Unforgotten

I found out today that my very first private client died a couple years ago at the age of 29. I watched her funeral mass online this evening, trying to better wrap my head around her death. 

I don't plan on trying to articulate any overarching narrative about it. I'm just trying to process my shock and the pile of emails that have sharply reminded me of how intertwined strangers' lives can be, and why it is critical to choose words wisely. 

I had forgotten how much my work was an expression of care. We never met – never even spoke – but as I reviewed those emails, I realized that outside the transactional aspect of our correspondence, there was an unexpected tenderness at a particularly dark time for both of us. 

I had somehow forgotten that. I had forgotten just how sick she was, and, in the periphery of her pain, I had also forgotten how patient, how strong, and how kind. 

I had not, however, forgotten her. 

In Greek mythology, the souls of the dead were required to drink from the river Lethe (literally "forgetfulness") before they could be reincarnated. Conversely, I think death often awakens the living to the forgotten qualities –both good and bad, to be repressed or recalled as demanded by our personal temperaments – of those who've gone before us. 

So tonight, as I sit and drink grief's anti-lethean salt alongside my bourbon and stir the wellspring of memory, I remember E's light and everything she illuminated. 

How patient. How strong. How kind.

The House I Grew Up In

As I was editing a student's description of rain in an essay about her time in France, I was suddenly struck by a vivid memory – more likely an amalgam of memories, rendered into a singular image – of me as a child standing next to my mother, hastily but carefully pulling down sheets and my stepfather's shirts hanging on the clotheslines behind the house I grew up in.

I say "the house I grew up in" rather than "home" because my stepbrother sold it a few years after my stepfather died, preceded a few years earlier by my mother. To complicate things, that house, strictly speaking, ceased to exist before either of them, as they had it torn down to build what my mother envisioned as her "dream house," the kind she had always hoped to live in. When she told me about their plans, I had already been away from home for years, and if I had any feelings at all about it – though I don't think I did – I likely drowned them in scotch and Irish whiskey, like I did with all my feelings. 

What is most vivid about that memory isn't the image of either myself or my mother, but rather the clothesline itself, which until now, I had forgotten about. Standing about 5 and half feet high, it was composed of two T-bars made of 1" or 2" steel pipe facing each other about 20 feet apart. Behind them was the riverbed – usually dry until the fall and winter rains came – that separated the houses on our unpaved street from the cookie cutter condominiums in the strangely suburban subdivision that I always found sterile and foreign. There was nothing special about the clothesline, though the only two times I was stung by a bee, I was standing right next to it. It was sturdy. It served its purpose. In trying to map what part of the new house covered its old spot, I get lost in memories of the old house and the smell of grass. 

It's rare that I think about the old house: so rare that when that memory suddenly crystallized, I stopped editing and started writing this here, unsure of where it would lead or what it would connect to, but hopeful that it might take me back to the house I grew up in, or better yet, take me home. 

The Winter of My Missed Content

On a snowy day in December 2011, I spent a day with a girl and never told anyone – not a soul – about it. I know that the face of those words might seem to foreshadow some mad affair, intense fling, or seduction that left me indelibly marked, wounded, haunted by longing, but it was none of those things. The truth of it is that I remember very few details of what we did that day. The ones I do remember are less memories than they are images that anchor feelings that still feel as tender now as they did then. Unlike the affairs, flings, and seductions that colored my days when I was, in fact, haunted by longing, that day in December nourished me in a way that I still don't understand. 

Unlike those whose lives – and lips, hands, bodies, and sheets – brushed up against mine, only to disappear into wildly incompatible worlds, never to be seen again, that day was not the last time I saw her. As I think back on it now, though, I know that it was the last time I saw that version of her, the version that I had first loved desperately and immaturely in a years-long haze of gin and pain. When I met her that morning, however, it felt like I was seeing her for the first time. 

She was radiant, and I loved her differently then.

When I think about that day, I remember snow on the ground and flakes in the air. It was cold enough for gloves, because I remember her allowing her gloved hand to slip into mine – the first time I had held another person's hand in a year, maybe two – and thinking about Ben Hecht's "Snowfall in Childhood." I must have worn my trashed Barbour jacket, because it was the only jacket besides a Brooks Brothers navy blazer that I owned at the time. I definitely wore the gray Scottish cashmere scarf – my signature, saved from many bars and hotel rooms, and now retired – given to me by a girlfriend years earlier. 

Memories are always imagined. Softened, hardened, dulled, sharpened, sometimes assigned to oblivion, sometimes etched so deep that they sting at the slightest suggestion. When the weather cools and the branches on the pin oaks and sugar maples go from flickering autumn flames to exhausted winter wicks, I can all but feel her next to me. I can feel the stir of excitement that came with wanting to lose myself in those hours walking through midtown, contented with her presence. I was as certain of that moment's ephemerality as I was of its eternity; that it would linger like a kiss, a caress, a strand of hair on a cashmere scarf. I never spoke of it except in passing with her, and I never wrote about it, not even privately, for fear that allowing any of it to crystallize into words would rob all of it of its power. I was afraid for a long time of it becoming another piece of writing, even after – perhaps especially after – she married, had a daughter, divorced, and lived a life that seemed to only stay connected to mine through occasional text messages and, more rarely, letters. 

On a rainy night in December, 11 years later, she introduced me to her two-year-old daughter, who instinctively reached up to hold my hand. As I gently took it, I thought about that winter and marveled at what I imagined my life might look like in some alternate universe where I am not a vessel of fading scars and regret, nourishing me in a way I still don't understand.

I can write this now because I can admit and feel secure what I have always known: that we're connected by more than occasional text messages and rare letters, because even now, every time I see her, it feels like I am seeing her for the first time. 

She is radiant. And I love her differently now. 

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. 

Continuity

(Pixabay)

J left for two months, returned for a week, then left again. She was as good at leaving me as she was at loving me, though after the first few times, it no longer hurt the way it had the first. I missed her, but I learned that missing her came with the territory and, as such, I came to accept it. J’s leaving was — and is — simply part of how she loved me.

We had, once again, gone from talking every day to not talking at all. When she came back, it was as if we had shifted our places on some grand game board and were unable to articulate how we had landed in the spots we were in. Our attempts at catching up were colored by the fact that we were still rather painfully in love: that while parts of our lives had moved on, other parts had remained exactly where they were.

