by Anonymous8

Created on: October 07, 2008   Last Updated: May 31, 2010

Evan

I sit listening to the song Passenger Seat at an inconspicuous table in Panera Bread. The setting is commercial, mundane. The haunting, lilting notes of the piano separate me from this place, and I am not here. I am the lonely passenger in a shapeless car that drives in the darkness. Someone is beside me, but not close enough - never close enough. Something between us, something that's happened or will happen but is never happening now is overwhelming, compelling, irresistible, like a hypnotizing black void at which I can't resist looking but which I know will swallow me, obscure me, leave me with nothing. Like halting, piercing piano notes played in a shapeless and unnameable vacuum. This is what my memories of him look like.

I fell in love with him long before he reciprocated the favor, and part of me remains in love now, long after he's gone. He had laughing green eyes, dishevelled blond hair, fair skin that was often flushed pink with the Florida heat or with enthusiasm. If you looked really closely at his otherwise flawless teeth, you could see differences in the shades of white.

Evan was slightly overweight. This single physical flaw incorporated imperfection into his being. It made him real, and infinitely more beautiful than he would have been otherwise. This one weakness gave me free license to dream about him. I saw myself as hopelessly, terminally inadequate. The world that I was able to see outside was the world of the flawed. Anyone without one immediately evident imperfection didn't even penetrate my consciousness. It isn't that I told myself some people were out of my league. They simply didn't appear at all; there was no effort involved in the exclusion of the beautiful people. He got in, but just barely, leading the way into a place so light and bright that I dared not dream of it without him. His weight gave me some modicum of hope that he might see me, too. Not because I deserved him, but because maybe he made the error of believing that he didn't deserve better. That's how I looked at his weight, and that's why without it, nothing would have been the same.

To say that Evan was funny would be to do him an injustice. In assigning descriptive adjectives to people, always there is the risk of reducing the irreducible, of defining what he was not by naming what he was. That he made people laugh is without question. He spoke with a smile on his face and laughed in his own well-timed pauses, a good-natured and boyish laugh that was full of

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