In high school I was friends with two identical twins named Dan and Guy. They had long hair and beards and Dan played the Harmonica. They both did many drugs and sold drugs and got sent away to rehab a bunch of times. I was a little in love with both of them, Guy especially. He didn’t say much and I took this to mean that he was brilliant.

One of the times they got sent to rehab they escaped and ran away and disappeared. No one knew where they were for a long time. I was very worried at first but I tried to remind myself how they’d run away before and always been fine. They were the kind of people who had this amazing luck that quite clearly would never run out. I missed them a lot though even after everyone else stopped thinking about them.

One night my friend Lizzie and I decided that we wanted to get drunk and high in Washington Square Park. We lived in Westchester so we drove her parents car and parked on Bleecker Street. We were walking around and the sun was just starting to go down and I was very stoned and very drunk and when I first saw Guy I almost didn’t beleive it was him because he looked like a very old homeless man even though he was fifteen at the time. He had a very long beard and when I hugged him his coat smelled like something might be rotting in it.

I was on the verge of throwing up at this point which is a very bad way to run into someone who you have been thinking about for five months. I listened while Guy and Lizzie a very nice joking conversation and we sat together for a long time on the edge of the fountain. He smoked American Spirit Cigarettes. Then I went and threw up behind the bathroom and Lizzie told me it was time to go home.

I felt like something very important was about to end and I was suddenly very sad. When I was hugging Guy goodbye behind the public toilets, right next to a pool of my own vomit I said, “You know, I think I always liked you a little too much.” Even at the time I was thinking how if this was the last time I ever saw him that what I’d said sounded to me like a very good ending. “I know,” he said.

The problem is that I can’t remember the tone he said this in. I have been trying to remember for five years and it’s not even that important. A week after that we went to the park to bring him vitamins and a sweatshirt but he wasn’t there anymore.

A few weeks ago I saw him on a train and it was the first time I’d seen him since five years ago at the park. He was getting ready to leave for Alaska because he and Dan had decided they were going to become commercial fisherman.