I remember the way your face looked when you told me. It was opened up in a way I had never seen it before, and I felt you churning yourself into a blackhole as you said it. Your eyes grew wide and grew sad like the eyes of lovers when they have seen the stain on the back of a collar or the center of the heart before it is announced. “But it will destroy you, M,” you said, sounding only the part of my name you had broken off for yourself to keep. You used to love to tell me that ‘M’ was a more beautiful name for me than any other because when you hummed it to yourself you could feel it resonate in every part of your body. Your bones rang with my M and I wonder if they still do sometimes — I wonder if you say my name out loud at all any longer.

I say yours all the time, but only as a whisper in late night streets and early morning darkness. I leave it suspended in places like a ghost, and I am afraid that’s what you have become to me. A ghost that asked me once, lying on his back on a see-saw, “M, let’s fall in love. Let’s fall absolutely madly in love and come home to tell each other about it. Let’s fall in love with our whole bodies and souls.” I was sixteen and already in love with everything, so this did not sound difficult until you added, “But not with our minds. Leave me your mind, and I will leave you mine. Find someone to love and give him your body and soul, but never your mind.”

You have my mind, and yes, you’re right, it will destroy me. It will bring me down like a curtain falling from its runners along a stage because you can’t really love anyone when your thoughts race to a boy who is more like an enchantment than a person. You can’t really love anyone when he is sleeping in the back of your mind talking in his sleep on occasion when you let yourself slip too far inside anyone else. You can’t really love anyone without your mind.