For "Seth," of course

I remember it as autumn—leaves falling away from the trees like books coming undone at the seams—although I do not know for sure that it was. In my memory or my translation of what it was, the triangular golden leaves of the gingko fall away, spinning, in the wind. There are persimmons of two kinds in the trees—bitter-soft and sweet-crisp. The red dragonflies have come, their iridescent wings glinting like metal shavings in the white light, and this is how I know it is autumn.

That autumn, Seth left me.

It seems so simple, put that way. There are many ways to remember this story; this is only one. Truth is multi-faceted, suggesting different light at different angles. Every story has an entire cast of storytellers. Every story is a thousand tales. This is the way I remember it:

That autumn, I was perhaps thirteen and Seth, twelve. One morning perhaps a dozen days earlier, Seth’s mother had come to our door bearing a set of ceramic bud vases like an offering. Seth’s father had taken a job at the college three hours away. They would be moving.

"Seth would have come to tell you himself," she said, her sleek dark blond hair flashing in the afternoon light. She looked at me and paused.

In that moment, of all the things I should remember, one small memory comes back to me from when we were ten and nine:

We are walking home from school one day. We are turning a corner, crossing under a pedestrian bridge that skirts a busy roadway, and Seth turns to me.

"Let’s get married someday!" he says.

Cars are whizzing by; the air is filled with the smell of fuel and dust.

I look at him, my best, best friend, Seth.

"I have to finish school first," I reply.

We understood certain things, Seth and I: the terms of mission service, in which everything has a beginning and an end, in which roots must be transplantable, adaptable. We understood the fragility of our families in this arena, and the impermanence of home. We did not set our roots down deep in a place where the nail that sticks up gets pounded down. We understood that friends were seasonal; belonging, provisional. We understood, also, each other. But these were all things we had learned.

"All beginnings are hard," Chaim Potok once wrote. In the beginning, I saw a belligerent, sandy-haired American boy born in Japan and despised the way he spoke Japanese fluently, rough and peppered with slang. He had spent all his life among people who stared at him and called him names he understood quite well. It was my first year in Japan, and I, looking quite Japanese but understanding very little of the language, and really, so little of anything at all, despised him. In the beginning, we quarreled. He did what boys do, teasing me or trying to hold my hand. I was crueler. I struck him, on one occasion or another.

Later, we would become inseparable, essential to each other.

We lived, Seth and I, at either end of the missionary compound, a row of four flat-roofed houses on a dead-end street where laundry was hung out to dry in plain sight, and children were sent out to burn trash in the fire pit across the way. Families rubbed shoulders day in and day out, and the way I remember it, everything was falling to pieces. Some days I came home from school in tears, and in the house too, there would be the scent of tears. Seth too had bruises on his heart. Mission service, like any other life, is trying. It is adventure, purpose, and calling, and it is also sometimes weariness, hopelessness, and defeat. We saw it in our parents’ faces, ate it each evening at the dinner table, slept with it, opened and closed the curtains on it.

Tensions rose. Sewers clogged. The seasons came and went, typhoons sweeping through the compound and beating it ragged at the seams. Beyond the back fence of the compound, land was turned into a massive dump from which rose pillars of smoke and the stench of uncertain toxicity. Spiders as black and round as mushrooms spun their webs among the camellia.

One day in a wild game of "Seize the Fort," Seth and I collided, and I fell to the asphalt street, my elbow scraped open to the bone. Later, he stood solemnly in the doorway of my house. He wanted to be my friend. That is how we found each other. We fell into each other’s lives with relief and remarkable ease.

On Sabbath afternoons, crowds would fill our houses, the adults sitting around tables or on the living room floor arguing and joking, the children milling about the yard and in the trees like wild monkeys. It was chaotic and noisy, a wild bartering of personal disclosures and impersonal theories. Religion, politics, the missionary life, women’s problems, the inaptitude of men, it was all up for grabs. It was the commotion from which Seth and I stole away into a friendship, profound, consuming, a poem exquisite, tragic.

We walked the length of the fence that surrounded the compound, hanging perilously to willowy stalks of wild bamboo. We hid away together, in locked rooms, in secret hideaways of bamboo and pampas grass, in the limbs of trees, while boys and girls mocked us (Seth and Sharon sitting in a tree…!) and read books and told secrets. We judged the productions of adults, found solace in words and imagined worlds, spoke in code. We knew things about each other’s families. We knew each other’s dreams. We wove recklessly, fearlessly, into each other’s hearts.

In April of the year we were eleven and ten, we stood in a river rushing with melted snow, silver eddies swirling around our waists. Seth’s father stretched his arm over us and lowered us into the water, first Seth and then me. The sacrament of baptism: this is the vow we made together.

Seasons passed in this way, seamlessly, Seth and I cemented to each other at the heart, indivisible, fortunate.

Seth’s mother pushed the box of vases into my arms. There were four of them, tiny and white, each with a flower of a different color painted on its face.

"You can take these with you when you go to academy next year." She knew I was saving up things for my dorm room. Seth’s mother turned to leave, pausing for a moment at the door.

"When we told Seth, he cried. He said he didn’t want to leave you."

The door closed quietly behind her, a ribbon of cool air untangling in the entryway.

Looking backward through the tunnel of years, I can see that we were on the threshold of adolescence, on the verge of realizing that certain things separated us from each other. We were, for example, boy and girl. By powers beyond our control, we were parted and spared the tortuous experience of a shared adolescence. We were extracted, ruthlessly and mercifully, from each other and made to walk our own paths, go our own ways.

Seth and I grew up apart, and separately, we each fell in love and married other people. Love is sacred, incontestable. I do not wish to wink at it or displace it from its rightful place—but concurrently, going back, going far, far back, to an autumn embellished with gingko leaves and dragonflies, there is also Seth, my original friend. This is also sacred, indisputable.

We write sometimes, Seth and I to each other, about those days—how everything was squeezed up against everything else in a suffocating mix, how significant and incomprehensible those years in Japan are, how one day we want to write about it—he in his way, I in mine. There are so many stories and lessons in those years. Everything I know about life perhaps came to me during those years. What I know now about our friendship is this: in fundamental, devastating ways, Seth and I became who we are because of each other; everything else has been consequences. The complexity of this truth and its particular nuances are the story that Seth and I share. He is my anchor and my reference point to this story, and I to him. I know this now.

I reach back through the veil of time and take the hand of a girl, thirteen perhaps, who has lost her first and truest friend. Hold on, I say, Don’t let go. Ahead, much farther ahead, there is life in these memories. I begin peeling back those memories and letting them float, one by one, across the years. They unfold their wings, those memories, and begin to fly, like red dragonflies flashing in the autumn light, sometimes blinding, sometimes alluring, but always, always, dancing a beautiful, heartbreaking, ineffable dance that I cannot quite follow.

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