Across Time.

Friday evening. Stimulating conversation. Cold cocktails served in antique glasses. Chilling at home, entertaining guests. Your friend D____ and his boyfriend K_____, the massage therapists, came by to drink some wine, get high, and talk about old times. It’s a relaxing scene, the warm glow of your Moroccan lamps illuminating just enough to keep things mysterious. The thick smoke of sandalwood waltzes throughout the room with its lovely partner, Mary Jane. Tiny dancers. They playfully spin in circles, in and out of our noses and lungs, leaving their invisible footprints all over our hair and clothes.

Idle talk, so inane and trite, but in retrospect, meaningful: worthy of reflection and study. We cover a wide array of topics from the “other-worldly” intelligence of magic mushrooms, to holotropic breathwork and Ken Kesey, from mystics of the sixties to the greatest thinkers of the eighteenth century. However, one topic sticks out in my mind... reincarnation and the cyclic nature of love... some call it destiny.

K___ tells us a true story.

7 years prior, before he knew D___, he came across an old photograph at a thrift store, a large group shot of about 80 sailors, all wearing handsome caps... all dressed in white... proudly standing before the prow of a great battleship somewhere in the South Pacific sometime before World War II. There was an undeniable quality about this picture, sitting there on that shelf by itself among a litany of old photographs. In a faraway tone, K___ tells us how his eyes traversed this sea of faces and almost immediately landed upon two... two men in a crowd of 80, not standing next to each other - in an expanse of monotonous stillness and monotonous colors and monotonous smiles. He bought the photograph and kept it under lock and key swearing to never show his special secret to anyone. He was true to his word.

Seven years later, K____ met a boy. There was something about this boy, something odd, but in a good way. When he was around this boy he felt... young again. An old feeling that had spent the good part of seven years lurking in the shadowy recesses of memory once again burned hot in his veins. K___ was compelled to action. The time was finally right, K___ told himself so one rainy night he showed the photograph to the boy and simply asked, with hidden hope, “What do you see?” The boy examined the photograph for the briefest of instants, looked up, and then immediately pointed to the exact two faces.

A drunken night of casual talk, I never expected to be given this gift, such tender selflessness… such a private, moving testimony, so extraordinary. D___ and K___, star crossed lovers, gazing at each other with adulation and genuine, honest to god friendship: an old friendship that defies time and trends and death. Such a sweet scene so unhurried; a scene void of pretension and self-promotion and materialism. Simply put, a group of friends sitting in a circle immersed to our ears in talk and dreams and laughter, while all around us, the smoke waltzes. A Viennese waltz I’d like to think, circular and rife with life and far-reaching.

I lean back in my chair and gaze across the room at you. We both smile.