We made lists back in those days. The top five favorite bands we wanted to see live before we died, things like that. Lists that allowed us to postulate our hipness with trendy answers. A top five band list might, as I soon learned, consist of a few modish Indie bands as well as a token 1960's or 70's classic Rock and Roll band that we would never be able to see because one or more of the members had died of a drug over-dose or suicide. Megan had an "obsession" with Jimmy Page and put Led Zeppelin on her list, I think I may have said the Beatles. Only later did I discover that calling the Beatles one of your favorite bands is kind of like me calling Titanic my favorite movie in eight-grade and thinking that was cool; while it’s true, it is so much the cool thing to say it should probably be avoided all-together.

The difference between Megan and I was that while we were both trying desperately to fit some mold of underculture coolness, she already had a sense of what this coolness actually was to the extent that she knew better than to pick the Beatles as her retro rock band for the list. Megan knew obscurity was gold when it came to coolness, but being too obscure was trying too hard. So she opted for the just slightly less exhausted cliché rock band and chose Zeppelin. Megan taught me all the rules to this game; she played it like a deck of cards, maneuvering all the loopholes. She knew when to bluff and when to fold and when to stay in the game because she had the winning hand. She was a sort of teenage prodigy in coolness; it was like a religion to us.

We had met over a shirt she was wearing, one claiming the name of our then favorite band Built to Spill. We were Young Life leaders, freshman in college, assigned the same group of middle-schoolers and put in the same hotel room on a leadership retreat to Knott's Berry Farm where our friendship was sealed.

I felt myself an adult as we sat there, our feet dangling through the ornate iron railing of a three star hotel in La Serna, California, the home of Knott’s Berry Farm and a lot of fast food. We overlooked the hotel lobby's gaudy baroque-esque fountain as the other leaders gathered around it with their duffle bags, ready to check-out. Megan extended her flip-flopped foot to give me a better view of her toes. "You see," she pointed at her pinky toe, "my extra appendage." Given our recently discovered similarities—our common favorite number 11, both our hopes of four children—all boys, our shared favorite Biblical abstraction of hope, Megan, it seemed only assumed that I too must possess an additional appendage like herself. She had 11 toe nails. Oddly enough, considering the already seeming cosmic circumstances of our blooming friendship, my appendages resided in even denominators. Megan's 11th toenail fell off last summer. Our common ten is perhaps the only lasting similarity we share.

And so we continued like this for some time. It was fun—the romanticism of our freshman Friday nights spent drinking tea and playing chess in Megan's dorm room, secretly burning Nag Champa; its peacenik smell will always remind me of that year. But something about it all just felt pretend—our favorite bands we loved to call our favorites, our strange coincidences involving lucky number 11, and even our best-friendship as we called it—it was upholding something that I'm not quite sure was really there. We played make-believe best friends, pretending we had something in common, pretending we'd climbed trees together when we were kids, our closeness somehow felt fraudulent, like we hadn't earned it. But I can't blame either of us, we simply didn't know better.

In Paris a few years ago Megan and I were riding the RER to a concert with our friends Crystal and Hess who had been best friends since they were in middle school. Between twisted scowls and underbreath comments all pertaining to the accustomed rotten stench of the RER, half joking, we asked the two, who are still close friends, the key to their friendship. Jokes and honesty. That's what they told us. I remember feeling so proud, sitting there in my doddered flip-out seat next to Megan, my best friend, (something which I had never really had before), another set of best friends across from us, the chronic jolting halts of the train shifting us closer together. I liked feeling a part of something. But looking back now, I think we were mostly intrigued by ideas of things, rather than the things themselves. We liked being best friends more than we liked each other. We exploited the coincidences which surrounded our friendship and our strange make-believe connections with the number 11, we said things we didn't really mean, we planned ourselves hippie lives in Ocean Beach we had no intention of living and wrote songs together about surfing boys with long hair mostly because all of these things upheld a magic we so desperately wanted to believe in, a kind of magic that dies when you figure out the logistics of things; like a child's a belief in Santa Claus that is no longer sustainable once they figure out how many children he'd have to visit in one night. We were lacking the other part of the equation; honesty. Megan tried to be honest with me that night; she told me I wore too much blush, I remember feeling kind of offended.

Anyone who knew Megan at that time in her life knew about her "soul mate", a man named Jonathon. She met him in high school on a spring break trip from Phoenix to San Diego. She might have called it love at first sight. Her relationship with him was made up of nothing concrete. But the romanticism of it seemed monumental—eternal even. It was threaded by coincidence, by twists of fate; interpolated with eleven-elevens and daring notes slipped under his door on Valentines Day. He was in fact, very much a part of the reason she came to our University at all. Jonathon was perhaps the epitome of the whimsical pillars that served to hold up our lofty ideas of things. I think the collapse of that idea in particular, the collapse of Megan and Jonathon as "meant to be" made the whole structure of things crumble.

I don't think our friendship was ever really the same after Jonathan. We were disillusioned. Fairy tales and best friends and soul mates…these were all things of an innocent past that just didn't survive this great collapse of idealism.

