Making friends with a guy who smokes and has a darkroom in his house when you start high school is pretty cool. We'd go back to his room after school and print black and white photos. His favorite pictures were of a classmate who developed early and immediately branded me with the feeling her pictures aroused in me. I was captive to that feeling, searching to relive it for too many years. I thought I found it when I changed dentists and during an exam when I was prone looking up at her, my heart rushed to that long sought beat. But she was young and I was married so I resumed the search. While watching a Mork & Mindy rerun, after a commercial break, I heard Robin Williams turn and say the words that steered me to this place:

If I ask you about women, you'd probably give me a syllabus about your psychologist personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You're a tough kid. And I'd ask you about war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right, "once more unto the breach dear friends." But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap, watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help. I'd ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever, through anything, through cancer. And you wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes, that the terms "visiting hours" don't apply to you. You don't know about real loss, 'cause it only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much. And look at you... I don't see an intelligent, confident man... I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you're a genius Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine, and you ripped my fucking life apart . .

. . I dreamed I was on a cot in a barracks in Manzanar and I felt a breast on my cheek as I awoke. I turned towards it and it was just the corner of the pillow. If I can't make you understand when I hold you in my arms, will you ever really know? I think it was from lying on a chaise looking at the full moon and the stars through the clouds and my subconscious replayed it as if I were in an internment camp. Still felt great though.