when time stood still.

thinking of you and me in your bed, warmer and getting warmer.

panama beach, feeling the morning sun on my face.

when time stood still.

in your bed. spooning. winter in north carolina. coming home drunk and crying and unhappy. just needing a friend. needing a warm body to hold me. and you held me. and you interlocked your fingers with mine.

and you played me sweet piano music, and i cried.

and we laid in my bed and i took photos of you. and we talked about how we're all so upset about the disappearing ground.

and how we'd both sleep through classes and tell our professors that the other was sick. because we were.

and when i was just getting to know you, that attraction of shoving people away. remembering you were that boy on dog quad writing in his journal.

one of the first nights i talked to you, really got to know you, sitting on the stairs up to lilly

latenight taking photos for class. going to cosmic latenight, and sitting down in the middle of the sidewalk because it felt good, and the quesadilla was warm, and i could see the lights of east campus flickering, maybe a slow moving car down church.

the photography darkroom, i think i took you there once, or we ran into each other, or i had to drop something off and you came.

and when we'd been writing shitty and good love poems. in the computer lab, alternating between going outside to sit in the grass with our backs on the ground, watching the clouds move. writing under trees in the back of brown.

playing sweaty ddr in the commons room with all the other weird kids who didn't want to do drugs. next year, watching almost every single one of them get drunk or high or both. and that's fine to me, a choice is a choice.
but you wouldn't have like it that way.

later, you showing me what you'd been writing that first time i met you, scared, awkward, hiding behind a tree, away from everyone else, writing.

you showed me your writing and photos, told me stories about people you loved, played me songs, that you had meant for someone else, that someone else had played for me, when i heard i saw them, when you played it, you saw her in your memory, and me in the present.

friends are there for each other. at four am when our brains are tired, somewhere, there is cup of tea or cosmic adventure. someone to wake you up from a deep slumber and say, no, get up, you need some sunshine.

someone to lay in bed with and just talk. just talk about life.

that night in the library. god and spirituality and psychology and all of those stories.

learning more and more about you.
and i think you see more and more of my accomplishments.

what you didn't see was my building depression, my building anxiety, my building physical illnesses that would extend for months. totally unrelated to you.

you saw me planning trips around the world, connecting with the beautiful people that i loved and who loved me, just being happy to be at college, in this totally new place, every day's an adventure.

but it happened.
my smiles were genuine and so were my tears. so were my sleepless nights that i didn't talk about because who want's to talk about what's missing.

i wanted to talk about what was full, the nights and dancing under the stars and my friends and laughing so hard we cry. and some drugs & alcohol, for fun, for comradeship, for lust, for experience. and the next morning, brunches for hours and hours, talking about everything from last night to when we're old and gray.

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