Relationships with lovers rely on an intimate continuity that doesn’t really take place anywhere else. We ask our spouse how their day has been as a force of habit because habit both requires and perpetuates continuity. What I missed most in J’s absence was the minutiae, the banal details, the in-jokes: all the things that form the secret language of friends and lovers. This language, like all languages, must be practiced with another speaker if we are ever to gain proficiency. This, too, requires and perpetuates continuity: the more you learn, the more proficient you become.

J and I immediately found fluency in each other. At times she knew my voice — in writing, in speaking, in not-writing or speaking — better than I did.

I wanted to ask her about the things I had missed, but I was fluent enough to know that she wouldn’t tell me. “It was nice catching up,” she said shortly before she left again, but I felt like I hadn’t caught up with her at all: aside from news about a pending promotion, she volunteered nothing, though a birthday and vacation had both passed in that two months of silence. At one point she alluded to shame, noting that I was unable to see the “idiocies” that she was convinced would alter my view of her. I didn’t bother pressing the issue because doing so would have made it an issue and, candidly, wouldn’t have had any effect on my feelings about her whatsoever.

The reality is that my reaction to whatever these “idiocies” were, had she chosen to disclose them, would likely have been too generous for her to endure. There’s nothing worse than having someone who is too understanding when you’re trying to engage in some deep-seated self-loathing. When you’re harshly judged, you can at least mount a defense — indignant, self-righteous — that is often enough to jar you from your existential rut. That’s not an option when someone takes the broader view — as I try to — and recognizes that people do all kinds of things and rarely have very little insights into why they do them, though the answer usually has to do with fear or the pursuit of whatever model of disappointment to which they are most accustomed. That kind of understanding — especially in the absence of an emotional reaction — can look a lot like indifference.

No one voluntarily confesses anything because they want to be met with understanding. Sometimes they confess because they want to relieve themselves of a burden. Sometimes people confess because they seek to comfort. Some confess because a confession — the divulgence of a secret — is a way of initiating intimacy: every seduction begins with a confession. Others confess because their disclosure will catalyze a conversation, highlight a problem, or generate a revelation. And sometimes people confess because they want to be punished, banished, sent away, and otherwise cut off.

But J made no such disclosures. Instead, she left only the hint, then spent most of that week checking in on me in various ways as I struggled to find things to say that wouldn’t send her running again.

J once said that she was afraid we’d end up hating each other and I never felt safe in telling her that I shared the same fear, as if expressing that fear might somehow catalyze it. Familiarity, especially in the form of proximity, can breed contempt: it doesn’t take much reflection to recall the ways a lover’s quirks can become tiresome. My understanding of this — and dread of it — has always been complicated by my fear of abandonment. Curiously, J’s departure never felt like abandonment. It felt like a kind of preservation. I sometimes speculate as to whether or not we’d have ended up hating each other or worse, boring each other, but I have come to no conclusions. We loved each other wildly and at times our passion bordered on terrifying. Would we have incinerated each other, become lost in the other? Or would that passion simply fade, as passions so often do? Would we have been able to grow alongside each other or would we come to resent each other because of the limitations that relationships place on individual lives? I am reminded of Andre Aciman’s essay “Counterintuition,” in which the author contemplates his relationship with a woman with whom he likely spends less than two weeks in total over the course of years, but whose presence lingers in the spaces in between those meetings. She reappears in various forms throughout his books and essays, under different names, but always recognizable to anyone familiar with his work. She left, but she never left him.

J left citing the same reasons to which I had grown accustomed, just as I knew she would, leaving me to try to fill in the blank spaces in our conversations and map the paths to the places we landed. Perhaps it was our closeness that did us in, perhaps we were ill-fated from the start: these were two of J’s favorite stories about us. But as I thought about it, I came to realize that her leaving and coming back also demonstrated a kind of continuity: that of a lover who has found someone to whom they can always return. There is no reason to catch up with such a person: love’s continuity is enough to overcome whatever time passes, even after you think you have moved on.

Some people enter our lives as anomalies. They are incongruent with where we are and what we are doing, but somehow create a space that doesn’t affect the rest of our life, even as it brushes against it or changes the way we see it. It can be overwhelming: at once electrifying and terrifying. The fear is that we will lose ourselves in that space or that it will expand and displace everything that contributes to our sense of self that populates our world. While it might be possible to integrate them into our lives, we realize that part of what makes them special is that they occupy this very particular space, known only to us, that allows us to live a kind of second life that is only accessible through them. The stories that you create become like a book that you never want to end. To savor it, sometimes you have to stop reading for a while. You leave and come back. Sometimes you just stop reading altogether, long after you’ve committed it to memory, long after it’s been inscribed in your heart, long after the writer has left his words imprinted on your lips.

Every Season an Apocalypse

Apocalypse, n. 
Etymology: < Latin apocalypsis, < Greek ἀποκάλυψις, noun of action < ἀποκαλύπτειν to uncover, disclose, < ἀπό off + καλύπτειν to cover.

– The Oxford English Dictionary

From now on I will make burning my aim,
From now on I will make burning my aim,
for I am like the candle: burning only makes me brighter.

– Rumi

Part of me wondered if we were playing with emotional wildfire & pretending it was candlelight. 

We wrote our own mythology, signed it with lightning and sweat and made it something new. 

I, your troubled writer. You, my dark muse, shedding old skin and trading it for new armor, always staying close enough so that we could discover each other again and again in every season, in every personal apocalypse. 

Did we meet in the fall? I don't recall what the leaves looked like on our first night together, only your scent, the sourdough taste of champagne – and later your perfumed skin – and the candlelight of our table doubling as wildfire. 

When leaves fall in autumn, they uncover the sky. 

Every kiss we share is a sweet apocalypse illuminating a singular revelation with emotional wildfire over and over again: together, we burn brighter and hotter than we could with anyone else, lighting the path to uncover other mysteries, other myths, and the strange power that comes from intermingling our dreams, sophisticated and feral, always hungry for another night.

Always and again. 

