You are thirteen when I first notice you.

We are six when we meet.

You are thirteen when I first notice you, and your dark brown hair sticks up just so.

I speak to you. You light up like the sea at noon. It is gross and unjust of me but I do not remember a word of this conversation. I remember your laugh and the angle of your young nose, and how long the grass was. We were standing just beside the grass, on the hard cobblestone by the place where you would later "trip" and scrape your knee.

("Trip," I say, because a cruel, ugly classmate—associate—of ours pushed you down, and you would never admit it.)

I speak fondly of journalism. You speak tentatively of putting up a fight.

We are talking about the same thing, but your mother died two years ago, and your father will disappear in the next month, and ten years from now this organization will be ripped, screaming, in two. I will come to talk about the press with acid on my tongue. You will come to hiding, to turning your face away when you feel the heat of the flames.

We are six when we meet, grabbed fiercely by the ankles and dragged away from our mansions to a base/campus/hideout in the middle of nowhere. Probably, we arrived the same day. I mourn I can't remember you. You must have been wide-eyed and perfectly still, your tiny heart beating fast in your tiny chest, like a hummingbird.

And somewhere, a hummingbird dips his beak in a flower…

And when we are thirteen, I notice you, and I am enchanted by how gentle your laugh is, and taken with the lightness of your handshake. It is unreal, impermanent, as if I will need to feel your touch again to reassure myself of you.

Your letters smell of lavender, still. I guess your hair still sticks up just so. I long for the day I noticed you, before we knew anything of the depth of the sea, or the width of the schism, or the distance covered by the tunnel between your apartment and mine.

You are thirteen and the worst thing you know is that your parents once had an argument with mine. The best thing you know is how to prevent a bad violinist from playing. Your heart is so full and the grass is so long. All I can think is let it stay uncut, let it stay uncut, let it stay uncut.