Amazement.

He was wearing a red leather jacket.

His hair was dark and curly and he had this look of crazy innocence about him. He wasn’t what you would exactly call “hot,” but what should and will be called beautifully intriguing. His lips were full and his eyes sparkled like a child’s.

He wasn’t like anyone I had ever met before. He lived by a different set of rules than the rest of us and floated wherever the wind carried him—as cliché as that might sound. He was (and is) the true embodiment of the poet drifter.

He approached me at the bar the day after my twenty-first. We had known each other, but only through the virtual world where we hid behind keystrokes. Where we didn’t know anything about each other except the style of our writing.

It wasn’t a planned meeting.

He thought I was interesting. And he recognized me. And he approached me.

He told me who he was, and I knew. The crazy hair and the red leather jacket fitted the words he had written. The amazement at everything in the world that his voice just couldn’t hide.

We walked down the street a few blocks. It was late, and I had been drinking. I had been drinking and here I was sitting on the steps of a closed law office with the boy who was amazed by everything.

They would come looking for me, but I wanted to enjoy this for a little bit.

He told me how he had been in the Navy and then went AWOL. He told me about his time in jail and looking out that tiny window to the messages people would leave for their loved ones on the sidewalk. I’d walked over that sidewalk a million times and had never given the chalk scrawlings much thought.

Everything was a poem to him and all women were beautiful.

I never loved him, and he never loved me. But we did amaze each other. And I complicated his life in a way I had no control over. The things you wrote after that day—I didn’t know she existed and if I had maybe I wouldn’t have taken that walk and sat on those stairs with you. But the fact is I did and I enjoyed being the object of your amazement.