I have no trace of you, and I love you so

the kinship of having no physical record of the people you love

Why is it that we are so difficult to capture? There are no photos of you and me. Is it sad?

I can’t tell.

I find it so engulfing

entrancing?

astonishing?

warming?

glaring?

peculiar?

ghastly?

gut-wrenching(?)

shameful at times, harboring the knowledge of your mother’s spice cabinet refills and where she keeps her Morton salt or which cup melds into your palm like a creeping vine, but not having the essence of your being next to me in my archive.

Elena recounts about her most dear companion in My Brilliant Friend:

“I discovered that I have nothing of hers, not a picture, not a note, not a little gift. I was surprised myself. Is it possible that in all those years she left me nothing of herself, or, worse, that I didn’t want to keep anything of her?

It is.”

But then I wonder what it would be like to only have you live on my device and not to your own devices. Would I find you without me asking? Without heed or warning in my tea with 3 swirls of honey and sugar-less, like you said? Without pretense in my teeth when you said I should smile with my mouth agape, so I did?

You hide like a child with all your petulance and audacity to appear and leave. Untethered to a singular thought, belonging to every crevice and cleft, evading finding because you are simply and profoundly everywhere.

But my doors are open, and you know where I am. You are allowed that, and the fact that you don’t care for the niceties of your visitation rights is precisely why. I couldn’t possibly expect this to happen if I tried to capture you — held you to a negative hung in a darkroom, only to be seen when the light shone through. You deserve your own devices, even when they derail me.

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said:

“Once you label me, you negate me.”

There’s a certain essence that slips away the moment we try to define a thing. To describe you in that way, to take a photo, seems like a reduction. The wholeness is gone almost. What kind of friend would I be to encapsulate you so poorly?

To be absent in my archive might be the testament to us there is. That’s the honeyed cost of knowing you.