December, 2014.Los Angeles, California

Prelogue:

Arthur:

This is not a love story.

It's more like a caricature.

I don't know why I'm writing it, aside from the feeling that it must be written.

Maybe because I am leaving Los Angeles tomorrow.

There is a certain melancholy to it, or a finality. I've always had a penchant for the melodramatic and seeing that there is nothing to do (and no one to see, for that matter) until my flight at 7 pm tomorrow, I might as well sit here with my tea with a morose look on my face and write in this notebook.

Anyways, again, this is not a love story. I wax poetic sometimes, but I can't help but repeat that love had little to do with this. It was more like a chance encounter story, or something akin to walking in a fun house of mirrors and seeing strange, bent reflections of yourself that sometimes frighten you and other times make you laugh. You kind of look at yourself, all stretched and thin or smushed and short and you stop and stare.

You ask yourself, "Is that me? Is that the person I've been all this time?"

And I'm using this analogy because there are times when you meet someone and you look at them and they make you see different versions of yourself.

And before you know it, you wake up next to them and you stare at their back and you ask yourself, "Is this me? Is this who I've been for more than a decade now?" and it scares you so much, you get up and you try to walk out the door, and when you do the morning light is so, so bright it hurts you to keep your eyes open.

I'm not saying I ever woke up next to Alfred some morning. I never really had the guts to get to that point. Part of me thinks that maybe if I did, I wouldn't be sitting here right now, scribbling away. But, yes. I ramble too much. The story. You're probably asking me now, "who's Alfred?" and I wonder why you would even ask me that question, because the answer is exactly what it seems: Alfred is a boy. And love has nothing to do with the story, but it had everything to do with Alfred. Love had to do with the way he walked, the way he smiled, and the way you would catch him looking serious when he was thinking really hard about something. Maybe it was all in my head. But this is my story and it exists in my head and I say that Alfred was in love in this story. With what or who, I'm still not sure.