I like to think of the moment we met as frozen perfection.  Me frozen by his perfection.  The day was so beautiful, bright, and warm.  Like him, beautiful to behold, bright of eye, warm of smile.  Frozen for its place in my memory and nearly as cold as the ice in my own veins, chilled solid by years of holding in a desire I knew better than to ever let the world see.

I had come to learn that days like this were not to be held like so many curios of delight but to be experienced in real time only.  Enjoyed for the moment and not held merely in check like an old vase or a painting hoped to one day accrue in value.  Days so warm, so bright, so beautiful to behold.  I didnt know then how many days like that I would get with him, basking in the delight of a boy just as warm-hearted, equally brightly shining, so similarly beautiful to behold as the day we first discovered each other.

I harbored a secret dread that in him the same was going to be equally and bitterly true for me.  Never to be held by me, not for long at any rate.  To be enjoyed for moments but not a lifetime.  Never to have and certainly not to hold from this day forward?  Not quite, but close.  I was right on that score and still tremble in the loneliest fear at the thought that chances I lost with him might never be mine again.

For he was someone elses son.  Drinking in his beautiful essence I felt that all I could be to him was a friend, one likened in love but never loved in full.  It is a funny feeling, wanting to be a boys father for the time it would give me with him only to realize that his own father who had made that chance possible for himself was blowing it every day.  That, and a deep feeling of deviance which would always keep me from tempting fate, taunting me with spending days on end with someone I loved so much and wanted in ways I thought then that nobody, especially him, would ever understand.

But I knew it had to be enough, to be only a friend to him so long of limb, so blue of eye, so chirpingly beautiful in full voice.  His blonding locks and tanning skin fraught with the harbingers of a new time coming always made me reach out to him.  I loved that he let me touch him, his hair soft and skin warm, when I just couldnt help but reach out for some reassurance that I was not living a dream, not standing off to the side in distanced fear of the very moment I longed for.

Together along the rail of the boat, running side by side on a deserted beach, sitting and swinging our legs off docks as wooden as I all too often felt inside.  That is, of course, until he sidled up against me and I could feel the very breath he took, the hand he held out to me, the head he would nestle on my shoulder.  In that touch I still hope I conveyed to him all that I felt and wanted but dared not ask him to give.

He wielded his boyish charm like both a sword and a shield.  His boyishly sweet quisling look, the one he seemed to reserve for me alone when he wanted to tell me something he held in value and knew I would want to know, was often a come hither look I could never resist.  I came to love that look in ways only time and deep caring can bring to one so smitten with unrequitable desire.

Being taught to fish by a boy is a gift every man should receive one day.  A boys passion for fishing, if he has it, is a rare and wonderful thing to witness.  The rush to tell, his face twisted in frustration at an occasional loss for  just the right words, the way his entire body would nearly be brought to bay by the fight in the taut and running line, the beaming smile when I would say Wow, I never knew that.  How did you get so smart?

Moments spent under the lamp of boys pride in himself can melt a lonely mans ice while burning themselves blue and cold into his memory.

He once asked me why I liked him so much and all I could think to say was because he liked me so much.  His twinkling eye let me know he felt my love for him was based on his beauty too, an unseen wink between us seemed to seal a bargain I now wish I could have driven further than I did.  And then we swam in water as warm as our friendship, as deep as our bond, as calm as the sea on the day we met.

While we never discussed my attraction for him he seemed to understand it, even enjoy it, for he knew it was something secret, something I could only have for him.  Boys love secrets and hold them close like whimpering puppies or toys they once loved but now feel too big to enjoy.  I never told him how much I loved him, how much I wanted him in every way love is designed.  Directly anyway.

It was a new lesson for me, that where words can cloud unspoken feelings can clear the air.  His secret, and mine, was not something to share as much as for both of us to enjoy at the same time in different ways on different planes

Once when we were fishing, he saw his catch had died for having swallowed the bait and all of sudden his own deeply held clouds burst forth, the tears coming down like rain.  He sobbed out loud and hugged me tight for a long time.  When I finally asked him why he told me that he was afraid of dying like that; cold, alone, and hopelessly hooked on something false like that lure.  As we pondered together the finality of death at our feet I wished I could change his hidden, inexplicable fear into desire for me.

He cried with me many times after that, once for his dog who died, once for his mother whom he knew his dad was cheating on, and some times just because he knew he could and I would never make him feel less of a man for it.  How could I?  He wasnt a man.  Not yet.

Yet no matter how desperately he wanted that, to become a man overnight, he seemed to take true solace in my arms, tears dripping all the way to his tight little waistband, in a kind of surrender to this time which he was beginning to understand was meant to be a special bridge between the little boy he no longer was and the grown man he could not avoid becoming.

One lasting memory is his favorite position, sitting between my legs, his back to  my chest, nearly enveloped by me. He told me that he felt safe from everything when we sat like that, drying the salt water from our skin while basking in the others delight.  I asked him one day while sitting like two indians, one smaller and nearly sculpted inside the frame of one much larger, what made him feel so unsafe.  His reply, that his family had never been a real family and that he was afraid, convinced even, that would fail his own family when he was a man the way his parents had done to theirs, shocked me.

It was then that I began to know the depth of this boy, just 12 that week, but seemingly growing old before his time, before my very eyes, for reasons that only fractured families come to know if never quite to understand.

And in that moment, his tears mingling with our mutual sweat, the tropics hanging in our shared breath, him hugging me like he could never let me go, I fell in love with him forever!

pK

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