and i made him drink my piss

i left class today somewhat dazed, still pondering the question i'm compelled to ask, but i know better than to open that gilded box. he wouldn't have an answer anyway, and it would only intrigue him further, provide him an easy excuse. i don't want to give him easy excuses, although i did today because i couldn't stifle my urge to know, my need to have images of him bounding through the snow, curiously nosing the powder, gleefully lapping it up. he carefully probed my weakness then deeply, roughly penetrated the hole i'd made in my carefully constructed shell. at the end, my urge to turn back and ask almost won. i fought it all the way to the parking lot, focusing on her voice lilting through the wires out the tiny holes into my ears. then he was there. then he was filling up my entire field of vision. there were no cars, no chatty over-made girls with meticulously streaked and ironed hair, jeans clinging to and bursting from the rise and fall of their asses. there were no guys in baggy jeans hollaing at each other across the parking lot, sweeping me back to blue pony days when i set my jaw, stared straight ahead and walked quickly past him doing the same, her wrapped, grinning in his arms. there was nothing except his plain white shirt and worn jeans, the nondescript grey hoodie hanging halfway off his right shoulder, the weathered workman's boots clunking as he swaggered toward me. his deep dimples, his dark, slanting, joking eyes, his darkly stubbled crew cut, his babyface and aloof limbs. for a moment, i wanted to rush him, wrap my arms around his narrow waist, touch his broad shoulders, noogie his prickly head, feel his face, the dotted map of islands with which i brutalized him as a child, the wide, flaring, misplaced black man's nose that earned him la nariz, a nickname he never understood. then, i felt tears welling, forcful as he stared at me, confused. stopped in my tracks, agape, i was conspicuously caught up in him for reasons he couldn't begin to understand. "hey." he grinned, half-flattered, half-bewildered, hesitated momentarily, awaiting a response. finding none and unfazed by its absence, he moved on, lanky, swaggering but completely unaware of the clumsy fluidity of his movement. down the stairs and out of sight. it wasn't him. he wasn't suddenly back in this world, safe in the bubble of a bad community college. he wasn't suddenly re-civilianized, fatigue-free, the same boy girls fawned over in high school. he wasn't suddenly unburdened by the last year and a half of his life, by the disarray and trauma of the democratization he defends so fiercely. he's neither safe nor sound. and he's nowhere within my grasp. stunned, i moved stiffly through the remainder of the parking lot to my car, where i sat motionless but for the shaking of my shoulders, the racking of my chest. for all my suppression, i had not realized the depth of my love for him. for all my differentiation and distancing, i had not realized how much i miss him and worry for him and need him to be back home, reading rolling stone, smoking joints, playing practical jokes, lying under his truck in grease-smeared, tattered jeans, his boxers peeking brightly above his baggy waistline. i hadn't realized how happy it would make me to see his face, shadowed beneath the ripped rim of his slate blue k-m hat, moving toward me, grinnning. i need his written words to be true. i need him back next month.