10.5.2020

Hundreds of Bodies in a Vast Unmarked Grave

 There are 438 pieces of writing on this site - 439, if you count this one - and nearly all of them are saved as drafts. I am hesitant to delete them, as they represent over a decade of personal history, and like most everything else that represents the decades of my personal history, I have no desire to engage with them.

For the Chinese bots and rare readers that stumble on this site or still visit 12 years after I started it, these pieces might as well be bodies in a single unmarked grave. You're standing on them with every visit, with no idea what they look like, what their names were, or what significance they played here. It's like looking at the ocean: you might have an idea of what lies beneath its surface... but you don't really know. 

For me, it's a bit different. I see the names, the original dates of publication, the odd cover photo here and there, and, despite the time that's passed since I wrote – and later unpublished – them, I still remember the contexts, if not the content. The contexts are invariably embarrassing, but perhaps 6 - 12 years isn't enough temporal distance to blunt their sting or perhaps I should send everything to my therapist so that we can initiate the processing that it would require to decide whether to delete them all or republish them as some tiring, vulgar Unvarnished Truth About Writing that, if nothing else, might titillate voyeuristic lovers of epistolary novels and run-on sentences. 

Either decision would require digging up these graves; digging up pieces of myself that I was relieved to finally discard. Although there always exists the possibility that I might find some minor treasure – a perfect sentence, a forgotten line of poetry – I would still see it as tarnished by context; it would be unsalvageable except as a sterile relic that other people might enjoy, but that I would cringe at. There is no reason for me to grab the shovel or cast the nets. 

At least not tonight. 

Sonnet: What to do with the dead

We do not know what to do with the dead

So they slip through the sermons and flowers,

And the freshly-sown grief and the words left unsaid 

While filling leaden seconds and hours.

They lie not in tombs, nor in the soft Earth; 

There’s no casket that’s fit for their keeping,

Remembered and mourned, awaiting rebirth

They alone have no time now for weeping.

As life fades away, depart then we must,

Hoping leaving is just a returning;

Psalms about ashes returning to dust

Tell us nothing of grief or of yearning.

The dead have only this one gift to give:

Remember death, but don’t forget to live.

Wherever I May Find Her

I don't remember exactly when I wrote this, but thought it worth republishing. Obviously.

In French, “I miss you” is rendered as tu me manques, literally “you are missing to me,” indicating a deep and permanent sense of loss. Someone — the informal, intimate tu — that was there is no longer. It doesn’t matter where they are: what matters is where they are not. They are missing to the speaker.

The verb manquer — to miss — is derived from the Latin adjective mancus, which means maimed, crippled, imperfect: mancus, in turn, comes from a Proto-Indo-European word that means “maimed in the hand:” a serious, life-changing loss of something irreplaceable, unique, and entirely personal; a part of oneself in the truest sense of the word.

If we did not so acutely feel the presence of absence — the vacuity, the emptiness — that accompanies loss, would we know that something — or someone — was missing? Unlike a phantom limb that still seems to have a shape and a place in space, to have a loved one missing to us is to experience a hollowness that is at once numbing and bafflingly agonizing. As it ossifies and becomes embedded in our lives, we might observe that it is equal parts grief, love, and nostalgia: a profound homesickness for the part of us that was once safely housed with and in our love for that person and their love for us, now somehow just out of reach.

There is another aspect, of course, to missing someone: the temporary absence of someone that does not rend so close to the bone, but instead is a bittersweet yearning. Temporary or not, when a lover is missing to us, it very often feels as though we have become unbalanced with some vital part of us going absent. The heart limps. Our beds outgrow us. Our arms feel empty. They feel remote, yet there is still some trace of them — the sound of their voice, the fading taste of their lips, their scent impressed into the pillowcases — that can make it seem as though they have only quietly slipped into another room; that they are just steps away from being found; from refilling our hearts, our beds, our arms.

Sometimes they are and we will kiss them again.

When they are not, however, the emptiness that follows becomes the ebb and flow of grief eroding the shores of our hearts until they are barren or until we learn to walk its waters without slipping or giving in to the temptation to drown.

I use the word “sense” as I would if I were referring to sight, touch, smell, taste, or hearing because loss becomes a sense just as tangible, as any of those that we use to guide our lives, and guide our lives it does, profoundly, and in ways that we may fail to discern.

The only thing we cannot lose in life is loss. It may dissolve and integrate into our lives, but it isn’t gone until we are, until we lose everything, even ourselves.

I have become familiar with another kind of longing that complicates and compounds these other vacuities of absence: I miss someone that has, of late, appeared only in dreams, but always more than a dream.

Elle me manque.

As I search for her face — spectral, haunting, unclear — in the city’s anonymous crowds, feeling her close, sensing her nearness to me, I wonder.

I wonder if her heart limps.

I wonder if her bed has outgrown her.

And I wonder if she will fold me into her arms and kiss me for the first time again when I return to her, a lover, long-missed, wherever I may find her.

Traffic, Lights

I checked the traffic on this page for the first time in nearly a year yesterday. I cannot imagine that any of the data is correct; that anyone still comes here to read anything, let alone that some stranger staying the night at a hotel in Nyack, New York read nearly every word that I've written here at 2:30 in the morning on the 4th of July. I'm less flattered than I am embarrassed. 

I suspect the traffic is made up of bots or miscellaneous clients who note the difference in domain suffix between my email address and my portfolio: a difference to which I have long been indifferent, wildly disinterested in changing. I suppose there is some small chance that actual people still read this and an even smaller chance that some people are reading this for the first time. 

This doesn't exist on any Google maps – I made sure of it – and I don't give this address to anyone. 

So, if you're here, it's because you chose to come here: not because you took an impulsive detour from the flow of your usual web traffic onto a dirt road that you had never noticed with no street lamps, no mailboxes, just a single, dim light in the front room of an otherwise dark house. 

You lost? Looking for someone? Leave your name and I'll let him know you came asking if I see him around. Sure, you can go to the end of this road if you want, but you're just going to have to come back the way you came: there's no way back out to the highways and lit streets but the way you came in. This road wasn't made for traffic and it certainly was not made to be a shortcut or a detour. 

Like I said, no one comes here anymore unless they choose to and I cannot speak for anyone's choices, especially those made insomniacs haunted by God-knows-what in a hotel next to a graveyard in Nyack. 

