Month of L

One

To My Best Friend,

I used to hate the sun, the heat, the sticky atmosphere of summer. I hated the sweat, the swirling illusions on the horizon, the damn cicadas, spiders, ants that would find their way to my bedroom walls and torture me.

Friends, best friends, B.F.F.s, the difference has always stood out to me. Ice and fire. Buring, searing, sobbing, the cutting cold. I knew the basics: you win some, you lose all. You miss so much.

First things first, I have not replaced you. I don't think it's possible, but my uncertainty scares me.

Did I tell you that I have grown since last year? My brother says I look older over skype, that my voice ages five years over the phone. You and I only text so you wouldn't know.

The terrifying truth is that I don't want to see how you've changed if it means you are ready to leave me behind. I don't want to see you in a light of familiar unfamiliarity, the light which follows me down alleyways and across concrete bridges, into my bed at night and my yawn in the morning. But I saw you the other day, terrifying because you were tinged in my familiar unfamiliar light. You still scrunch up your nose as a joke and smile when the sun hits just right.

If there was ever anyone who I thought had never endured a bad day, it would be you, but I know now that I can't return to that naivety. I'll leave that to the strangers you pass in hallways.

This city, the one I am writing you from—its billion puffs of cigarette smoke and chimney trucks, its thousand sputters, coughs, sneezes, germs pushed into the air, flying through and around, making their home in my pores—has pressed down on my lungs. When you told me that you had made another video for me, my airways opened for the first time in days.

I've been remembered.

How unfair a thought. But what can I say, friendship is a two-way street, and I have only known it to be driving the freeway alone.

I will leave you with this: You are not a distant star in someone else's constellation. Though you and I orbit each other, we are not tied together. You are not what is holding me down or pulling me back in. You're the sun all alone, surrounded by the family you made yourself and those more fortunate.

I want to tell you this every time, between the shaky I miss yous, when our fingers barely manage to type for fear of rejection, that one day the reply will be I didn't miss you or I think you have the wrong number. Before we send off our sloppy, unsure talk to you tomorrows, I want to tell you this.

I am squinting up at you blazing there, a filled hole in an empty sky. When I think about how much you have gone through, what you will go through, how I will try to be there for you but know somehow that you will survive with or without my presence, I can't help it. I don't hate the sun struggling past the pink, blue, orange folds. I can live with the heat if I think about how much of your life you have suffered cold. The swirling illusions aren't illusions if they are your dreams wafting down on us and each night you chase them to bed. And those insects, those damn cicadas and spiders and ants. If I know you are the sun, then I can understand why they would want to flee from your too bright light.