Reply to a Craigslist missed connection

Kaitlin (caitlin?) from **** - m4w - 22 (downtown / civic / van ness)

I was the bearded guy that really liked beer. you were pleasant. :)

Dear bearded beer-lover,

I wish there had been Craigslist when I was your age. Back then, I met someone or I saw them once and maybe never again. Our eyes would meet across tables in the library, and for weeks I would carry the heat of that look in my head, straining to see him just one more time.

I did answer a classified ad, in the campus alternative newspaper: Male Agnostic Seeks Female of Similar Disbelief. Agnostics were a rarity at Brigham Young. We met, we drove to Pasadena to meet his family, we stayed at an empty friend's house on the beach. We blew bubbles that landed and popped on our naked skin. I don't remember how it ended. He wrote great letters.

When I was your age, 22-year-old boy, you were barely born. You were pushing your way out of your mother's belly and into the world.

I think I remember you. Do you know how many bearded boys I poured beer for that weekend? But I remember asking to see your ID, remarking that beards didn't fool me. Even so, you looked a bit older than twenty-two. You circled back more than once for a refill.

Or were you the one who asked for one big beer?

Either way, dear boy, I thank you. Your words covered me in sunshine, and I imagined another life, where I was twenty-two years old, now, in San Francisco.

What a blaze I'd cut through this city.