Anyway, traveler. I'll leave you to it. Stay as long as you like or leave as quickly as you came. 

This is where I've parked my dreams. I'll come back for them eventually. 

That light will stay on: tend them if you like. 

Paris L'hiver. Part 3: Sophia

When I awoke, she was draped across my body, one leg over mine, bathed by a single blade of sunlight that cut through the crack in the drapes that I remember her drawing before we fell into the pillowed folds of the bedding.

She was awake, watching me with sleep-soft eyes, her fingers tracing slow figure-eights on my chest. I remember how she had let down her hair the night before as she undressed; how the click of the door of closing behind us suddenly transformed her crystalline remoteness into something vulnerable, desirous, and hungering for closeness: all the things that had I had come to Paris to escape and still found on every boulevard and behind every brasserie window. 

"You're thinking again," she said, drawing me closer with her leg. "Stop thinking."

She had said the same thing a few hours earlier. 

Stop thinking. Just be mine. 

She had come to my small table the night before and stopped, waiting for me to stand. I had seen her double-kiss the woman with whom she had entered and who then left, and when she stood up with her glass, I assumed she was leaving. I had already started thinking about what I would write about her when she appeared, offering me her gloved hand. 

Although I recognized the gesture, I suddenly felt like an American Eugene Rastignac: provincial and stupid, sorely underdressed, and likely to make a fool of himself. 

Somehow I didn't. I stood up, gently took her hand, and leaning forward in a slight bow, kissed the top of her fingers. She smiled. 

"Mademoiselle. S'il vous plait." I gestured to the chair in front of me. She sat down, placing her drink on the table. A waiter, who had been watching her the whole time, slid in, refilled her glass, and then evaporated at her nod.  

"It's stupid, I know," she said. "but appearances and everything." 

"No, it's... fine." 

The bouquet of her perfume – violets, ambergris, sandalwood, vanilla – lingered over us as I tried to sort out who, exactly, she thought I was... or who she was. 

She registered my hesitation and looked amused. "Do you know who I am?"

I had absolutely no idea. 

"No, I'm sorry, I don't."

She smiled that perfect smile again, lips like garnets or the bruised flesh of a peach. 

"Good." 

At least Rastignac would've had someone – a Madame de Beauséant, a Vautrin – to point her out and whisper her name and station when she walked in. 

"I'm K.S. Anthony. Enchanté." 

"Hello, K.S. Anthony. I'm Sophia."

Her name was not Sophia, but at some point between that moment and when she left two days later for Monaco, I promised that I would never name her, that no one would ever believe me, and that I would probably never be able to write about her anyway. 

We talked. We drank. We talked. Somewhere in the pauses that were filled with my staring at her, she said "I want you to stay with me tonight." 

Now here I was. 

"Stop thinking." She kissed me, her mouth as wet as mine was dry, and I could taste her lipstick and the toast and lemon of the night's champagne, an open bottle of which was still sitting in an ice bucket on the desk near the bed. "Just enjoy this."

We spent the morning in bed, making love and drinking. Her phone never once beeped or rang and I remember being amazed at her total lack of interest in it, at how wealth and power can afford one the greatest luxury of all: time. It was completely foreign to me. 

"You don't have to be anywhere?" I asked. 

"Only here. With you. With my writer." 

"I like that."

"Me too. I wish we could stay here, together, in this room." As soon as those words left her mouth, something changed. She suddenly began to recrystallize as the impossibility of that descended on us. 

"Why can't we?" I sat up, pulling her closer, trying to chip away at the forming ice.

Her station came with its own set of rules, obligations, and expectations – burdens, all – that followed social lines that had been in place long before either of us were born. Even if I were to suddenly become  wealthy, I would have little access: new money does not grant one anything but new privilege. While capital can buy many things, including the appearance - and some forms – of social capital, it doesn't buy a new birthright. Unlike Rastignac, Jay Gatsby's greatest sin wasn't the obviousness of his ambition: it was the fact that he never realized that he was little more than a novelty for Daisy Buchanan. Rastignac succeeded with contempt and the aid of a criminal, not flattery. Those social lines conceal a part of wealth and power that most people never fully see: a different kind of desperate striving that aims to eliminate despair and a lack of real agency and self-determination. In trying to escape, the rich self-destruct just as stupidly as the poor: they just do it with better drugs, including marriage. 

"You know why," she said, softening against me, her breathing matching mine. "This is all we're allowed." 

Late that evening, we walked along the Seine. She traded her gown for jeans and a coat, her hair concealed under a cashmere knit cap, and still held my hand despite people occasionally seeming to recognize her in the night. At one point we stopped to stare at the Eiffel Tower and the lights on the water.

"You know," she said, not looking at me, "if I were anyone else, I would fall in love with you. Like all the women you write about. And then I would just be one more of them."

"That assumes a point of view that we don't have. There's just too much there, too many possibilities. Maybe we would have never met. Maybe you would have hated me. Besides, you've known me for a day: what makes you think you would fall in love with me?"

"What makes you think I'm not already?" 

"Because I'm a novelty. I'm a crush, at best. You've already said this is all we're allowed. It's easy to say that you're in love when you know it's impossible. Maybe that's when it's easiest, because there's nothing really at risk."

"You're wrong. I will always love you. You make me want to risk everything."

I didn't know what to do with any of that, but I especially didn't know what to do with the second sentence, which left me unguarded and threatened by the specter of loving her back and suffering for it more than I knew that I would. I opted for a half-assed attempt at reason: ironic, given my usual disdain for reason in the face of passion. 

"I don't think you'd be very happy with me."

"What do you know about what I would be happy with?" There was anger there - frustration - but I couldn't tell if she was angry at me or the world. 

"I don't. That's just it." 

"I hate that someone else will eventually have you, that you'll forget me, or that I'll just be some other girl in your fucking writing. You don't want me to love you. You want to be loved by strangers." 

Experience has taught me that it is pointless to try to argue that point in Paris, New York, London, or anywhere else on the planet once anyone has read anything I've written. The evidence doesn't do me any favors, though I maintain that everything is far more complicated than what can be captured in a few hundred words. 

