the way of all flesh

I saw him as I came down the escalator and noticed that he had become older.

"Abraham," I said and stepped across the arrivals hall. I smiled at him and as I got close to him I exhaled so that I could breathe in his scent. I had been missing that smell for all the time we had been apart, and I was ready for it.

As he put his arms around me, I buried my face in his neck and pulled in his smell. As soon as it hit my nostrils tears sprang to my eyes and that was when I knew that it had been too long. He smelled older. I should not have been surprised. I hadn't seen him in over a decade. We'd been 15 when I had left. He smelled like someone who knew that they were doing, whereas before he had radiated the scent of his adolescent self.

I let my fingers slip into the notches of his spine, which were coated in a new, heftier layer of muscle. He drew breath with the same ferocity that I remembered, and that comforted me.

"Abraham," I said again, pulling away from his body to examine his face. He looked happy. He looked like someone who knew what they were doing. I envied that. He smiled at me and said, "I know what you are thinking." He probably did.


We drove home in silence, the space between us filled with the years behind us.

Finally, when we pulled into his driveway, and he killed the engine of his car, and we sat in silence as the ticktick of the engine cooling resonated around us, I turned to him and opened my mouth to speak. I said, "You need to tell me why you left her."

That was a lie. I knew why he had left her.

He nodded and got out of the car.

___


We lay naked in the bed on our backs. We were careful not to touch one another, as afraid as we had been the first time, half my life ago. I slowly turned my head to look at him, and in the dark his face looked exactly as I remembered it. I inched my hand over to his side of the bed. I placed it on his hip bone. I was sure I'd be able to feel his freckles, but of course I couldn't. In my mind his body was smaller, his skin thin and taught and untouched. Under my hand, though, it was thirty years old; adult. When I realized this, I was washed in chagrin. I was embarrassed to notice that in my mind he was still 15. I was embarrassed to to picture the 15 year-old body he must be expecting from me.

He leaned over me, and kissed me, and looked into my face for the first time since I'd gotten off the plane. He sighed a long sigh and his hands considered carefully the age of my body. He placed his palms everywhere, comparing the feel of my anatomy now with the impression of it stored in his muscle memory. He was thinking exactly what I was; that we had gone, and would continue to go, the way of all flesh.