Your boy gets agoraphobic - but lights up at the mere mention of you.
 And those gifts you sent back to him came straight from your sweet
heart; he can play with that gold cross each day between his fingers,
and with that he can think of you.  What went through your head as 
you saw it, he wonders.  Why you thought of your boy at the moment 
you did, when he was far from your sight, he can't comprehend; this
is still your time of mourning.  You should concern yourself only with 
dressing in black. 
 
Your boy hangs your cross upon his chest; he has from the very
 second he got it.  Why is it that you thought of him?  It's a question
he's not brave enough to ask you, even now, when it begs to be
asked. So leave him to his illusions in return for that.  You need not
let him on to his misconceptions.  His dreamt-up Switzerland is not 
your home Switzerland and he hardly knows a thing about it; he
conceived of you wrapped up in longing for him, softly humming so
dizzy with love, on a Alpine boulevard below white peaks smiling
richly and benevolently, passing glassy boutiques displaying every 
permutation of boxed chocolates in silvery and golden foil, heaps of
Piaget and Rolex watches, eggshell-thick bells and little carved 
wooden bears, gold pens, crystal, electric shavers and chrome
coffee makers.  There he saw you left the death far behind you.
 He could not see you as you actually were, one of some hundred 
soaked figures tramping down a gray street in Geneva, evading
old bloodthirsty cabbies and speaking bad French, holding out
beneath a jeweler's steel awning till the spate of morning torrents 
subsided and you returned to your aunt's freezing flat to cook lunch.  

 This account, from your letter arriving this morning.
 You turned by chance and looked in the jeweler's window.
 All he knows of the past two weeks of your life is what you set in
that letter.  Eating breakfast, he read the first four pages - the
composed calm parts written in the station cafe in Paris (you, 
so obsessed with “how loud some of you Americans are!  It’s no
wonder…. “ and “I remember coming to this station as a child...”)
then the sad thoughts flooding you that evening on the train; words
faded, scattered and dragged each other around the pages, and 
your boy knew not if it was from the car's spasmodic affair with
the ground or your own lonely, uncontrollable shaking.  'I can't know', 
you wrote, 'at this point, how long before I'll be back.' 
 
The train slipped under the evening.  You kept alive this silent 
conversation, writing as if he were sitting beside you, anticipating 
his replies and observations and imploring him – "No, look at this!
 Look at that.  Notice this," like you do in the street, in the cinema
, you do always.  His passion for the panorama, not the nuance,
offends you.  How many times have you told him where to point
his camera?  And what does he do then?  It's all reactions with him.
 Once, you said you were determined to change his eye.
 
You wrote "I'll write everything I hear or see."  But no one ever
wrote all they heard or saw.
 
The boy and girl sleeping before you, lying on top of one another,
their cheeks pressed together.  His hand thrust inside her jacket.
 Raised flowerbeds built at the end of a rural platform – red and
white blooms dead still, cold in the lamplight.  The railway workers,
finished separating the cars, skipping across the tracks in the dark,
taking their hard hats off, scratching their scalps, and joking. 
Passengers rising as the train neared Zurich, taking their cases
and shuffling down the car, as you saw your house from the tracks,
waning slowly, the lights in the living room burning on.  The 'pale
disaster' of your aunt's face when she saw you.  Walking to her 
car, a cigarette flicked out someone’s window stuck in your collar
– this, you claimed, was the first time you cried.  
 
After a shower he put on coffee, sat alone at the vast table, and
slowly read the rest of the letter.  There was much about the funeral
in the rain, about spiteful things your sister overheard said there.
 The eulogy - your boy would've liked to have known the gist of
the eulogy, the anecdote or bible passage it hung on, but you
didn't mention it.  Nothing of the death after that. He read of your
week lived 'smothered, clutched' in your home, what with aunts
and uncles sleeping in your parents' old room, your sister
screaming at the lawyer and going off in a huff, someone having to 
do the cooking and no one wanting to at all.  You wrote that 'that
street is embedded' with pieces of your toys, blood from your
skinned knees, the voices of your dead mother, dead father.  But 
your boy can't envision your land, your city, or your street, and 
knows your mother and father only from photos you don't bring
out often.  So the letter is useless in a sense; he has no faces to put
to the names, has no voices to hear come out of them, and cannot 
wander the streets in his mind.  Meaning remains in it, but only
through your living and what this time has been doing to you.                                 
 
Sometime during his second coffee there began a slow steady rain. 
He heard windows shutting in a bedroom down the hall, footsteps
from the kitchen to where the mail lay by the door, and in the mirror
he saw what no one else would've seen; the flatmate who thought
he had gone unnoticed, staring curiously and pitifully at him, 
hunched over your letter.  He left, saying nothing, but tapping his
umbrella against his leg, and your boy went on reading, slipping
his feet in and out of shoes left there under the table.

