HAPPY AS EVER.

The month is April, the air smells of rain. It is late, late enough for me to be tired, but these days I am prematurely tired, and so I am making my way home. I am walking past your apartment, the one I spent a good deal of time in some time ago, sometimes even alone; those mornings when you would leave me there in your pill-fuzzed sheets with the sun streaming past the dusty Venetian blinds, kiss my forehead and be off for work. You trusted me not to go through your things; you assumed I would be respectful enough to keep to myself, which I didn't. I remember being strangely relieved and disappointed at finding nothing incriminating.

I stop in front of your building, I notice that the lights of your kitchen are on, the windows themselves open, the fan in the kitchen whirring away, blowing the poster of Jamaica over the refrigerator. I picture you sitting at the kitchen table, glasses poised on the tip of your nose, tinkering away at a clock radio, the parts strewn about in makeshift piles. This was how I found you the last time I ever came to visit. When was that? A while now. I was happy to see you that night, I had just come back from dinner with another man, another case of something not going well, something not seeming how it should, ending badly. The sight of you at the table, peering up from your busywork with a screwdriver in hand, looking like both a small child and an old man at once, sent shivers of sentimentality up my spine; it broke me. At the end of a terrible day, a terrible date, a terrible year of countless terrible dates that did not pan well: there you were, the picture of dependability.

Now it is later. Much later; so much so that me standing outside of your apartment building, the rain already starting to come down, standing under the streetlight watching for movements within your windows, counts as crazy. It counts as stalkerish tendencies, but it also counts for something far worse a fate: that I am not over you. I am not over your apartment, with its vintage photo collections hanging on the wall, the organic condiments positioned in the kitchen cabinets, the slightly malnourished but nonetheless existent bevy of houseplants. I miss these things that stood for something, stood for stability in a world of unstable partners, ones that moved helter skelter around the city, or worse, city to city, jumping ship, running like a bat out of hell from the potentiality of relationships; these other men with their dire need to be free from belongings, from baggage. Men who needed to be independent and autonomous, to venture the world like a lone wolf, forever prowling. But you: you were different. You wanted stability as much as anyone; you wanted to see my face, consistently making its way through your front door, forever smiling a dependable smile, happy as ever to see you.