Have you ever seen someone, and had it instantly decided for you that you’ll know them intimately, to a degree that’s frightening in its intensity? That you will and do love them (and this is something that I, much to my chagrin, didn’t have with Mathias when I met him); and do you know what’s most terrifying about admitting that you’re in love? You’re just completely and utterly naked, exposed and shivering in the face of everything cascading through your mind, your heart, your libido. You put yourself in harm’s way, you lay down all your barricades, lower all your defences, and dismantle the protective walls that you’ve spent (quite literally) years crafting. No clothes, no weapons, no facades, no masks. You have nowhere to hide, and you are, for however long that person is in your life, completely and utterly vulnerable. The only thing that makes it at all bearable is the firm, insistent, almost-annoyingly nagging feeling that the other person loves you back, and that you can trust him to not hurt you, even although a little voice in the back of your head screams “No! Don’t let him in! He WILL hurt you, he can’t help it, you can’t help it, it’s completely inevitable and you’re a fool for succumbing to the illusion that it could ever be otherwise!”

And sometimes—and this WAS a way in which my relationship with him mirrored my connection with Mathias—there’s a sense of revelation. There’s a feeling of being completely saturated, enraptured, a notion that fades as fast as it erupted into the horizon of your mind, an emotional supernova that leaves aftershocks in the strata of your soul. And it vanishes, leaving behind traces of itself like the Cheshire Cat fading away in front of Alice, piece by piece, but sometimes, you’re swept with a consciousness of it, and the intensity of your gratitude (both willing and unwilling) tightens your chest until the lack of oxygen threatens to overwhelm your sensibilities, sweeps through your parasympathetic nervous system, shutting down even your autonomous body functions until you come back to reality with a gasp for oxygen. I’ve never been a religious person, but at moments such as this, I feel the confluence of God and man rushing over me, immersing me in a glorious sense of my own mortality interacting with something that can only, with our weak and limited primate senses, be described as divinity.

It’s a poor way to describe that sensation, ham-handed and melodramatic, I know, but I honestly can’t think of any other way to try and explain it to someone who hasn’t felt it. Words are wonderful, but they too can sometimes fail. My friends, some of my best friends, never understood why I continued to be open to H.C., to put up with what they saw as his flakiness, his inability to commit, his confusion about his own proprioceptive sense of identity, and I would frequently, under the assault of their joint disapproval of my folly, shrink into a defensive ball, whispering “You guys, you just don’t understand.”

How could they? I’m not sure I quite understand it, even now.

I am, oddly enough, not an easy person to get to know. I remember overhearing someone describing me to a newly-admitted freshman during the GLBT social mixer, as “cold and haughty, although presumably, he unbends a bit when conducting human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, as he’s been widely rumoured to do.” A bit of an exaggeration, but largely rooted in fact. I can be astoundingly unpleasant and stand-offish when I decide to be, mostly while at large gatherings, especially when I’m unsure of where I stand in the social Nielsen ratings.

Which makes it all the more odd that in my second month on campus, right at the beginning of freshman year, I saw H.C. in New South, one of the campus cafeterias, and promised myself that I would get to know him, no matter what. I’ll admit to being shallow; I thought he was one of the most stunning men I’d ever seen. As I later discovered, he’s half-Filipino, a quarter Spanish, and a quarter Chinese, all the traits of each group combining to create this broad-shouldered, sloe-eyed being who just exuded sexiness, even when I later realised the depths of emotion that had contributed towards its contribution. At the time though, I almost took a nosedive into the crouton bowl at the salad bar, and was only a friend’s steadying arm away from an embarrassing Caesar salad dressing facial.

H.C., if you’re reading this, I know exactly what you’re doing right now. You’ve got a slightly twisted half-smile on your face, and you’re not sure if you should laugh, or if the seriousness of my actually writing about all of this, putting what we shared—and we shared much—into cold text, reducing it to words and punctuation, warrants a more serious response. Knowing you, at the end of the last sentence, you probably laughed quietly, maybe a little nervously, and now you’re settling in, making yourself a little bit more comfortable, because even though you’re not sure if you want to read the rest of this, you wouldn’t be able to sleep comfortably until you finished devouring every word on the screen. And now you’re debating closing this window, just to prove me wrong, but you won’t, because we’re beyond that sort of bullshit.

Aren’t we?

