By Laura Towne

 

I don’t have many friends, he said.
Not sullen or in need of reassurance.
Just a matter of fact statement and because of that,
the way he said it, as though it were a simple fact instead of a telling thing about his life,
I felt something deeper for him.
The statement was more intimate than anything physical we had just finished.
He said the line in response to me—
telling of friends arriving shortly to pick me up for some engagement or other.
I did not invite him along.
He would not have come.
He was a compartmentalizer. A boxer.
The one who lives their life in sections, in boxes.
This notion spurred me to know him more.
To transcend the edges of the box he’d put me in.
To crawl out.
To see his full, true self.
He left soon after that.