It's senseless to read anyone's writing and conflate it with intimacy; with knowing the writer, and yet perhaps that's what she was getting at: the thesis that I use my writing as a wall to separate myself from the absolute terror of being vulnerable enough to be known. 

Maybe that analysis worked for her. 

Still, she was wrong. I wanted her to love me. I just knew that even if she could and even if she did, a dearth of affection wasn't the problem that separated us. Unlike every other woman in my life, the obstacles were not primarily psychological or temporal: they were social monoliths that neither of us were positioned to surmount. If she had lived on the other side of Central Park, we might have had a chance, but hers was a world so far removed from American conventions of wealth and class that it didn't even sneer at the Upper East Side: it just didn't think about it at all. There was no invitation past that night that she could extend that would not have to be rescinded. 

"I hate that eventually I'm going to see your marriage as a trending topic on fucking Twitter one of these days. At least I'll be out of sight, out of mind for you."

"More like my divorce," she laughed. 

"That too." 

"Maybe that will be what you write about me: 'Divorced.'"

"'Disengaged' would be a better title."

"I'm not engaged."

No, not yet, I thought. 

"I know," I said. "I'm glad." 

"You'll never be out of mind for me. Even when you belong to someone else." It was the kind of thing someone would say to a writer if they wanted them to write it down later. Of course, I did.

She kissed me and we began the walk back to Place Vendôme in silence.

"Stay again tonight," she said when we got to her suite. "I want to fall asleep with you inside me."

I don't think that staying was a mistake or that I regret it, but I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't have been better if I had just left her outside the Ritz that night, if that by trying to capture what we both knew would have to be released, we may have set in motion some patterns that would echo for both of us. 

I started writing about her shortly after I got back to America, then stopped, afraid to continue, afraid to write her back into my reality, afraid that writing about her might put an end to our story, even though I never heard from her again. I never told anyone about Sophia and I never intended to. 

I have realized that – and if you are reading this, J, I hope you'll understand – what has echoed and continues to echo in the years since I met her is that throughout my life I've released too many chances at love and at being loved back into the wild, opting instead to be loved by strangers, cutting myself off from the world with seas of gin and walls of words, carefully arranged to give those who leave the illusion that they are the ones who are leaving. 

That analysis works for me, at least for now. 

As she rested on me that night, I could feel my heart start to race, panicked by the realization that she'd be leaving the next day and that I would never see her again, never touch her again, never hear her voice again. She shifted to kiss me again, dulling my thoughts and walling our tangled bodies off from the world that lay just outside in the sodium glow of the square with a single phrase that has haunted me in every place it has echoed ever since.

I will always love you. 

When I awoke, she was draped across my body, one leg over mine, bathed by a single blade of sunlight that cut through my life and has never faded. 

And that – always – was all we were allowed. 

Part 1

Part 2

Lost and Found

(Originally written May 2010)

Je ne peut pas dormir. 

I laid awake, despite my burning eyes and aching muscles, and listened to the wash of traffic outside, hoping to smell the sea carried in over salt-thick screens on soft wind. For a moment, I did. 

I realized that my bed is positioned in my bedroom in nearly the exact way it was when I was a child--feet towards the closet, door to my right, window to my left--so for a moment, I felt like I was in a place that hasn't existed for the last 10 years or so. 

I don't remember the last time I slept in what I thought of as my room. Even my memories of the time I spent in the house that was rebuilt on that property are beginning to fade. I wonder what is already lost to memory. I wonder what I have forgotten. I wonder what will be the next to go. Faces. Names. Old phone numbers. Bits of poems. Voices. First kisses. Last kisses. 

These are things that matter to me: not the faceless voices of spouting rhetoric, not the saviors that I never asked for, not the salvation I don't want, and not the revolution or the bumper sticker that goes with it. 

Give me the feeling of wet sand and cool water and the windward breeze that makes the jungle whisper. 

Give me the smell of a gas stove and honeysuckle and roses in the Oakland hills. 

Give me the things that fade; the things that we pretend will last forever: friendships, loved ones, lost ones. 

Give me the things that slip into the vacuum of time. 

When I was about 3 years old, my mother gave me a coffee can filled with cats-eye marbles for Christmas. I was less interested in the marbles than the can, which she had decorated with contact paper and a ribbon. I liked the sound that the marbles made: it sounded uniform, neat, resonant: not at all chaotic or disorderly. It reminded me of people walking or of gravel. 

I have not seen marbles like that in at least twenty years. They are somewhere out there. Buried in a yard. Lost in a landfill. Somewhere with a thousand other lost things taken for granted and snuck away by time: letters, pillowcases, paperbacks, wrapping paper. 

School pictures and the day that you were sent off with freshly brushed hair and an order form for 8x10s and wallet sizes. The shirt you wore the first time you fell in love and the day she said she just wanted to be friends. Pieces of jewelry and all the awkward ways that it was given to you. Napkins with traces of lipstick. Phone numbers you wished you had called. Potential lovers, forgotten friends, strangers who stayed strangers. 

Things you are glad to have forgotten. Things you promised you never would forget. 

They are all out there somewhere. And sometimes, as you lie awake at 2am, they find their way back to you in the soft glow of a streetlight and the faintest scent of the perfume of the sea, as perfect as a marble, as perfect as memory: happy to be home again; happy to bring you home again.

Sweet (2002)

Note: I wrote this in 2002. I finally threw a soft edit at it this year when it resurfaced: I had asked the site that carried this and some other early pieces to delete them about ten years ago, but they asked to republish, which I reluctantly agreed to. I'm still ambivalent about it, but I don't think it's a bad piece of writing: just green... as I was when I was 17. 

I was 17 when I first dreamt of Elke.

I dreamt I was alone on a train but acutely aware of a girl I could not see sitting behind me: try as I might to turn to face her, I could not force myself to turn around. I woke with a feeling of vague uneasiness that lingered for the rest of the day and haunted me before I went to bed that night. Two more restless nights passed with the same dream, and the same strange feeling that unsteadied me the next day. As much as I tried to put her out of my head, I could not.

The fourth night was different. As soon as I felt her, I turned as easily in my dream as I might turn to you if you were sitting beside me, to face her.