A few years ago, before the Megan and Jonathon thing didn't work out, Megan was in Paris and received an e-mail from him on November 11, and of course we saw this as some cosmic sign from fate itself. This year, 2 years later, Megan is in Greece and I sent her an e-mail wishing her a happy 11/11, she wrote back claiming that "he" had e-mailed her on November 11 at 11pm; it was of course a joke. In a lapse of nostalgia I noted how the magic had passed away with our youth, she responded, "No, no, the magic passed away when we started being honest with ourselves. Yet, in the confines of truth, imagination can experience infinite freedom."

This speaks to something much greater than just our lucky number 11. The past year and a half or so Megan and I have struggled with one another, not so much drifting apart as just fighting to avoid it. And I do believe, like Megan said, the magic passed away when we began being honest with ourselves. But the problem became not about being honest with ourselves, we were at times perhaps too honest, but more about being honest with one another; this was where we struggled. The moment we began to admit that we didn't have that much in common, that we thought about things differently, we enjoyed different things and had different priorities things began to fall apart. We were unwilling to work at our friendship, to figure out how to be friends without magical coincidences gluing us together. The things we have in common with anyone, in any relationship, the things which initially draw us together are always subject to change. Toenails can fall off, one can begin to prefer love to hope, or choose to leave children to more domestic women. But what I am beginning to understand now, being away from Megan for the first time in three years, is that love has little to do with coincidences and commonalities and ideals, and as long as I continued to hold fast to those faulty ideas things with Megan could only be difficult. For in my desire to reconcile, I thought I needed to change her. I remember so often thinking that if I just waited a little while or had a long talk with her, Megan would grow up, or she would change, or she would finally get it, like I got it. How egocentric it seems now; how opposite of love.

With Megan away in Greece, having left on a more-or-less sour note, I grieve what this friendship has become, realizing now that while Megan and I may never be the kind of friends we tried to be when we were young we will always love one another. Love is much bigger than getting along, or having things in common. I now find that the differences, which I for so long held against her are the things I love most. They are the very particulars that make Megan who she is, a person who is nothing like me. And in truly loving her I no longer see the need to change her, but rather to embrace the person she has become.

I first met Megan as an artist; she was a painter. Freshman year she would leave late on weekend nights to paint, her pants and sandals often streaked in whites and teals. On my spring break trips to her house I was educated of her past by the many paintings confined to the blue walls of her bedroom. We spent one evening painting the trees of Pepper Tree lane yellows and reds. She would send me cards, my name written in flowery longhand, embellished with pastels. A few months ago we lied in bed, falling asleep to an awkward conversation about art. "Nothing is art," she said. At least nothing she made was art, is what she was really saying I believe. At the time, I regret I couldn't disagree with her. I was in a strange elitist slump where I held everything to a Duchamp-esque modernist exclusivity, something which would indeed deem Megan's paintings nothing more than formative. This attitude towards art now depresses me because in every sense of what I now believe it means to be an artist, Megan is it. Art is worship to her, she paints because, as trite as it may sound now, she finds joy and beauty in it. She paints because that's what she has always done, and she does it without being corrupted by the filth of intellectualism. Megan has never been trying to communicate some leftist social position or push the boundaries and confinements of modern mediums to break through to a whole new realm of postmodernism in hopes of changing the world. Her art has always been agenda-less, innate and honest—something, it seems very few artists I know can claim.

As I have watched Megan become honest with herself—watched her make art freely again, with the innocence she had at 18, but matured, watch her find love, true love that isn't about changing people into what you want them to be; as I have seen her rebuild something beautiful and genuine out of the rubble of disillusionment I would hope that our friendship could find a place too.

I flew to Paris for Thanksgiving this year. I am always thrown by how on the way back you leave in the morning, and arrive just a few hours later all the way across the world. Traveling 14 hours, I was still home to San Diego by dinner after leaving Paris just after breakfast. You literally gain and lose hours. You can leave a city on a Saturday morning and be somewhere else the Friday before. It's time travel, but it's not as science-fiction as Back to the Future made it seem and so we find it insipid and complain about the long flights and turbulence. It's like finding out that magic isn't magic at all, only optical illusions; it’s kind of sad. This is growing up—figuring out the science behind magic.

Ours is a story about losing and finding, about becoming younger before you can get older. It's a coming of age tale where youth is abstracted into something we pretended to be adulthood. It's about learning the mechanics of magic and finally understanding that love is the only thing truly supernatural; it is bigger than magic and lucky numbers and time travel, it can't be explained by science or equations. While our friendship may never be magical, the will to be friends—a product of love, will always defy the laws of science.

I'm now interested in the ends of things; in learning to surmount the death of concrete ideas.

I think of Bucky, from Don Delillo’s Great Jones Street and what he says of his dead lover Opel, "The love of minds should last beyond lives. Maybe it does, each mind a dice-toss of neutron stars, invisible except to theory, pulling at cold space to find its lover." This love of minds, the kind of love I'd like to think connects Megan and me is ever expanding, it prevails against gravity; it's only confine is truth. Unlike the magic which connected us in our youth, a magic limited by nature, this kind of love is eternal, it's capacity—infinite.