I KNOW WHAT HE’S THINKING. And he knows that I know what he’s thinking most of the time because after all these years we have a way of communicating silently with our eyes and right now I know he’s thinking I’m still thinking about him and that I’ll never stop thinking about him and maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t. Maybe I will always be thinking that he’s really in love with me. That there’s an in in the sentence. I don’t know. He thinks if he says I love you and means it as a friend which I know he does, he thinks if he says this that there will be interpretation, that I will hear the in in the sentence whether it’s there or not but I’m not stupid. I may go ahead and think that he is really in love with me but I will never again think that he’s going to be with me. I know that we will go on with our lives and become involved with many or several or with any luck just two other people (one per), people with whom we will be awake at the same time and when we meet parents he will not refer to me as his friend and we will be happy and he will tell me he loves me and there will always be an in in the sentence and maybe there will even be beautiful babies but I will know that we had that thing even though he thinks he thinks that we didn’t have that thing, even though he thinks he thinks that it was never a full-on thing, that it was another thing, a thing that had something to do with us being in the right place at the right time for this particular greater purpose, that god may have been involved even, but not for the other thing, not for love. (And I know why he thinks that and I get it, I do, it’s just that I don’t think the possible god thing is exclusive of the other thing, the love.) But I know what he really thinks because I see the way he looks at me, even when I’m looking at someone else I know he’s looking at me, and I know he doesn’t have a jealous bone in his body which can be annoying at times, but still, I know that he looks at me looking at these other people and he just keeps looking at me that way, and he thinks he thinks that this is just him being happy for me, happy that I’m moving on and looking at other people, but on some other level, a level he won’t admit to, not even to himself, I think he thinks that it should be him, and I think it should be him and I think it should be me, but what we both know is that it won’t. It won’t be him and it won’t be me. We have many things in common and many things not in common and I know that the not-in-common things are more heavily considered on his part than they are on mine. I think we can work things out. He thinks we cannot. I think the things we have in common are more sort of profound worldview things and the things we don’t have in common are lifestyle things, although now that I think about it there may be some overlap, there may be some little bits of his profound worldview where I drift off (tendency toward spontaneous public nakedness as expression of comfort in world [and/or humor]/smoking is cool) but nevertheless when I see him with these other people, these wrong people, I think that he should be with me. And I think he knows this on a level he won’t admit to I can see it when he looks at me.