some vague, fuzzy, and perhaps entirely inaccurate memories of great conversations i’m pretty sure i’ve had:

sitting on a low wall in some park in new york with jason.  he’s telling me about his ex-girlfriend, about how he knew it was over between them when he realized how hard he had to work to care about her.  after their relationship ended, he says, he found that he was already over her.  i say something similar about the guy i’ve just broken up with.  jason’s current girlfriend, he says, is practically effortless.  on the stairs below, four cats slither in and out of a hole in the concrete.

on a park bench in brixton with mark.  he’s been nauseated and we’ve taken a walk to get him some fresh air.  he says he’s not sure what he wants to do with the rest of his life.  he’s not sure if he wants to stay in london.  he misses the country.  should he buy a flat?  move away?  change careers?  two people on a bench across the park are making out enthusiastically, athletically.

we’re somewhere, and i’m telling jessica about how there are two different kinds of friends.  there’s the kind of friendship that’s easy to make, easy to maintain, easy to lose.  those friends are the ones you go to bars with in groups, the ones you see at work, the ones with whom you don’t really discuss anything of substance.  i call those the beef jerky friends.  then there are the friends that are grilled chicken breast, garlic mashed potatoes, steamed broccoli, and chocolate cake.  those friends are hard to make, so you don’t have them very often.  you need them, though; they’re important, and substantial.  i can’t remember why we’re talking about this.

sitting under the porch roof at the harp, billy and i talk about something, over some beers, for some time.

phil tells me, as we drink beer and dangle our legs from the two-ton block of granite that is the 180, that he used to be afraid of cities.  when he was very young he went somewhere with his parents, to new orleans or something, and the crowds and noise freaked him out.  he tells me that eventually he got over it somehow, by going somewhere or doing something.  the clouds are pink from stadium lights.

in union square park, someone keeps playing a busta rhymes riff on some sort of drum.  the coffee sign across the street lights up CO, then FF, then EE, then COFFEE.  we are there for several hours, watching people and dogs walk by, watching bums sleep and neon blink and cars creep past.  we talk about stuff.

marisa and i at brasil after the westheimer street festival and she’s telling me that she doesn’t think there is one person out there for everyone.  she thinks there are two.  one you have when you’re young, and one you have when you’re older.  she also says that the worst thing she can think of is to have one of those people die.  it always makes her cry, she says, even in evita, which is an otherwise terrible movie.  i can’t picture her crying, and i don’t remember what i say in response.

yanda and i talk a lot, i think, in front of the study window with the vines creeping up the brick across the alley.

where do these conversations go, anyway?  they seem so important, so monumental, so universal at the time, and yet they’ve melted away somewhere.