I look at his parents and wonder about them. The softness around his father's face, extra chins and pudgy cheeks. Are those cheeks to be his a few years from now? Will he too lose his neck to the hunger of second.. possibly third chins? I look at the scowl that his father always seems to wear and wonder what he has to be so miserable about. He's rich and white with healthy productive children who are making something with their lives. He doesn't have to work another day if he doesn't care to. His mother is one of those women in their forties with tight smooth cheeks that is either the product of years and years of special care or a nip and tuck discreetly here and there so that there is no real proof that she's had any cosmetic alterations, at least not to the casual observer. An easy smile with lipstick that was in vogue in the mid-to-late seventies when she would have first become the hip modern career mother she's worked at being for all these years, proudly modeling that college degree and her middle-age successful husband who was probably a great catch back when he was in his honor fraternity. I gotta wonder if there was ever love there, if he ever made her heart flutter like their son makes mine. If she ever laid in her dorm room and stared at the ceiling rather than studying for some exam, dreaming of his kisses. Did they have dark sticky sex in the backseat of his well- worn car so as not to disturb a dormmate? Or did they wait until marriage was upon them? Do they still have sex? Or did those feelings dry up fifteen years ago when their last kid was conceived? They don't seem real to me in any way. I can't imagine them ever having lived a life like normal people. They're like characters in a book, fictional people that exist merely to move a plot along. And I hate them I think. For no good reason I suppose. But something about them and their TV personality perfection troubles me, and makes me doubt myself. I don't know why, but I know that when I look at them I don't see any reflection of myself and of this love aching in me. And it concerns me because if I can't see such things in them, then maybe he can't see such things in me. And maybe I'm a caricature to him. Broadly overdrawn and unrealistic in my behavior and actions. Because I sometimes see that reflection in his eyes, as though he's trying to fit my piece into his puzzle, not quite able to get my oddly shaped corners and connections to interlock with the things he knows to be true and real. And these realizations make me think that no matter how much I love him, no matter how much I ache, no matter how brightly this fire burns in me, none of it will ever matter. We won't be anything to one another in a year's time, that life will come and go, and I will be swept away like I've never been. But, I know the fire will still burn in me, even as he finds someone he can place in his world. Someone that he can look at and see something familliar, someone that feels the weight of his family and heritage, and can shoulder it. That person will never be me.