Pete

Pete looked at me over the fire with a blank expression. "Dude, that's gay," his face breaking into a laugh as he tilted his back to the stars upstate in New York. I laughed too because I like Pete. I'd heard so many of his sensitivities that if I simply said, "No, Pete. You're gay," he would probably slip into a days long depression, isolating himself to his jerk-off chamber, only coming out to smoke two American Spirits at a time. A little glass house.
Peter didn't want to believe that vulnerability is the kernel that makes any kind of love real and worth the effort. He knew that's how it was but he also knew that it was the pinhole that meant the dam was going to break. He pined for the whimsical bullshit he saw in movies and television (and fuck he watched plenty of that stuff) but was too afraid of baring his throat at a woman. Of looking up at the sky and waiting for her to suck every drop out of your veins knowing that if she did you'd just stand there and then die.
"Pete, love is about cutting your heart down the middle and making a space big enough for someone to crawl inside and fall asleep for awhile."
He stared at me, the flames casting deep shadows about his eyes.
"Sometimes they've been running for so long that a place to rest is enough to make them cry."
He lit another cigarette. He knew I was going now.
"You look down and see them there, curled up, and it's enough to make you cry too."
I like Pete. He's been my friend for many years and will be for many more to come. But it will take him even longer before he writes a love note to a woman he thinks he loves.