"Have you realized yet," you asked, "this is the longest I've been
away since I met you?  By the time you get this, I'll be there with
you, but that doesn't take away from the fact that I'm alone now.
 I write and I write, until I've written fifty pages, but what does
that do?  All the words in the world can't bring someone here, as
much as we would wish them to."
  
"So now my life's where you are," you finished, writing upon your
old desk, in your old room.  You said you'd been visiting your aunt
in Geneva, that you'd started going back to church.   That you 
wore that cross until the morning you sent it.

The letter, not you, betrayed a consolation, a quiet joy that there 
remained no reason to ever go home again.  It spoke to you
missing him, you loving him.  When he felt sure the place was
empty he wept a little for you. 
  
Your train reaches London at 22:37.  Four hours.
 
Split yourself off from reality, rest yourself.  Forget for a moment 
that nineteen nights ago, your father died a rather young man.  
Forget for a moment the white-bearded man who caressed your 
bare knee getting out of the compartment in Strasbourg.  Forget,
if you can, relatives seen and unseen in the churchyard, the old
schools you avoided the entire time, the dead dolphin being 
winched from a tank in the aquarium you went to, to pass the
time in, one day. 

 Forget everything for a second (reduce yourself to your simplest
fraction); everything now, save how this fellow came to be known
to everyone as your boy.   

 Your boy wrenched his knee badly this morning.
 Walking atop the wet edge of a curb, staring cloudswards as he
does when troubled-thinking, he didn't see the cat lazing in his path
until too late...and the cat didn’t move.  He fell awkwardly, 
collapsed in the road.

 You can hope it's an injury like a sentiment that disappears in a 
day or two.
 
No.   Now you'll never get him out of the house.  Never.  His leg is
on ice; "I've got to stay off it".  You have said before, he’s too
delicate.  It'll hardly matter what you tell him waits out there -
–a night out in the clubs with old friends of yours, a jet crashing
into the school down the street, or the Virgin Mary appearing in 
Covent Garden.  Your boy won't go.  Your boy doesn't go.  
Once, your begging and pleading even amused him.

 Now your boy doesn't know what to say to anybody.  He imagines
what everyone says about him.  It hasn't always been like this, but
it is now.  It is now, and he thinks he prefers it so, as if his loss of
sociability was as hoped-for as the growing-out of some
burdensome, freakish youthful talent – a high singing voice for a
boy – which others beg for and laugh about at Christmas dinners,
which only brings the child pain.

 Today he had no classes, so passed the day alone at the table by
the window, enraptured by hundreds of photographs he had taken
on trips to Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Sussex.  They were
mixed together, not ordered chronologically but in stacks ranking
which he liked best the last time he sorted and re-ordered them,
three days before; the very best of these black-and-white
landscapes, the most dramatic cliffsides and sublimest shores and
wisest-looking coastal rocks, he stacked separately again. 
Here, one that’s not a landscape – a seagull perched on a old,
half-flat soccer ball.

He has a book in them; someday it will come out.  He keeps
changing the order.  He said a little thanks to God for certain 
glints of light, or for having had him happen upon a certain 
empty beach after a cloudburst made jetty-rocks shine.  Those
photos that he disliked, he put aside, considering how very likely
it was that he would prefer them in the future, in another frame of
mind.

 He sat alone at the table, his leg now elevated, the window open,
as it didn't rain in and he hated the feeling of being stifled, getting up
only because he had forgotten his watch, or to get something to eat,
or to undo the blue envelope and read your letter once more.  It
terrified him.  

To see you in pain brought on some great pain – a reaction he had
never expected from himself.  And it bitterly hurt to see you 
consoled by false promise. 

 You've got to get used to - you have gotten used to the fact that
scarce are the evenings he'll willingly float, like you, amidst the
hordes in Charing Cross Station, saying 'Wouldn't it be nice to go off.
..' to ----- or ---- or ----- or somewhere.  Right now -  let's try it.'
And never would he ever do such a thing.  You say you’ll travel by
train whenever you can  -  “It’s good to stay along the ground,” and
“It’s good to be among people”.  Maybe it is one of your life’s little
pleasures.  He prefers the car, the plane.
   
Now can you remember? 
It seems funny that you should have traveled to the sea in the first
place.  That day was nothing special, and you had exams starting that 
week; you went with Carolyn, who you yourself admit to not liking
much; “she’s a kind girl, but shallow, and not very bright.”  She had
walked back to the restaurant, to get the gloves you watched her
leave on the radiator, and so you slipped over the barrier and onto
the beach, and sat waiting on a sandy log.  And this young man with
a camera walked by you, and looked at you – the only other person
on the beach, but for a dog-walker far off on the silverblue flats. 
Then you looked away, then turned back, and he was at the edge 
of the surf, but his shoes were not in it, nor was he bending to stick 
his hand in it, like some people do; he was where it could just not
reach him.  He was fixed on you, faced you, alone by the jetty, and
that made you curious, not angry, as to what he could want.  And 
so you rose, you strode to him, and you asked him.

