he left the room, the door wide open.

Conformity consisted of learning ‘how to think

for ourselves’, but we knew one another by our

oddities, while the teachers knew us for our failings.

That year, falling in love sent me stumbling backwards –

the real fall came later, when Signe took up with Ramseur,

the handsome hockey star who insisted we arm wrestle

because I could hit a ball farther than he.

My roommate, Leep, the math genius from Menlo Park,

was California cool; Arader, a Main Line Mensa

miles gloriosus; but Schiffer was pure New York.

I tried making a virtue of my virtues

but when I puzzled things out, the pieces never fit.

Prep school prepared you to succeed, but no one

prepared us for success – that was a blank

we would have to fill on our own, or not,

like Drexler’s empty room blaring ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’.

Not long ago, I heard that song again by chance

on the radio, and these memories welled up

quick – a pool in a clearing, spring-fed

and coruscating. Those pieces of the past

coalesced suddenly into a whole –

beyond the pain of nostalgia or wistfulness

for lost youth: a presence, instead, an intensity

so tensile the insight stretches out past

the instant of its moment – as when you

are perfectly happy or in complete despair.

And in the midst of it, I thought of Drexler

and wondered about that song haunting the radio,

about why he did what he did and why it affected

me so much then and now decades after.

‘Whatever happened to Drexler?’ we ask, as if

we could say what it was that had happened to us

from a point of view outside ourselves.

Two days later – no, thirty-six years later – I got

an email from Drexler reading, ‘Remember me?’