A San Franciso post-solstice sunlight slants over Geary buildings rooftops into a friend’s apartment where I happen to find the yearbook of my sophomore year in high school. Such a long time, not to remember, not to forget, so I look through the book, curious and not curious, slowly, to find the photo of my friend, a senior, not having met him at the time. I’m sorry— there’s no photo of me in it, I always was a solitary type, I always did feel out of place. High school was a zoo of adolescence in which I looked at kids in cages embarrassed at being one myself, and one without a friend or mate of my own kind. No time, no time; no memory and no time, in which I look for missed warmth and wished-for happiness and can’t find the faces or the names.
3 January 1980