Daniel

Daniel doesn't age. It's his shtick. Since I've met him, and for many years before, he has dressed in the same fashion, a style one would pin on a vampire alien failing to blend into human society: dark and ostensibly tailored. The point was to create a fixed image in people's minds. He would become a static being, timeless, while the world moved around him. It would be him, not quite, but it would suffice for a permanence while he would be busy enjoying his solitude elsewhere.

This plan might have worked - indeed, did work on me for much of our friendship - except that he had the bad manners to make our visitations time lapsed. Daniel is my only close friendship who exists in flashes now. We see one another four times a year, for around forty-eight hours each session. He moved to Maryland, there to be with Kest full time and marry her. Around this time, he also eschewed those social media platforms where I might indulge voyeurism on how he is and, for this purpose, how he looks. Kest inclines toward many photos, but of insects and works of art reflected in other works of art, when they are not of the masks she makes and sells. Unlike me, she doesn't appear to believe taking and posting choice photos of one's lover whenever said lover does something photogenic is complimentary or prudent. Still, prior to this most recent visit, she had posted a couple of Daniel and her, taken by a well-meaning tourist who failed to comprehend that Kest was more interested in the simulated dinosaur nest in which they stood than the two of them in full. The best I could say in seeing these images was, "Well, at least she is keeping my Daniel fed."

Like Jesus, I do not know the hour of Daniel's coming and so am caught unaware when he texts me that they are just across the river and would I like to meet them for dinner? I indulge low-grade panic, as I've done nothing to convert the studio-turned-cat-bedroom into a guest room. I needed to deal with that before I could condone leaving for food. Also, I had just eaten some, but it seemed quibbling to use that as an excuse for not getting more food. Any Daniel visits comes with it a doubling, if not tripling, of my daily caloric intake. It is the price of admission, and I am not sorry to pay it. Food is an essential experience for Daniel in a way elevated from base physical survival. (I will subsist on rice and some sort of protein for most meals I have unless forced. When Amber works late, this is markedly true.)

I toss clutter into the corners. I run the vacuum over kitty litter and inflate the air mattress, feeling the latter will obscure any insufficiency of the former. My hunger for his company, if not necessarily my hunger for food, rumbles my torso, and I call his good enough.

We are to meet at a Mexican place near PAKT, there to also see the latter restaurant's proprietress Eryn. Kest relates in disappointment when I am nearly there that Eryn's eatery is not open for dinner this weekend and Eryn herself seems disposed elsewhere. We are instead to eat at Duo. I readily accept this substitution away from untested Mexican, always a dicey prospect.

I find them, fittingly, at a candy shop. Daniel sits outside in a chair while Kest completes her purchases. I sidle up next to him, seating myself, and he greets me with a civil "hello;" my sudden presence is not a surprise, but it is also not cause for jubilation. It is not, in short, as though we've been parted, though our last phone conversation of any depth had to have occurred two months prior. I have not needed his confessional, but, I realize in seeing him in the flesh, I have needed him.

Kest emerges, also not crying hosannas that I am here, warbling instead her joy that the candy shop had gummi centipedes. The candy shell of Kest as surely aged over the years -- though not since I've met her -- but I would hazard the chocolate center has kept to childish things, a trait hard not to find charming. It is only a select few who can make their livings crafting copper masks, and that does sound like the sort of job a seven-year-old would assign herself.

The co-owner of Duo, Shawna, waits on us and is delighted to see Daniel. The question on people's lips in seeing him now is not if he has moved back, but why he is here at the moment. I miss the former question, its hope that Daniel has returned to the fold after a year's separation from the Hudson Valley, but it is not realistic any longer. Maryland is not a lark but the place where Kest has forged roots.

Kest states that, when passing the restaurant before, Daniel suggested he might pop his head it to say hello, but in an offhanded, breezy way that could as well mean that he might not because that would involve social effort. Just as he finished saying it, one of the employees popped out of a window and pulled him inside to catch up.

I don't know the moment my friend all became adults. It seems not long ago that I was irrationally in love with a college student, but that was a decade. The years accrued in such quick silence. I've known Amber over seven years and I still find her new and shiny, but I also understand that she is far from the girl I met and whom I could not resist. She is thirty now, just about how old I was when we met, a fact that irritates her. She intended to remain young forever, costuming herself differently every few months that age might lose her in a crowd, the opposite tack from Daniel's sartorial fixedness.

Looking at the heads of women I think of as young and lovely, I now notice pale hairs. How did this happen? Of course, anyone younger than them seems like a wayward child, a world distant, an unreachable chasm between. I seek out friends and I immediately discount anyone below twenty-eight or so, an age that surely felt adult enough when I lived it nine years ago, but now feels naive. I am not sure what I would talk about with someone a decade younger than me, unless I were being paid to instruct them on writing or lecture them about Christmas goblins. I would have found that condescending were I them, though I don't know for certain I mean it in this fashion.

I don't want to be old, even by proxy. It was part of my existential crisis last winter than I couldn't cotton to my body changing, to the fact that I was beginning a final degradation (albeit as glacially as I can manage it) just as I felt I started to pick up the thread and figure myself out.

Kest and Daniel spend their Saturday vending at the Steampunk Festival at the Rhinebeck Aerodrome, which I avoid because Amber has too many chores for us and we don't really care to spend $50 for $10 worth of entertainment while bothering Kest's maskery. Two women, whom I took from their names to be fragile octogenarians and who are just forty-somethings with steampunk names, nearly begged Kest to attend, though these women may be the only thing in the steampunk community she likes. As it conflicts with a Ru Paul Drag-con, which most of Kest's friend are either attending or at which they are vending, I doubt Kest is keen to revisit this festival next year. It is a surer bet that she can move more product to queens, especially as she makes crowns.

She tells me that she once sold shockingly well at an event for retirees, because the alpha of a gaggle of elderly women put on a crown and proclaimed herself a princess, so the remainder of her clique had to follow suit. This is not a reliable enough miracle to focus more on the geriatric than the cross-dressing.

Sunday, Amber has work until four or five -- when dealing in the world of dog surgery, precise hours are a rarity. Kest leaves Daniel and I to go to Olana, a garden and historic home some miles away. I would have liked to have gone, because I never have and have generally heard good things about its vistas. I would have gone because I promised to allow the making of memories and the opportunity for pictures, but Daniel wants to stay here. I could not decline that. He is more of a homebody than I am. There comes some minutes when we are not interacting and it seems silly to me, uncomfortable, that he would visit, eschew a trip to a garden with his spouse, and then not interact. I express that it is my obligation as host that I keep him entertained, so I put on a few episodes of the show American Vandal until he say he has had enough, that he gets the joke. I wish I could have contrived a better solution to my anxiety. He does not need any more entertainment than he provides himself, though he enjoys my company and a place to spend the night when duty pulls him this way.

The day before they are leaving, I say my goodbyes, a handshake for Kest -- I am not sure she is a hugger -- and a hug for Daniel -- he isn't and I don't care. Since they have a five-hour drive, I wouldn't want to wake them up before I left for work the next morning.

When I come home from work, almost all traces of them are gone. They have folded the linen and deflated the mattress. It is almost as if they were never here, except for a few more slides entered into my image of Daniel, changes I wouldn't notice except for the frames missing between.

Soon in Xenology: 11/9. Superpowers. Pico.

last watched: Bojack Horseman
reading: It Can't Happen Here
listening: Yeah Yeah Yeahs