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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness ... it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair ... in short, the period was so far like the present period . . . .
-- Charles Dickens, "A Tale of Two Cities"

     "Mark," came the voice on the other end of the phone. "What is your relationship to my daughter?"

     I couldn't answer that easily. It was a tough question, and I honestly didn't know the answer at the time. I knew that Jennifer and I had been closer than friends, closer than a brother and sister, even. But we weren't lovers. We had never been.

     I sat there on the phone stammering for a few moments. After my divorce almost six years prior, I didn't let a lot of people into my head. It was a nasty place back then. But Jennifer Wynn was completely different. I let her into my head, and later, my heart.

     We met at a coffee house in the winter of 1993. Her witty cynicism and her somewhat callous personality both infuriated and intrigued me. We instantly became hard and fast friends.
     I had a lot of things going on in my life then. I was quite depressed, really, and by summer I was well in the middle of a fairly severe nervous breakdown. I couldn't do anything to fix myself, either. My therapy, at that time, was writing. I carried a notebook around with me everywhere I went so that I could write down some of the thoughts that were spinning through my mind. And one night, Jenn looked at me sharply, grabbed my notebook from me, and wrote...

A man needs not solitude to be alone, nor alone to be lonely.

     She asked me to come and stay with her, to give me a quiet place to work out my mental situation. We had an agreement that I could stay there with her so long as I cleaned up the house and cooked occasionally. It worked out rather well. Both of us were lonely, and living in the same place with someone who was a close friend was something we both needed.
     And being lonely, it helped to have somebody to hold at night. For those few weeks, we laid together on the couch nearly every night and fell asleep holding each other. From there, it progressed such that we were actually sleeping in the same bed. Clothed, of course.

     As I mentioned, we were never lovers.

     It was more powerful than all of that. We held each other. That was all. It was a most wonderful comfort to have somebody to hold. Completely non-sexual. It kept me from clutching a pillow and crying myself to sleep as I had done for months before.

     Jenn needed to go back to Boston for Christmas and spend some time with her family. I was doing better by then, but two weeks without her still seemed like an eternity. The night she left, she held me tight, and kissed me.
     Passionately.

     That was the point where we really started to drift apart. Those two weeks, it was Hell with her not there. I wanted to ask her what that was all about, why she had kissed me, but I couldn't. And I wrote a little about it, and wondered, and, quite honestly, freaked out a helluva lot.
     That kiss ... it changed things. I was perfectly happy with us being friends. To be honest, I had really wanted to do that several times before, but I knew it wasn't a good thing to do. Everything worked against any sort of "relationship" that we might've had, the foremost being that she was a Lesbian. And it's well-worth mentioning that she was as close to being Me in a female body as I've ever met. We were so much alike, we may as well have been siblings.

     After she returned from Boston, she came home to a messy house and my shattered brain. I was angry at her for kissing me, and at the same time, I wanted her to do it again. And on the ninth of January, I woke startled and sat straight up in bed.
     "Mark," she questioned. "You've been acting weird ever since I got back. What's wrong?"
     "Nothing," I mumbled.
     "Look, asshole, you've put this wall between us and I feel like I can't even reach you. Are you in there?"
     "Somewhere," I mumbled.
     "Come on, Mark," she pleaded. "Tell me what's wrong?"
     "Why did you kiss me?"
     "To see what you would do," she replied slyly.
     My mind reeled. All of a sudden, I felt that I had been the object of some cruel trick. My anger welled, and just when I got to the point that I was going to open my mouth and say something, it all stopped. I cried.
     "It'll never work."
     I got up out of bed, packed my clothes, and left within ten minutes. I didn't say a word, nor did I listen to anything she said. I drove around until early the next morning. I realised that I was okay. I got a job, apartment, and started to live on my own again.
     After a few weeks, I was right where I needed to be. New job, new life, new everything. I called her up, to apologise, to tell her that I missed her. Rightfully, she was hurt, my leaving like I did with no contact, no explanation. She had worried, and friends shouldn't treat each other that way, I was sure. Somehow, we worked it all out, and we were back to being friends just like before.

     She graduated from her University that spring, and moved three hours away. She got a good job with the State, complained that it didn't pay enough. We talked a good bit on the phone, but saw each other more and more infrequently.
     Occasionally, I'd go out to see her or she'd come to see me, and it was like we had never been apart. We'd complain about the relationships we had just gotten out of, complain about work, get a good night's sleep and then we'd go back to getting about our lives.

     At one point, her problems became a little more severe. The woman she had been dating was apparently not good for her in the least. We stayed up late talking on the phone about it quite a bit for a few months. I always kept my opinion out of it, allowing her to vent her frustration. After a while, they broke up.
     Jenn really changed at that point. She was so different, so much less lively. She would come into town, and we'd miss each other, as I'd be working and she had to be somewhere on the other side of town. There never seemed to be enough time. She got angry with me for that a few times during 1995. So angry, in fact, that we stopped talking for nearly four months.
     After the New Year, we were back to talking occasionally on the phone. She was still so very bothered by "something." I could never figure out what was wrong, what she was thinking. It was painfully obvious that she was very depressed, and I wish I could have helped her.

     On February 15th of 1996, I knew something was wrong, as I had talked to her at some point, perhaps only a few hours before she died. But I kept putting off calling her for the next two weeks. That feeling of "impending doom" preoccupied me the whole time, but I could not bring myself to call.
     Finding out that she had died completely floored me. I became despondent. Depressed. Lonely. Hurt. Angry. So stressed that I couldn't think straight for anything. It took a long time to work through it, to be able to talk about it. At least it doesn't hurt so much any more.

     I loved her more than anything or anyone in the world. She was Family. She was my Sister.

     "Well, Fred," I stammered, trying to hold back the tears. "She was my best friend."

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