Basically this

I don't remember how to be the person who was his friend. Perhaps it isn't my responsibility. Neither of us are those people anymore. Maybe we never were, and I utterly uncharacteristically imposed a narrative on someone doing nothing more than living their life.

There are people you meet again, and it is as though nothing has changed between you. Dan Kessler is, in my eyes, the same man he was in 2009. I don't know who I am.

I loved him once. We first properly met at Dutchess Community College, though he did not attend. I had seen him years earlier in his high school's production of Once Upon a Mattress, and felt I ought to know him. Nowadays, I would have looked at the play's program (though I sense he was Chorus, so that could have added a challenge), found his name, and friended him on social media. We had enough mutual friends even then, but I didn't know how to say, "Hey, I saw this guy at your school with reddish-blond hair in a ponytail, a beard, and a goofy smile. Does that sound familiar?" and get the response I wanted. We lived in a benighted age where people not only didn't do this, but social media did not exist.

Years later, when I saw him near the lounge of DCC, I did not hesitate to introduce myself, seeing it as an opportunity to make up for an oversight. I don't recall if we became friends then, though Dan Kessler was always open, so we might have. I want to say that is what happened. The content of my journal and his absence through 2001 (as far as I have gone in my responses) suggests this would be naive, and we only became close later. What a waste of time when I could have been stargazing with Dan Kessler instead of diner visits with people who looked down on me.

No matter when it happened, we were best friends. I cannot recall a time in those years when the sight of him didn't bring me contentment and relief for his practical and symbolic import.

He saw a better chance in the city, and he took it. His destiny did not lay in cycling through the same experiences and people as some in New Paltz still do. I do not believe he agonized over the particulars as I might have. Before he left New Paltz, I already felt the vacancy his leaving created. That is the nature of the city. People move there, start urban existences, and don't have a need to come up again until their family dies, as has happened to Dan.

At the Eveready Diner, Dan says he is sorting his mother's effects--and there is no lack of these. She was something between a packrat and a hoarder. He laughs at his confession but cannot seem to fault her. This is how she coped, though it is unclear what she was coping with. She would buy things she had no use for or simply not in this profusion. He will come up once every month for the next four to deal with the contents of a storage unit, which he, with sound reason, calls liminal spaces.

Over dinner, he unreservedly treats me like a friend. I don't know how I deserve that. I have changed in ways that make me uncomfortable, in contrast, something I did not realize until he looked at me with eyes that had known former iterations.

Dan has a little winter in his beard, but enviably little. His hair is still lush and curly beneath his cap. Going through this experience, I can't imagine I would look well, picturing myself haggard, beset by dark circles under my eyes.

His father died when he was young. I don't remember the circumstances, but I recall this factoid while I try to piece together how his mother died. He has not built a tolerance to me such that I can overtly ask, "So, why is your mom dead?" as though I can begin to deserve the answer. I feel around the subject whenever he brings it up, but I do not reintroduce it.

Dan laments that he must try to rehome his mother's six-year-old cat. He notes his mother is the second owner who has died on it.

I try to figure out when his mother died, as that is something that might give better context. He was here for Thanksgiving with her, so she must have been somewhat okay then. He doesn't list symptoms or say, "Oh, her cough was bad when we had pumpkin pie." Given that she was a hoarder, was her death related to mental health? He did not tell me when she died, not that I was due that intimacy, so I could not go to the memorial service. I would have, though I do not believe I have a memory of her.

I want to know about her death partly because I am a sympathetic person. The proportions of grief and indignation vary when it is a death from cancer or a wasting illness or that from a car accident or murder (I would have heard about a murder, and his mien in discussing it would surely be less subdued). Suicide, of course, is its own animal. What is the recipe for my consolation? I don't know, so I offer him something blander.

Partly, I want to know the circumstances for kind reasons, but the rest is self-centered. My parents drop hints about their mortality, stating they are fixing up their house to make it easier for my brother to sell after they die. They do not lack cheerfulness in saying this, which almost makes it worse. Suppose I can zero in on the cause of Dan's mother's death and disqualify it as something likely to happen to my parents. In that case, I can fidget less, seeking congruence. On the other hand, if she was struck down by a heart attack or stroke--commonplace as one ages--I will have to add that to the list of Things That Could Happen to My Parents.

It is not as though my relationship with Dan can pick up where we left it. I need friends, but this is a strange interaction--stranger for me than him. Amber and I are the only two people he's seen.

I don't know that I want him to be a close friend again--though he is no less worthy of this--as much as I want to be at ease around someone who knows a version of me who is a not-distant ancestor.

His life now sounds like the extension of his New Paltz adventures. He has a housemate who moonlights as a drag queen. His landlord is an 80-year-old karate master. His ex-girlfriend, Bree, left for Philadelphia for unclear reasons. Amber gets the idea it had to do with infidelity, but his ex may merely have gone a bit dotty, though not in the way people say of their exes. She seemed to have had some crisis and chose to flee to alleviate it. We can deduct points for her taking their cat with her.

Music is still Dan's overarching compulsion, as writing is mine. It is knit to his existence, not something that would fade given steady employment doing IT for Actors' Equity. He likes working with actors and is joyful when he meets these people, but he doesn't consider their names a card he can slap down to impress people.

I can't know how I appear to him. I cannot even ask. He remembered I might still be in this area and wanted to see me as a reprieve from the discomfort of clearing out his mother's apartment. I don't know that he contacted anyone else. Aside from a pair of musical sisters, I am curious to know who else in this area would mean anything to him.