She was a girl about my age and beautiful. Her skin, as I would later write in my journal, was like porcelain and her eyes pale blue. Her face was framed with golden hair, fine as silk, and I remember thinking that there was something about her that reminded me of pictures I had seen of wheat fields in Europe. I managed to say hello and she replied in kind, seemingly as curious about me as I was about her. I cannot remember if we said anything or conversed as the train sped on, but I do know that I asked her name, to which she replied, in a voice that I still remember, “Sweet.”

I woke the next morning longing for someone that I knew existed only in my dreams, but for whom I felt this inarticulable desire. I missed her: this girl I did not know, this girl that I had seen in the simultaneously closest and furthest place imaginable: in a dream. I went to bed early the next night, hoping to see her. Instead, I dreamt of nothing. I moped through the next few days, telling no one, and hoping to dream of her again.

I did not. As the spring dragged on that year, I eventually stopped missing her, though her face was never far from my mind.

I spent that summer with my brother and his then-wife in San Francisco. The temperature was much milder than my home climate, and I took advantage of its graces. I spent most of my time alone in cafes, happy to read voraciously and drink coffee with similar zeal. My sister-in-law was teaching ESL at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, a small town south of the city. Growing bored with my routine of solitary caffeine consumption and dollar matinee films at the Strand, I decided, one day, to go with her. The drive was pleasant, usually about 45 minutes, and the campus was much smaller than its name suggested. It sat, as far as I can remember, on a hill covered with pines, adolescent redwoods, and other trees. That summer, the air was crisp and cool, fragrant with honeyed eucalyptus and the tang of evergreens. There was a tiny cafe down a winding road, and several small gardens lined with various flowers in the brilliant reds, purples, and yellows of July, as well as cast iron and stone benches. It was a nice bit of relief from the city to walk this area with my thoughts uninterrupted, save for the chirping sparrows or the flurried of leaves and dirt from squirrels – still a novelty to me – gathering food. I'd walk around observing the world and then meet my sister-in-law in time to sit in on her class.

I first saw her during the second class.

The sounds of the other students laughing and talking in a variety of European tongues dulled to an almost inaudible mumble, and I felt my heart begin to race, then suddenly slow and ache with a familiar longing.

Sitting there was Sweet.

She wasn't joined in conversation with any of the other students, though she sat with the small faction of German students. She sat quietly, reading a book, hair slightly covering her eyes, which were indeed the same soft, pale blue as the cloudless skies. I did not think it was her: I knew it was her.

What would you say if you met someone in real life that you had known in a dream? Would you feel some assurance that they, too, must've known you in their nocturnal life? I felt no such assurance. I knew only that I had to say something and that the sooner I did, the sooner I might be able to make some sense out of all of it.

At 17, I had no talent for talking to girls that I didn’t know. So, I said nothing at all to her that day. The next day didn’t really leave me any openings, either. Neither did the day after that. While dream me had the courage that I did not, she spoke so little – to anyone – that I wasn’t at all sure she even wanted to be spoken to. I didn’t even know her name.

I still remember how badly I wanted to talk to her, how it felt as though my heart could burst. Anyone who has ever had a crush knows the mixture of apprehension and fascination, the longing and reticence, and the fevered restlessness that accompanies these pangs of adolescent love. I can still feel those traces of that longing some 30 years later, faint creases on my heart's palimpsest.

I don't recall exactly how I came to talk to her. I had tried to coolly watch her on the previous days as she walked, sat, and read, always by herself, always with a soft smile whenever she caught me looking, which, to my mortification, was often. I was walking along a trail on the campus one afternoon, plotting my next move (or lack thereof) when she crossed my path. Some awkward teenage small talk took place, and I’m sure I desperately tried to sound collected and casual, though I can't see how I managed to say anything with my tongue tied in knots. Pleasantries aside, we ended up walking together in relative silence, though not the silence of people not knowing what to say next, nor the pained silence of two people who want badly to find a reason to part company. Instead, it was the perfect silence of two people simply enjoying each other's company, the warmth of summer and the electric glow that comes when a human circuit is finally completed.

As we exited the trail, I managed to introduce myself and ask her name. Her answer was humbling.

Elke Bitter.

It was serendipitous that what was Sweet in one world should be Bitter in another. That day was perfect. She was two years older than I, from West Germany, and was studying in California before entering university in her homeland in the fall. We discussed Hesse's Demian, German authors, and everything else I could think of to extend our conversation. We bought coffee and sat for an hour in one of the gardens, surrounded by violets on an emerald carpet of grass, talking and exploring the connection that had been, perhaps divinely, made. I don't recall going home or anything else about that day. The only things I can remember are her eyes and those hours.

I spent the next few days with Elke on campus, drinking coffee and stealing more time over conversation and walks. I never so much as kissed her, felt the touch of her hand only once, but I was content. Ours was a perfect world unto itself.

She left a few weeks later. The last day we spent was much like the first. A comfortable silence only mildly burdened by her imminent departure. When the day ended and we said goodbye, I knew that the dream was breaking anew; that it would be the last time I saw her. I was thankful for having seen her at all. She wrote me once when she got home and I wrote back, but that was after the end.

I thought about Elke long after that summer ended, but never dreamt of her or heard from her again. I still think of her from time to time, especially on days with clear, pale skies when the air is thin and perfumed with eucalyptus and pine, soft, aching, and sweet.

In Praise of Flings

Occasionally I write an essay that I just like, even if I don't really believe altogether...even if I think of myself as being more of an unreliable narrator than usual. I'll either just like the flow or the voice or a combination of both.

This was written for a class on the personal essay taken in November 2010. The text, including the note at the end, is the original. (Originally published 11/02/2010)

I sometimes think that I have loved best those who I have loved least: the women who I’ve had flings with, the women who never knew me. I am not talking about the vulgar rutting of drunken hook-ups, mind you. Hook-ups imply a certain coarseness that I avoid. No, the women with whom I have had flings were loved, if only briefly. And perhaps because it was so briefly that I can say that I loved them best. I did not burden them by giving them all my heart, but that did not stop me from giving them all of my adoring attention.

