friendship.

     I was just returning an email to my dear old friend Abbie, who wrote from Mexico, when she informed me that at that very moment she was compiling an email to me with photos (from December 2008, when we met up in NYC).  Stars align. Galaxies find balance. We think of one another at the same time.
     Seeing the photos made me feel so happy- to see myself with her, a lifelong friend from boarding school, and with Kyle and Dan, two of my best friends from college, together in Brooklyn. When worlds collide. Brought back so many memories! Crazy kids. I love these people. It also amuses me to no end when I see photos that I never remember taking. Like the time my friend Dan told me he had a photo of me holding a rifle in a bed in Virginia... uh, don't remember that! Oh, to be young. Oh, to be alive.

The bottom two are notes I wrote Abbie while at boarding school circa 1996-1998. We were close friends from the first moments we met on Hyphen-3, the third floor hallway where I would make a top-ten list of things for lonely lovers to do on Valentines Day, where we would bond over our love for Pearl Jam, and adventure, and making mischief, and finding love, and being wild. 

I love you Abbie. 

(And Kyle. And Dan.)

fall.

The wild country- indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky- provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut.
- writer Annie Proulx, Close Range, 1999

What love feels like in the fall.