I guess he made me feel different, outside of everything, an observer; he made me think, always redrawing boundaries; everything was intimacy, nothing was intimacy, his smile, his touch; I would look at him and think he's making me crazy, but I couldn't scream--it was urgent, but at the same time it made me so languid; my mind raced as it drifted, but always insanity lingered; "I love you," he whispered, his voice sweet like syrup coating me; it was never enough and always too much, I wanted to say his name over and over again; we danced hard and fast and crazy as we laughed and screamed; his bedroom was cleaner than mine and quiet, and we used to lie next to each other and talk about the future; he wrote me love letters and sent me poems; his presents were always personal, a picture, a book, even a stuffed animal sometimes; the stuff we cooked was awful, but we ate it anyway; he always seemed like he wasn't really there--I tried to grasp him but the air got misty; and I knew that funerals made him cry and where he was ticklish; sometimes I'd lie awake at night and think about being in his arms until it felt like he was there; I loved him too much; "you are my dreams," he would whisper and his breath was like the summer breeze in my ear; everything he taught me was new, wild, crazy, or just fun; late at night he would throw pebbles at my window and sing to me, quote sonnets and love songs and drum solos; he seemed so intense as he held my face in his hands and studied it; in the clubs we flailed away trying to drive out the ghosts that drove us, it was like exorcising ourselves, we chanted and swayed and pretended we were shamans; sometimes when there were no words I listened as his heartbeat pounded in his chest and peace crashed through my body in waves; he held my face in his hands and studied it "who are you?"; once we started a foodfight in the school cafeteria and laughed and kissed amid the chaos; we played frisbee in his yard barefoot, and there were watergun fights in the parking lot; we were walking through the woods when he suddenly pushed me against a tree--his breath was hot on my neck and I could see the madness in his eyes; when it started getting bad I would lay next to him felling abandoned, open and vulnerable, and when he touched me his hands were like ice; one night when it was okay again I kept repeating "I love you" as if it could protect us both, and the next day his mother told me he'd been burning his posters; I always needed him; in his sleep he cried out, fighting the demons in his mind; he would listen to me talk about my dreams and worries, "you think you are a poet," he said, "but your thoughts have no rhythm", his mocking laughter echoed in my head a long time after he left; his eyes seared me; he began talking of death, holding it in front of me like a solid object, a talisman, grisly and frightening in its hold on him; "who are you", he asked, and I could only shake my head because my mind was filled with cobwebs like an ancient attic; the shadow in his eyes grew deeper; as he ranted and screamed I thought--this is the boy who sang to me; I didn't know what was in his mind, no idea what was making him crazy, all I could do was love him; I was so scared of the darkness in his eyes; one day I was combing his hair and he said "help me please" and I wondered if it was too late, I was scared of the desperation in his voice; when he held me after he told me I cried and clung to him and begged, he just held me tighter and said that it was already decided, but I could hear the pain in his voice too and I wanted to scream; months later I stood at the screen door, watching the traffic with his latest letter in my hand, waiting for a date, thinking--maybe it will be different this time.