He said something strange, he said that he was “envisioning you in
his camera lens”.  Looking back, it does sound a bit like a line, but
you cannot forget (you told him) what you felt behind it, what you’ve
felt behind every word he’s said since – a sweet, gentle sort of
honesty.  And so you’ve been together.  His dreams you know well 
enough, and he has heard yours, he has tried to feel them, deeply.  
Deeply.  In his pursuits you encourage him, even bought him a book
by a ‘great’ photographer, Stuart F. Dresden, who you’d never
heard of, nor your photographer friends, but he insisted on anyway.

 Your boy gets agoraphobic, but there were times when he’d go out
with you and your friends, who all took a liking to him, even if he
did not joke as they did (he’s told you “if nothing else, people find
it hard to hate me”).  And none of them are outstanding.  They 
listened when he offered advice on visiting the Irish coast, or who
might win the French Open.  It was them who noticed he never 
strayed from you, talked deeply only to you, looked to you before 
speaking.  After a few nights, they laughed quietly among themselves;
now, when he’s never around, it’s standard, even cliché, to ask you
“Nadja, where’s Your Boy gone off to?”  “Nadja, how’s Your
Boy been doing?”

You, some say you're the only one he will go to, like a shy child 
clings to his mom.

All this he’s gathered, secondly.  He knows his faults - even 
cherishes them – and so considers that his covert strength.  Love,
he has considered the end-limits of his love, and equally, the limits
of his hate.  He doesn't ever want to hate, even when he does. 
But he has begun hating you.

Would he ever say this to you?  Do you think your boy'd ever make
such a statement?

It could stay sequestered indefinitely, boiling within him; he thinks
he could take it.  If only he had not this crucial defect; of all
perceived and imperceptible weaknesses, there exists one greater
and graver than all others - this inability to keep hidden secrets.  
And so what will happen when those who come upon this meditation
reach here, when the screen guarding your boy comes tumbling
down?

Then they'll know, that your boy is I.  An always stoic boy.  Rarely
I cry.

But for now, leave this.  You shall not see this.  Divide what helps
you from that that does not; let unhappiness leave you. 
 
Somewhere over French pastures you go, the last colors of daylight
falling behind you.  I don’t know if you’re sleeping.  I can’t know
if you’re sleeping, or looking quietly into the dark, humming 
something, as the train leaps forth and some on it cross on into
new life - the next life.  Life lived after the death of someone or other. 

 Your train reaches London in less than three hours.  Now it dives
in the tunnel.

 Let unhappiness leave you.

I'll limp to you.  I'll limp through the drizzle towards your train, I'll
stop only to eat a fish sandwich and fries, drink one small cherry 
Coke (saving half for you, only to hear you refuse it); limp through
the doors of Waterloo station, when the record shop’s closing, 
the student travel office’s shut, but the two flower sellers, who live 
on a wooden stand-isle in the middle of the maelstrom-floor, they
haven’t yet said to hell with it. 

All week it’s smelled as if an old, dripping dishrag was thrown 
over the top of the city.  This is what you come back to.  This, 
your birthday next Thursday, the leaking sink, two weeks’ unpaid
rent.  Your boy will show his devotion, wait there, meet you, 
bring you quickly under the ruthless lights, before a downpour
comes to beat the strays back into alleys, where they hide, gnaw,
scratch.  It’s a dark night, I won’t talk much about it, not on this
walk back to your place, into the next life, into a night richer in
gestures than we’ve had in a while.  Mostly I just want to sleep, 
dream anew.  Maybe, watching TV,  I'll put my foot on your
thigh to rest, and maybe for a joke you might untie my lace.

The advice I once got somewhere was “Confront your dreams,
confront every single one of them” though God knows who said
that, and God knows what dreams they really meant – the dreams 
of what I thought I’d want (a true love, money, fame) or the
dreams had while sleeping.  I wonder what they’d say to the one
I’ve been having; I run over some grassy cliff looking for you at
sunrise, but can’t find you, though you leave me a note.  I drive 
back to this city, but it’s no better, there’s a steam train brushing 
up against my building, and the passengers chip the bricks with
hammers.  There’s an office in my room, which is really your room, 
where an electric ticker runs prices of unknown stocks – an bell
rings for prices falling.  And then I’m taking pictures of your father
and mother, who asks me, in your voice;   

 “Tell me, do you believe in anything more, besides having someone 
who loves you, whose just being nearby reminds you they love you?”
Assuming there's someone who knows if your boy loves you. 
Because I'll just say I'd like nothing more than to keep you.
 There’s a question that’s got to be asked someday and 
answered, even if what goes for the answer you already scratched 
in a tube car window with my knife, like the delinquent you aren’t,
one evening.  What goes for the answer isn’t, though; no more than
the truth for one or the other, of one day, or the next.  There is
an answer for this evening - this is not the time, this is not at all
the time for you to see this.  There’s this question to try to stave
off to that some day, when your boy puts an end to his castling.
 I could take anything but advice.