lives to sustain a flame of the intensity we now kindled. Simon had told me that the human heart was a candle, constantly ignited and melted by the flame of a new lover, only to cool, harden, and callous when that lover left and took his flame with him. I reasoned to understand his metaphor to mean that a heart burned and cooled too many times would eventually burn out, never again to be reignited by another.

Simon had melted me wholly. And when he left to study abroad in Scarborough, the viscous, waxy pool of my remains coalesced, leaving me utterly bitter, desperately broken, and hopelessly aware. His parting words to me were of a fear we both shared – that the time apart would change us. He feared that upon his return, we would meet only to realize that I was no longer the boy he loved and he was no longer the Simon to whom my heart had been given. To those who asked if my heart was broken when he left I said only that that was impossible - since Simon was my heart, I simply didn’t have one when he was not around.

In the foolish self-imposed idealism of youth, I incidentally found, and subsequently lost, a lover in a poet named Simon, who kept me awake at night, asking my questions and denouncing my metaphors. I never saw Simon again. I never saw that version of myself again either.