We talked for most of freshman year, engaging in this strange dance that I didn’t recognise at the time, even when, one night, driven to sheer stubbornness, I decided to tell him of my strange fancy, sitting on the edge of the silenced fountain in Dahlgren Quad, the chapel doors in front of us seeming to be a heavy-handed allegory more intimidating than any Chapel Perilous ever entered by a seeker of the Grail. He stammered, started speaking, stopped, not sure what to say. I got up and left, went to a friend’s room, where one look at my face prompted my friend to rush me down to Au Pied de Couchon, the dingy French watering hole on Wisconsin Avenue, and ply me with bottle after bottle of cheap red wine, all the while assuring the French proprietor that we were of legal drinking age.

That was the first alcoholic drink I ever had. I’d forgotten that.

Things were strained for the next few months, while my father passed away and I struggled to hold my family together, to restrain them from saying and doing things they’d hate. I was barely nineteen, but I felt so old, and no one understood. He did, I think, in his own way, but we’d already trodden on each others’ toes during the waltz; there was too much trepidation.

And oddly enough, sophomore year, we were roommates. He was dating a slightly insane senior, never spending time in the room. In a passive-aggressive act totally uncharacteristic of me, I left him a note wondering if I could take over his bed and form a double bed, since he had no use for it. Angry notes were left on each other’s laptops, a debate fuelled for no reason other than sheer contrariness. There was some nebulous ground that neither was willing to relinquish; we may not have known what we were fighting for or about, but the fact of the battle itself was enough to keep us going. There were awkward silences, glow-in-the-dark stars glued to the ceilings, books amassed aplenty in a regressive fort-building exercise that clearly delineated the borders within our room. I even applied, and got into a year-long program of study in Italy, so badly did I want to get out of there. I spent more and more time in Manhattan that year, trying to get away from the feelings that made me recoil mornings when I’d wake up and see his bed unslept in, or mine for that matter, because I’d have been up all night, roaming DC and falling asleep in friends’ rooms. He told me, a year later, that sometimes, he’d lie awake in the middle of the night, listening to me breathe, hoping I’d come across to his bed. He’d come to my bedside and watch me sleep; what would have happened is something we never brought up. Not then.

Was that what you said, H.C.? Or am I glossing over memories, changing them into what I want them to be, rather than what they were?

Junior year, I was a wreck. Cutting myself, failing classes, taking care of my brother’s wedding. I didn’t talk to H.C. much, if at all; he was dating a freshman (or was she a sophomore?), and that didn’t endear him to me. Then, one night, in the courtyard of my dorm, he came up to me silently, while I was smoking. He’d had sex with a guy, a freshman, he said. He didn’t really know why, but the guy’d been after him, and he’d decided to do it. He was confused, he didn’t know how he felt about it, he didn’t know why he was telling me about it, but he was.

I got up, and without a word, ignoring his calls to come back and talk to him, went to my room.

We didn’t talk for a few weeks, until, the night before I was going to fly back to Karachi for the wedding, I ran into him on the street. We exchanged pleasantries, polite conversation ensued, and then there was silence. My foot traced convoluted arabesques on the pavement. We looked anywhere but at each other, starting to speak, interrupting each other and then stopping. Laughed nervously, awkwardly. I wanted to go back and start all over, but I didn’t know how. A few minutes of uncomfortable silence, and I started to say goodbye, when he wrapped his arms around me, and with only the slightest hesitation, kissed me.

We walked away from each other, turning away wordlessly. I didn’t dare to look back at him, didn’t know what I’d say or do if I did, knowing that the smart thing to do was to pretend it had never happened, the right thing to do was to ignore it completely. He has a girlfriend, I repeated to myself as a mantra. He has a girlfriend, and this is just lunacy, it won’t work, it’ll never work, he doesn’t know what I want, he doesn’t know what he wants, and he and I both know that, but in all our knowledge, why are we both so fucked up and helpless to do anything? I listened for his footsteps, hearing him receding into the distance, not daring to turn around, because I didn’t know what would be worse, to see him looking back at me, or to see him walking away. My heart urged the footsteps to become louder, more hurried, racing towards me. My head urged my heart to shut the fuck up.

What would have happened if we’d turned around, H.C.? Did you turn around? I was too scared to.

