I found you in my knowing...

You sat outside our beach bungalow with those coco cabana eyes, dipped in the promise of no goodbye, "Swear to me that I'll never know abandonment again." Your kind smile and - I've been a mystery for a while - hair tells me I'm covered in sweat over the anticipation of the denouement of your truth. I see your fear through the Indonesian palms across the trunk that you uncarved all their names in. You can't hide from a hider, but you can seek a seeker. I did not just find you. I really FOUND YOU. I found you in the honey of your loyal eyes. In the cup full of tears you shed on a black hole September night. I found you in your footprints and the music in your hair. I found you in my knowing. In my unconditional. I found you most of all in a century old friendship, gripped by four shaky hands refusing to allow blood through the cracks. Your insanity is thick, we make cakes with our crazy over white sands that melt into our hearts like the butter we left back in the states. Our words drip past desultory love into the stories we can't stop creating, stuffed in our back porch swing's hidden crates. I have never known a love, who isn't my own blood, who I would die for. But I would. For you. And I really would leave you be, too. If it meant seeing your smile across the planets in my collar bones, sheltered safely, if I was asked to walk away. And I never really knew what it meant to care about another, who isn't my own blood, in a selfless way. If that is all I ever learn, then I have learned the world. I have learned my own heart by loving her wild, her quiet, her laugh, her friendship, her art...I have learned my own heart, by loving a woman in her coming together, and her falling apart.

That is the story of my friendship. Of the UN that belonged in my rusted conditional all along.