I Want My Words To Survive Translation.

What I Wished More Than Anything Was That The Thing Hadn't Happened At All, And I Thought That By Not Mentioning It I'd Be Doing Everyone Else A Favor.

And So We Stood Together Like That, At The Top Of That Field For What Seemed Like Ages, Not Saying Anything, Just Holding Each Other, While The Wind Kept Blowing And Blowing At Us, Tugging Our Clothes, And For A Moment, It Seemed Like We Were Holding Onto Each Other Because That Was The Only Way To Stop Us From Being Swept Away Into The Night.

Because Maybe, In A Way, We Didn't Leave It Behind Nearly As Much As We Might Once Have Thought. Because Somewhere Underneath, A Part Of Us Stayed Like That: Fearful Of The World Around Us, And No Matter How Much We Despised Ourselves For It--unable Quite To Let Each Other Go.

And What Made These Heart-to-hearts Possible--you Might Even Say What Made The Whole Friendship Possible During That Time--was This Understanding We Had That Anything We Told Each Other During These Moments Would Be Treated With Careful Respect: That We'd Honor Confidences, And That No Matter How Much We Rowed, We Wouldn't Use Against Each Other Anything We'd Talked About During Those Sessions.

Perhaps It Is Indeed Time I Began To Look At This Whole Matter Of Bantering More Enthusiastically. After All, When One Thinks About It, It Is Not Such A Foolish Thing To Indulge In - Particularly If It Is The Case That In Bantering Lies The Key To Human Warmth.