i touch myself through you

I've just spent two hours conversing on the phone with N, a fellow in San Diego around my age. It's amazing, the parallels you encounter, glimpsing your self in the stories of other people. N had traversed many of the same emotional and psychic landscapes I had, collecting his share of cuts, bruises, and scars, like I had. He has seen, as I had, the saddest of the sad in the face of a former lover the moment you're about to leave the intimacy of their life forever to move on in your own, on your own and you know that they know they're losing you forever. He has experienced, as I had, the irony of moving vast distances only to have the table turned on him, by a friend or by a lover. He has felt, as I had, how isolating it was to be left out in the cold as you look into the window of another person's life.

So we talked about the city. Urban development fascinates him, as it does me. In our way we've kept track of how our manmade habitats shift and change over the years and its cause and effect and what that means to people affected by it, what it means to him and me. We talked about how we had to deal with our sexuality, how we made excuses to keep it at bay and what happened when we inevitably ran out of excuses. I told him my stories about how I lived in L.A. over ten years ago, how, in my depression, I would take solitary strolls in the middle of the night in Hollywood, stepping on the stars imbedded in the Walk of Fame, and how the street itself was paved with tiny bits of glass so it literally sparkled in the night but there was no one to see it because it was two in the morning. He told me he too is a night owl, he thrives during the tiny hours.

We talked about fate and destiny, about how people serve some purpose in each other's lives, slipping in and out of meaning, in and out of focus, and how the most profound revelations are often the most agonizing and crippling but you can never go back.

He had to work tomorrow so it was time to say goodnight. We talked about the condo he owns in Palm Springs and how he loves going there during the summer months to just relax. We then talked about San Diego a little bit more, of how cheap it was to take the Amtrak train down there for a weekend, what we could do, where to get a cheap dinner, what to see, how that city is like L.A. but without the acid. We talked, and his voice sounded at once wise and boyish and collegiate and knowing.

We talked and talked, and all I could think of was how badly I wished I were there to simply lay my head on his chest, in his bed, while we talked some more, in a moonlit room, and everything was cast in the deepest shades of indigo.