Fragment (2015)

I wanted her to hold on, to keep holding on, to refuse to let go. I wanted her to protect those letters, those mornings walking past the black iron gates and over the misty bridge, those things that I had to let go. I wanted her to keep me, keep us, even though I knew that the only part of me that she’d be able to keep were the artifacts of memory that I had so desperately created while we were together, strung together in paper and ink over lonely hours, quiet waiting, and a continent and an ocean apart.

Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she will. Maybe she won’t. Because those things are where I can’t be – can never be – I’ll never know.

I live with my own memories now. Of a quiet girl with long blonde hair who loved kisses and books and coffee and lingering breakfasts and who loved me. Of dew sparkling in the English winter morning and a hand that always found mine. Of a city that I gave up everything to return to. I have memories of all that, but what I remember most is that on our last day together, I watched snow fall through the window of her dorm room, not really understanding that all we had would melt away, not really understanding that all I would ever be able to do is look back and find that she had gone.

This is where I leave you.

That's what I said when next I saw her, two summers and two bruised hearts later, as I tried to summon the courage to say something else to mark another goodbye. I stumbled, as I always do when I speak. Here I left you, here I found you. A wanderer's words, stolen from some esoteric handbook and clumsily handed over to a girl I loved on a September morning at the end of a summer that might have otherwise been entirely owned by misery. Speech, like patience, like hope, like love, like so many other things failed me.

Poetic as that sounds, the reverse is true. I failed in speech, just as I did in patience and hope and love and so many other things.

When I kissed her on the forehead, unspoken words lodged in my throat, I realized that she was wearing the same perfume that I had carried in my jacket like a talisman next to my now-long-gone rosary. There were no words for that either and when I looked back, trying to remember lines from Orpheus, trying to remember the last time I looked back, I drowned in longing. I sat for a while on a bench, trying to find a way to rewrite, rescript, do everything that had just happened over again, but when I turned around in the crushing hope that she would still be there, waiting for me, she was nowhere to be found. 

That is where she left me. 

(Published on private blog, 2015)

When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought 

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.

- William Shakespeare, Sonnet XXX, 1-4

I don't remember the last time I lay in bed or sat at a table, stared at the face of someone I love, and drank my fill of that moment, thirsty, longing. 

The fact that I do not remember this means that it has been too long, that I have wasted days, wasted nights, wasted time doing the kinds of things that people do to distract themselves, console themselves, and delude themselves into thinking they have days, nights, and time to waste. 

It's late July. The days are long and hot, stirring disquieting reminders that wasting time is the easiest choice people make. Most people don't even realize they're making a choice. Some drink from bitter cups, some reach for whatever is nearest. 

On cool evenings, I distract myself by standing outside my apartment in Harlem, smoking a cigar, chatting with my neighbors, and watching people and cars pass by as the sun begins to disappear behind Broadway. As strangers pass by, I wonder what their lives are like, what they've sacrificed to convention, or if they, like me, delude themselves, forgetting that days turn to decades; forgetting that time eventually runs dry. 

I suffer from sidewalk crushes. Glimpses of women that inspire brief reveries of what it might be like to love them, be loved by them, and to fall into some domestic orbit, surrendering our distractions to infatuation with nary a thought of ephemerality. 

Between draws on my cigar, I think about the attractions that still simmer, the loves left undeclared, the encounters that transformed time into memory and, in just the space of a few hours or days, refreshed everything I thought I knew about love. 

Somewhere in Paris. Somewhere in Rome. Somewhere in Hollywood. Somewhere in Chicago, New York, or Washington D.C. Somewhere in those and other places are traces of the days, nights, and time that I drank to the dregs.

In savoring those traces, I remember the last time I drifted into a stranger's wild orbit, felt her fingers entwine with mine beneath a table, out of sight. I remember the spice and amber perfuming her skin, the wine-taste of her mouth, and the promise of her feral touch to transform our time into memory, into thirst, into longing.