You are shaking. All is all. Remember that time we ran into each other in the parking lot?

I had taken a hundred years to find my car--it was silver and probably invisible--when I found it, you were parked next to me. How about that.

I asked you why the long face, and you said why not. You meant, "why start now?"

On the drive home, I wondered out loud what you didn't want to start. I closed my mouth and swallowed the rest of the words, because I knew. But I've felt it too, you know. Twenty-two years of walking alongside that abyss. I know who you are; I've looked in the mirror. I can break these muscles into a thousand pieces with my clenched teeth, nightshade, Valium. And one, two, three. Just like that: an absence.

I think about you a lot, and that night, in the parking lot. I wonder if you saw the way my face was soft around the edges then. Did you know how blue your eyes looked in the moonlight? Had you picked that shade of red paint just so that your car would glow in the parking lot at night?

Questions don't really matter much, now, though. I'm across the country, and you're somewhere else. I thought about calling, but I guess I don't have your number. I must've put it in my phone when I was drunk, if I even did that at all, so you've become an "A" or "Smarty" or "1!" I'm sorry that I let you fade away into another drunken mis-decision and now you might be gone forever because I don't have the heart to call all those one-letters and symbols and say your name out loud.

I know it was just a parking lot, and just under the moon. I know that you might not have noticed my soft face or your cutting eyes, and that's okay. I just had to tell you that I wish I hadn't let you go. I wish that I'd stopped to sit a while, and hear your story, and to walk on the line with you until your eyes melted just a little.