As a more accessible topic, we talk of people we once knew. He remarks on the strangeness of Zack's vanishing act almost two decades ago, how he disappeared literally overnight. His family would not tell anyone he was gone and, once we knew, where he had gone. I suspect he had explicitly told them not to tell us in case we would mount a rescue party, though, of course, we wouldn't. He left, and we took that action as he intended. We never received an answer as to why he did it. I didn't think it lingered in a way that would bother anyone. Abandoning his life here without antecedent didn't seem far-fetched.

The mystery weighed more heavily on Dan, which makes me wonder if Dan was closer to Zack than I was. How does one arbitrate something like that?

I am accustomed to people leaving, though I prefer the respect of them saying they have gone and--if they are feeling generous--why. Better to take the guesswork out.

Dan left, only not really. He moved to Brooklyn, and it seemed too far, so our friendship faded there. No hard feelings, simply no real drive to keep it thriving. Not all friendships are meant to persist into the retirement home. After Dan left, I actively searched for new friends, finding Daniel and--through him--Hannah. I did not want for companionship, something Dan could brag about as well. He has bandmates and housemates. He is appreciated at his job. He did not lack for my absence, nor did he have any cause to feel it.

I don't know what it would be like to be nearer to the man who was Dan Kessler's best friend. I have patched holes in my programming and revised sub-routines that wasted my emotional resources. I became the person who could live my life, one who would have told off abusers if dropped back into the realm where Dan knew me (Dan does not number among the abusers; he was only ever a prince). The man he knew is a remnant, someone who wouldn't have the slightest idea how to be me, the bravery of that.

I may sell Dan short because, despite what he is experiencing, he outwardly retains that air of the Buddha as though none of this hurts him much. It may be the case, but we all know how relentlessly I would be milking my wounds for ink. He has had time to process, so I cannot project my expectations onto him.

My time in New Paltz with Dan Kessler ranks as some of my happier memories from the year and a half when I worked at Maplebrook, which treated me (with a minority of hyperbole) as an indentured servant. Maplebrook was one of the worst experiences in my adulthood. Dan Kessler was always a reprieve, the Tuesday nights I would spend with him while my then-fiancee Emily was in the city--doing things I don't want to know about.

I do not have close friends from that era, partly because I do not have many friends. Life moved us if we ever had cause to be joined by more than proximity. Sometimes, death did the moving.

I regard Dan well. In memory, plainly, but also in what I know of the man across the booth from me. Some of the liking is in the absence of dislike. After our formal friendship faded, I lost respect or interest in several based on their actions. Dan had none of this against him because we fell out of touch. He was not chronicling his every misstep on the internet and social media (unlike me), so I have no grounds to do anything but faintly like him, my default state, until persuaded otherwise.

I feel like Molly Grue in The Last Unicorn, demanding to know why he came to me after fifteen years had etched me. Without his ordinary tragedy, I would not have encountered him now or possibly ever again. I would not think of him more than a few times a year. If I did, it would be to miss him or the brightness he provided me. Is he not worthy of lasting gratitude to have been one of my reprieves when life had provided me misery? Our cells have changed almost twice over. (Though they have not, really. Some slough off or experience apoptosis. Others, teeth and brain, last.)

I do not give friendship from debt, let alone debt the other person would not acknowledge and which, if they did, would have been paid in full with no compound interest.

I don't want this to read as though I did not like seeing him, though at this point in my life, at this point of the year, with my lack of sleep, I struggle even to be around myself. I don't know that Dan expects much of me beyond something to do other than be in the morass of his mother's death, whenever that occurred. I would want the same.

He asks if he heard that I wrote a book about some animal. I laugh and admit I wrote an exhaustive book about Gef the Talking Mongoose. I go into the most grounded part of the case when Gef was the cause of a change in civil service law. I warn Dan that, years ago, two friends suggested they wanted to hear about this, and I emphatically told them they did not. Once I started, the light went out of their eyes for the next fifteen minutes. Dan listens and seems amused. When I tell these stories, I look into the middle distance as though I'm seeing notes. It's easier to hold forth with an implied audience rather than a direct one across the table, who might not know to expect this from me.

Amber cannot provide much buffer. They are physically present, but they are not here; instead, they are fixated on their Cornell rejection. They say they could hear in eight days that the rejection was a mistake. It apparently happened once, though I suspect it won't twice. No matter, they do not want to be under the glaring diner lights but in front of a computer, researching Plans C through Omega.

Though Dan can be remote with his job, this is not his home. The sooner he leaves the Hudson Valley again, the better for him. He lived here most of his life. I had been mulling over my exodus in the inevitability of Amber getting into Cornell. I see nothing more they could have done. However, it still feels like we are only a little divorced from packing boxes and scoping out storage units near Ithaca in a liminal space of our lives.

Amber joked we could still move. They talk about a program in New York City for a one-year paid internship that would make them more attractive to Cornell University. They say, possibly not as a joke, they could get subsidized housing there and come up on the weekends. I wouldn't want to endure it long-term, but I understand doing something unsavory for a year. They suggest they take a cat down every week to keep them company, though they would switch the cats out.

We part with Dan after a few hours. I work in the morning, and Amber's mind has been grinding out solutions to Cornell. Dan needs to rest before returning to the storage unit's slog. He reminds me of his subsequent four visits, suggesting we could get together. There is even money on if we will.

last watched: Beastars
reading: Pity the Reader