Cyclical

I loved a boy who lived in the past.

He told me stories with half-feigned mirth. He told me about the time his mother filed his nails and had to hold him down, about when he ruled the city as a jubilant young man, about the time he taught martial arts and tested up with a serious injury, or the time he used to lay on the jungle gym at night -- the rails too narrow for his muscled shoulders -- and smoke cigarettes; he told me the past through rose glasses. He told me about the pleasures of copious celebration, about the time he had to pull over five times on the way home to puke and how it was a miracle he didn't get a DUI. He never noticed that he might have killed someone.

The practiced reintegration of retelling his stories made him human. I couldn't fathom how many people had heard the same words through the same pretty visage before. He recited the tales over and over, and as each word slipped through his parted lips, he would be a real boy -- if only for a moment.

I never realized that I loved a boy whose reality was then; that now would never be real until it was recounted through the skewed tilt of his half smiling lips -- not until another stared transfixed at his mouth and fell into the fantasy of his past and his memories of me.

I'm living in the past when I loved a boy.