I came back on academic probation, Prozac-saturated, trying desperately to prove that I was worth the $40,000 that the university received annually on my behalf. I threw myself into my work, writing paper after paper, doing extra-credit work, attending class with a diligence that bordered on mania. There was no time in my life for anyone or anything else, and I decided that I’d imagined what had happened. Glimpses of each other across the main campus square, but nothing more than a perfunctory wave, the occasional hug when we crossed too close to one another to gracefully spin away and carry on with our lives.

Senior year came and went in a brief flash. I buried myself in my life, in figuring out what to do, trying to pass my Biology classes with a minimum of work, chain-smoking my way through a senior thesis, driving myself insane with worry about my brother after September 11th, being attacked on the street and only narrowly-averting physical harm because of a passing group of students who knew me and stood up for me. Waiting for my nephew to be born, and sobbing in inconsolable grief as I held him for the first time and saw my father’s features, his hands and eyes, being watched by a silent infant whose gaze gripped me in a melancholy that was palpable enough to make my brother excuse himself from the room, the rawness of my feelings discomfiting him, he who had never seen me cry in all my life, not even at our father’s funeral.

We graduated. I moved into my friend’s summer townhouse, right next to campus and blew the cash I’d been given as a graduation present, waiting for my work-permit to arrive, playing Final Fantasy X and partying like a madman. H.C. was on campus too. One night, we decided to get dinner, an uneasy truce declared itself, unspoken and unheard, but felt. Shall we invite him home? he asked me over the appetizers, indicating with his fork our waiter at the Cheesecake Factory. I snorted into my wine and chuckled indulgently, hoping for a sudden coronary or a stroke to incapacitate me and end the evening because I didn’t know what else to do.

The living room of the townhouse. Everyone’s out for the night, we’re sitting cross-legged on the floor, with a bottle of Absolut Citron between us, taking shots out of the bottle, a last-ditch effort to postpone and perhaps justify? Timidly: Will you spend the night here? You’re too drunk to drive. A slug from the bottle, his lips wiped with the back of his hand, still glistening, pupils dilated but focus present in an intensity that’s almost embarrassing. Angry with myself, I snatch the bottle back. It’s only a few blocks. A last-ditch effort: You’re sure? OK.

He comes up to my bedroom, the smallest, filled with boxes on one side, and my single bed on the other. My laptop blinks intermittently, a small green glow on the wall distracting me. Avoiding his glance, I shrug my way out of my clothes, clad in underwear that’s entirely too flimsy and revealing, emotionally and physically. The down comforter, in the middle of DC’s sweltering summer heat, is yanked over my body with an almost unseemly celerity, his lips curl up in that half-smile that still floats into my mind on a lonely night, and he climbs in next to me, wrapping his arms around me.

We kiss, and the darkness envelops us, as he curls around me, and four years come together in a tapestry that I didn’t even realise was being woven. There’s fumbling, hungry kisses, a pulling-away, boundaries set, broken, reset, shattered again.

He leaves in the morning, climbing over me with a degree of grace and consideration that is entirely unwarranted because I haven’t been able to sleep all night, waking up every few minutes to reassure myself of his comforting warmth, of his chest next to me, rising and falling, my arm under his head, one hand in his hair, the other cradling his genitals because even now, I can’t, I don’t believe that this is happening. Has happened.

It’ll happen again at my new house in Woodley Park. It’ll happen a year later, when he drives in from Maryland to see my new house in Adams-Morgan, while my foster brother’s little brother sleeps in our living-room, on the couch and unaware that just twenty feet of drywall, granite countertop and stainless steel kitchen separate him from two people who should know better, but one of them at least, just doesn’t give a shit, and will take what’s given when it’s given. When it’s there, and while it’s still all right to so do.

All of that came back in my dream last night, H.C. and I, human spiders with limbs intertwined, my head on his clavicle, his legs thrown over and under and around mine, all at the same time, the sheets of the bed spiralling around us in a twist of fate that I knew would eventually come, but which, now, is an impossibility, ineffable and inevitable in its own warped way. His warmth and bulk are reassuring, comforting, and terrifying, all at once. It’s not meant to be like this. Is it?

No, it’s not like this. It’ll never be like this, will it, H.C.? I’m not challenging what may be, just wondering, out loud, engaging in pointless rhetorical exercises. It’s all right, it’s over now, most of it, anyway. The important bits? I’ll look back in a couple of years and let you know. Life is, after all, mostly an illusion, and Fate a magician. It’s all done with mirrors.

Break the mirrors.

I’ll see you on the flip side, eh?