To Demetreus

I walked through our park tonight. Just now, in fact. I was walking home from seeing a rock show with my friends in the village. I have no clue if you liked rocked music or if you even do now. All I know of your musical taste is that you loved Mozart and found Bach dull. I thought you were crazy. Turns out not so much; I now find that Mozart is beyond fascinating and that Bach, well, he can drag on a bit, can't he? Regardless, neither of them are rock 'n roll so that doesn't help me.

I imagine that if you were ever to read this, which you most assuredly won't, you would hasitate at the opening statement. What park? We had a park? Show me park. No, never in our fewer-than-a-handful of times seeing one another did we venture into a park. Not on that first night which plunged me so deep I was a zombie the following day. Not on our second night, which was little more than a requiem for my heart. (You know, I still can't watch that movie to this day? I tried, for the first time, last week, hoping that my chemically-enhanced state would aid in the matter. I told the best friend that my companion was tired and that was why we only watched the first twenty minutes or so. This wasn't a lie, but even still, I couldn't have managed much longer.) And we certainly never went to a park when I saw you with Him at a club that summer and the only thing you could offer was an anemic smile.

So yes, dear boy, you are correct, there was no park for you. Oh, but how there was for me.

This was in the days of the early sonnets, when my Shakespearean acrostics were little more than immature odes to your supposed beauty. I only had you pictured based on the spikey orange hair and bright blue shirt so vivid in your msn display pic, like Sonic the Hedgehog gone auburn for the season. Hardly the medium for high inspiration, but those are the times we live in, no? There is a park, The Park, on River avenue right by Scott street. I'd never been in there, and yet that was where my mind decided that we would meet. It would be slightly misty, not quite drizzling, in the way that May evenings can be in Winnipeg. There would be umbrellas involved. I wasn't entirely clear on whose it or they were, but no umbrella would actually have been opened, as even in my still-developing romantic 19 year old mind, lovers in the rain didn't use umbrellas, even if they were close at hand. I was foggy on how we would have progressed from the first glance to the inevitable Kiss (by which point, naturally, it would have been a torential lovers' downpour), but I wasn't worried; it would happen in whatever way necessary.

Only it didn't. The Kiss happened, of course. Oh dear god, how it happened, the seat dropping away, leaving me suspended in mid-air. I don't remember your lips so much as that floating, that weightless haze that stayed with me for a year afterwards. I almost wish it hadn't had happened. I say "almost" as I could never really change anything, knowing who I became. I suppose I should be happy that I'm so content with my current self that I wouldn't erase the most painful thing I've ever known, but it's little comfort at 2:17 in the morning. I don't need to regret in order to still love you to this day for that Moment and to likewise dispise you for what you stole in it, as you truly did steal. Yes, it may have been unwitting, a biblical Benjamining, if you will. But Sweet Thief, you stole me but good. It took months to undo what you did in that one night, and even after that, to this day, I'm not really healed. That's fine. I don't need to be. Perhaps I make wiser decisions for it, or at least safer ones, although they're hardly the same thing. I've come to accept that there was absolutely nothing rational in My Fall nor in the theoretical recovery. Thinking about you weekly, usually more, is irrational given that you really only provided me with four hours of happiness. However, time was never really a factor in anything we did and those four hours encapsulated an entire lifetime of Disney and Grimm before it. They were everything I had ever thought I could conceive and receive. Everything. Except that they did not occur whilest in a park, let alone that park. And yet everytime I drive by there, I've thought of you, usually just in passing, but sometimes more and tonight perhaps more than I have in years.

So I walked through it and it was lovely. Truly the modern Rembrant I had always pictured. The swings I imagined you sitting on when I would have arrived were angled slightly differently and yes, I admit they were actually baby swings, not that it matters. I walked to that spot, four years after I was supposed to, and turned slowly, getting a perfect 360 view, so I could say that now in my mind, I would forever know what it would really have looked like on that night in the rain.

Fuck.

"You see what you did?!" I wanted to scream, and yet I already knew the answer. I always have.