how handsome you are

In the afternoon I am walking down the street, it is now warm here, in a city that for the first time does not feel new, and is not new. She is talking to me about being with you on the other side of the country, and the only comment I can make over and over again is, he is so handsome, is he still so handsome? And she says, yes, every time I ask. I do not so much think about you or write about you more than any other man, and it’s true all I write about is men in some way or another. But today I am thinking about about you because she called and told me you are well, and seem happy, and have job, and a girl friend of the sorts that somehow surpasses the beauty of the other women you have kept company with. And this does not surprise me, mostly because of how terribly handsome I remember you to be.

But today I am thinking about you. I think about you while I am upside down in yoga, and think that the temperature of the heated room feels the way your apartment did that summer and my being upside down also feels something similar to the way I felt that summer– light headed and flustered and sometimes frustrated with only myself. I try to imagine you in the life you are having now and the glasses you may wear and the cigarettes you smoke, though you will tell people you do not smoke before you smoke. And I think about the way you are probably a bit shy of the nice apartment you have because no one else you know has an apartment so nice. But you always have had money and good taste, and I never understood why those were things to by shy on. I think of you cold and shivered there and how when the sun changes the season you will walk and roll your pants up your shins and wear buttoned downs and loose t-shirts. I think of you reading on the subway and drinking in small bars. And I try to think of, what you think of all of this, when a new part of your life begins. On my way home I pass a man on the street smoking a cigar, and although I have never known you to smoke cigars, this too reminds me of the projection of you I have spent all afternoon creating. Because I can believe, a version of you that you do not yet know, will walk down the street and smoke a cigar in the afternoon in a city that will no longer be new for you anymore.