the way that I love my family or my friends, or the person I have not yet married, or the children I have not yet had, but that I loved her the way I wish I used to love myself. I loved her in that I wished I was back in my old apartment if only for a minute, even though thinking about it still sometimes sends me into a panic, if only to reach through my always open window and catch her as she fell and let her rest on my shoulder the way my best friend does when the world gives him a moment to just stop, just rest. I loved her in that I wanted to let her just stop, just rest. I loved her in that I would have given anything to be there with her to tell her that someone did.

I imagine myself floating.

Floating somewhere like the middle of the Atlantic,

somewhere that is both quietly empty and full of life .

I, in reality, am both terrified of deep water and not a very good swimmer

but when I imagine myself like this I’m not.

When I imagine myself like this I am unafraid and floating.

I am something small and hollow

like one of my grandmother’s Russian nesting dolls,

small and hollow, full of smaller hollow things.

I imagine that if something tapped me I would echo,

I imagine that I am nowhere near anything that could.

I imagine that my echoing doesn’t scare me,

that being alone doesn’t scare me.

I imagine that maybe this is what happiness feels like,

that it feels like anything else without the fear.

In the summer of sophomore year, you perfected my doctor’s signature. Really it isn’t very difficult, it’s just a long letter M, a dash, and a dot, but still I’m grateful. I know you said you only did it to see if you could, but still I’m grateful. Tired and grateful. Not quite sick and grateful. Our friendship, if you can call it that, is strange at best. We never really say more than a handful of words to each other but we are almost always together. We know admittedly little about each other but we share almost everything: a locker, oranges, a favorite color, the same strange not quite sickness that neither of us have bothered to try to name, and a small life-vest in an ocean that we made for ourselves. There is nothing but water as far as either of us can see, but for now we are both content to tread water next to each other.

It’s the spring of senior year and you sign my doctor’s notes with the pen that you keep around your neck. We are made mostly of orange peels, forged signatures, and the occasional kiss, not because we love each other but because we both need to be near someone sometimes but that would otherwise involve meeting, and then talking to someone. We are still just treading water and I think I see the outline of what might be land but that would mean actually having to swim and my legs are already tired. I know. I know none of this is healthy but I’m not about to point that out, not when I’m not technically sick, not when your favorite pen is already running out of ink.

You and I have not spoken the same language for a long time now. We have lived together for almost two years, and I’m starting to think that we will never understand each other again. There is something familiar and foreign about the way your lips twist to form the echoes of words that I used to know, that I am supposed to know. I can sometimes remember, not clearly but in the way you remember an old dream, in distant and distorted clips, the way “I love you” sounded in the long dead language we shared. We function, not well, but the way an old car starts, slow and shuddering, function in a way that suggests it might not tomorrow. I wonder if now, if any remnants of ruined words still hold the same resonance. I wonder if now, if I told you I was leaving, if you would flinch the way I did when your voice growled in ways that I have never understood. I wonder if I told you I do not love you anymore, if it would still translate in some broken and fragmented way, if you would even hear me close the door.