I changed when I met you. I saw in you a fire I didn’t dare light in myself. 

I liked that you liked penguins. You said you liked them because they were a bird that couldn’t fly.

I was 13 when I met you. We were in the same grade at school. The first time I met you, you struck me as a twin. You hunched up to share the space with someone else, another soul just like yours. I imagined someone with the same hair and broken grin, the same gray eyes and slightly fewer problems and attitude. 

I only met your twin brother once, at a dinner at the end of the year, the one I wore my old black dress to, talked to the teachers and ate all the strawberries off the hors d’oeuvres table. You two were pretty similar, I thought to myself, you told the same jokes and smiled the same devilish grin.

But nobody I had ever met was exactly like you. Nobody was anything like you.

The last night of the year came. It was smooth and cold. The sky was satin and black and star-doused. You enveloped me in a warm hug I broke away from too fast under a street light. We were on the patio, I think. Everyone cried that night; we would be gone in the morning. When you told me that you’d miss me, my chin was tucked over your shoulder: I wore tall heels that night. The rest of the time I was infinitely shorter than you. Your hands wrapped around my back. I remember that feeling; I wanted that moment to last infinitely.

Unspoken words, words we could never speak, passed between us in that hug.

Everybody asked me why I liked you. I couldn’t really explain it.

But somewhere along the way I lost a piece of me. I want it back desperately. These days I don’t do any work during the day. I scrounge by with the kind of killer essays you wrote, trying, at night, to conjure your acute and lilting voice.

Now I remember that day on the beach, listening to you recite your old Berlin address to me. You had a radio you’d crank sometimes on the bus and sound would come pouring out of it. I remember sitting on my friend’s older sister’s bed as she did my makeup and staring into my own eyes in her long mirror, thinking of how you would greet me in a few hours and I would wave foolishly, awkwardly, and you’d half-smile back sarcastically. Sometimes we’d stand there talking and we’d stand there and we’d stand there as people swarmed around us and be too wrapped up in each other’s company to notice.

Somehow I think I can make sense of the electricity that buzzed between us. You would angle your body towards mine and say something mean or funny. You’d stand so close you could have brushed my lips if you’d wanted.

The other day, I listened to my favorite song (back then).

I closed my eyes, and I saw you.