            In a relationship, passion eventually subsides. Eros gives way to subtler things. Subtler things succumb to the weight of the mundane and couples, despite their protestations and promises to the contrary, begin taking each other for granted. Every couple thinks they are the exception to this rule, but every couple recognizes this as a rule. “We’ll never be like that,” they say to each other and their friends reassuringly, but in a year or two or three or even less…they’re arguing over whose turn it is to take out the dog or who forgot to pay the fucking cable bill again or why the hell they hang out with that idiot and drink so much. It happens. It’s always sad when it does, but it happens. It’s not that everything goes to Hell all at once or that people shift gears and remain that way, but let’s face it…the passion is the first to go. And why shouldn’t it? You’ve got them, right? He’s not going to find anyone better than you, right? And she sure as Hell better not step out on you or else…right? Sure, you’re not just an option. Not just a choice. Nope. No…they would never…perish the thought!

            In a fling, the passion is all there is: two strangers absolutely and very simply desiring each other. Nothing else is expected or even wanted. Sometimes this lust emerges from some other desire. I love how you think. But sometimes it is very simply a glance on the sidewalk of a strange city, or a smile in a hotel lobby, or just a chance meeting with a stranger. I am not sure it matters what lights the fuse. Once it is lit, there is no turning back. Desire has a force of its own.

            When a relationship is new; when love is burgeoning, the entire world seems new. This feeling is a neuro-chemical effect, yes, but that does not detract from its power to intoxicate, to free us from the mundane, to liberate us from the personas that we must adopt in order to keep the peace, to maintain stability, to get along. Flings are everything wonderful about those first precious days or weeks or months, distilled into a matter of hours or a long weekend. Rather than end in a break-up or a screaming argument in front some awful restaurant where you’ve had your last sullen meal, a fling ends in a long glance back over your shoulder as your lover disappears into a crowd or a final kiss at the airport, your clothes still slightly askew. Better than that though, a fling leaves you with a feeling of possibility.  If it is possible to meet and love a perfect stranger, even if only for a day or two, what else might be possible? What else have you been overlooking in your life? What else can you do?

            Detractors will say that it cannot be love if it’s a stranger during a fling that you’re talking about, but I disagree. Chemically, there’s no difference. The brain doesn’t know any, that’s for certain. Dopamine floods the DA receptors. Serotonin levels diminish to obsessive levels, making it possible to pay attention to every new square inch of unmapped warm skin, still hot from a shower or just freed from rain-damp clothes. Oxytocin flows, adrenaline lights a fever, and everything comes alive in a chemical explosion of perfection, of longing, of wanting, of yes and yes and yes and yes. All of that without Monday morning combat over burnt toast and overcooked eggs? Yes, please. All of that with room service, cold champagne, and someone who’ll never see you at your worst? Sign me up.

            Sadly, it would be foolish and slightly ridiculous to attempt to go through life simply having flings. If you’re a man, eventually your friends and family will wonder when you’re going to grow up. If you’re a woman, you’ll suffer from the ignominious sexual double standard that marks you with the scarlet letter S. And in either case, eventually you’ll want something more permanent, something more stable. There’s plenty to be said for the madness of exhausting, sweaty, stocking-tearing, shirt-ripping, ecstasy-inducing, wall-shaking, neighbor-annoying sex, but there’s more to be said for it when it’s with someone who cares if you come home at night; who texts you to let you know they’re thinking of you at work, and who knows how you like your coffee.

            There’s plenty to be said for the security of having someone with whom you can grow old with; with whom you can raise a family, with whom you can see life’s troubles and triumphs with. Joy is exponentially more joyous when you can share it with someone, even if they occasionally hate you. Life is simply more fun when you have someone who knows you, who allows you your faults and quirks, and whose faults and quirks you have learned to love as part of something greater, something sweeter.

            Flings are fun, yes. But they are better, perhaps, as something remembered from the safety of a pair of arms that will not let you go, even for a glance from a perfect stranger. I may not have not always loved those best, but I have always loved them most. 


Author's note to friends and family: I will probably never grow up and settle down.  

Bittersweet

(Originally published 12/18/10)

There aren't enough words like "bittersweet."

There aren't enough words to describe the warm sigh of longing that creeps up from the pit of your stomach and pounds like a runner's heartbeat in your chest.

There aren't enough words to describe what it feels like to feel something and not be able to express it. There aren't enough words to describe what it's like to be wordless.

There aren't enough words to describe what it feels like when all you smell is the cold, raw salt of the ocean and her shampoo because it's 9pm and she's snuck out of the house to hold your hand and you absolutely cannot bear to go home yet. Absolutely. Cannot.

There aren't enough words to describe what it feels like have I love you locked down in a cage in your throat. Presque vu doesn't work. L'espirit d'escalier might come close, when the curtains draw shut and the lights go out and the shadow crosses into night. The light under the door goes out with a click. You're alone.

There aren't enough words to say goodbye when you don't want to. That's why they drag out. That's why there's no eye contact. That's why they stand at the top of the stairs and you don't look back.

There aren't enough words to say I'm sorry I wasn't around to catch you when you fell.

There aren't enough words to describe being in a place where you can see what seems like every star, though words like "gratitude" and "awe" scratch the surface.

There aren't enough words for love letters written with no. 2 pencils and expertly folded into high school works of art and unfolded into drama that feels like it will never stop making you weak.

There aren't enough words to describe what it feels like to be on needles and pins waiting for the letter to arrive, the phone to ring, the text message to sound...or to describe the sore, sharp frustration when it's never the person who you want to hear from.

There aren't enough words to break the tension in a hospital waiting room.

There aren't enough words to make sense out of the suckerpunch that takes the wind out of you the first time you hear someone tell you they love you.

There aren't enough words when you're manic, stacking words on top of each other, struggling to keep control, clenching the wheel, gritting your teeth, and trying to avoid crossing the median into the oncoming traffic of psychosis.

Mostly though, there just aren't enough words like bittersweet. Especially for people who mean to ply their craft and trade in words.

Friends For Life

(Originally published July 15, 2012) 

I had a friend in high school that I used to run around and get into trouble with. No surprise there: that was the reason for having friends and probably still is. We'd drink, drive fast, consume questionable amounts of questionable substances, and then pass out, usually after miraculously returning to his house and watching some crappy movie for the 500th time. We played in a godawful punk band together. We were close. Really close.

What I remember most about him was that we continuously promised--in the way that only drunks and 16 year olds getting drunk can promise--that we'd be "friends for life." At some point after the 15th Budweiser or the second pint of rum, chased with Coca-Cola in a parking lot or a park, we'd swear it: friends for life.

The last time I saw him, the conversation, while having sparks of our old camaraderie, seemed a bit awkward, strained; too-polite. We were still friends, yes, but that bond had grown transparent, stretched thin by time and distance. I haven't spoken to him in years. I scarcely know what he's doing now. I don't know what we'd talk about now. The old times are just that: old. There's little point in rehashing them except for the sake of stale sentimentality and forced nostalgia. The life of our friendship for life seems to have more or less expired.

"Friends for life" is just one of the scores of illusions that must eventually surrender to reality, but of the lot, it's a relatively benign fantasy, like thinking oneself capable of starting a revolution or making the world a better place or any other college essay topic that should never be committed to paper. Far worse is the idea that one knows more than one knows: the absurd melodramatic adolescent world-weariness that, unfortunately, is often allowed to exist long after its expiration date. Any American over the age of 18 who has ever written about "their soul" can be said to display symptoms of this. Nobody--and I mean nobody--gives a rusty fuck about your soul, except, perhaps, psychotherapists who'll happily listen to you rattle on for as long as you like on the subject while inwardly rolling their eyes and charging you by the minute. Friends for life at least suggests real sincerity between two people. That's worth more than a million imagined revolutions.

What nobody tells you when you're 16 and swearing friendships for life is that you live dozens of lives when you're alive. No one lives just one life: not even the most boring of people. The life I had then is incompatible with the one I have now. I am geographically distant, but more so than that, my heart is simply no longer in the same place. I am not my 16-year-old self anymore.

That doesn't mean I've changed all that much. It simply means that my priorities have shifted. My considerable frustration with the world hasn't decreased: it's matured. I no longer have any fantasies of ruling or changing the world. I simply want to keep its ugliness as far from me as possible. Nostalgia holds no real draw for me except, perhaps, as a literary tool: I'm quite happy to keep my past in the past. That may seem irreconcilable with my tendency toward "golden-age thinking," but I never had any illusions that my childhood or adolescence were idyllic or that I was living in the "best years" of my life.

None of this negates the lifetime friendships I've had. Lives within lives end. They meet little deaths that, like all deaths, we may feel acutely at first but eventually become accustomed to and learn to accept as new lives flourish in their receding shadows. It's notable that the friendships that remain clearest to me are the ones I've had with people who have actually died: the ones whom death has polished with the illusion of perfection and wiped free of all blemish, all real humanity in all of its awkward imperfection. When our friends die, we too, drink from the waters of Lethe and forget the past as it actually was.

I don't look back to those days of stupid mistakes and bad ideas with any kind of sentimentality, nor do I judge them as terrifically idiotic. They just remain details that, for me, seem to have lost their richness and hue, having paled under other experiences; other lives. 

Toaster Breakups and the Theatre of the Banal.

(Originally written/published 04/07/2013 8:41 PM)

My first "serious" girlfriend and I broke up over a toaster.

I don't remember what, if any, the argument was or even if the argument was about a toaster, toast, or anything toast-related, but I remember looking at the toaster in her kitchen and thinking to myself "we're breaking up over a toaster." That is what the memory, now faint, is anchored to: an image of a toaster and the hazy recollection of one of those fights where one of the combatants begins laughing because of the sheer absurdity of the battle, because of the realization that the fight is not at all about what the pretense is, because of the realization that all fights with people we're in relationships with can be boiled down to stupid minutiae that point to larger misunderstandings, ever-widening gaps in communication and momentum that starts to drag thanks to the dulling power of unmet expectations. 

As a relationship decays, the final stage is absurdity. All you can do is laugh. 

The fight in the kitchen was poorly acted drama and my laughter kicked down the fourth wall. It was the umpteenth break-up and at that point, I simply didn't care. We often force ourselves to pretend to care about things we don't feel all that strongly about. All feelings are, at their core, feelings of ambivalence. Nothing new there. 

Still, there is the toaster: the object of indifference. The silent bystander. The man on the street uninvested in the two people arguing loudly in front of a restaurant or in a parking lot where their voices echo and sound like metal.

I've had other toasters since then and all of them remind me of this. That's not to say I am emotionally invested in them. I'm not. Occasionally, however, I'll be cleaning out the crumbs or making toast and I'll think about that fight and how the retrieval of memory alters it a tiny bit every time. Sometimes it is a toaster oven. Other times it's a plain white or chrome toaster: two slots for bread and an internal timer sensitive to people manually popping the toast up before its allotted time. 

Don't pour any meaning into the crumbs or the idea of timing. I'm talking about toast. There's no larger metaphor. Like the break-up, this is not an essay with high stakes.

I moved to California less than a year after the break-up. Like or unlike a lot of young people who leave home,  once I left, I stayed gone. My next break-up was far less dramatic: I was in a relationship with someone I liked but didn't love and who became more annoying and less attractive to me every day. 

The next one was more dramatic: more bad theatre. As were the ones that followed.

Maybe that's a smug re-imagining of the narrative--I'm sure it is, actually--but I'm also pretty sure I know bad theatre when I see it. 

The tropes are all there. I once wrote a list of all the reasons people give when they break up. It took up several napkins. Unfortunately, I lost them or used them as napkins or, more likely, realized that even reducing everything to a series of acknowledged (or not) clichés doesn't prevent one from having to participate in them or their enactment.

This has come up in my History of the European Novel class lately. It ruined Flaubert for me.

Among the tropes were the obvious:

"It's not you, it's me."

"I'm just not ready to be in a relationship yet."

"I love you, but I'm not in love with you."

"I love you as a friend, but..."

"I always drive people away..."

"I need someone that can/will..."

"We're not good for each other: this is unhealthy..."

"It's not you, it's me..."

"I want to see other people..."

"You deserve someone better..."

"We're just too different..."

and the slightly-less obvious:

"I'm allergic to your pet."

"I've just been cast in a movie out in Hollywood/New York"

"I've just inherited a castle in Scotland."

and so on. 

I don't remember which one was invoked during the toaster episode or, really, any of the ones that came after. They're not always singular. They're often combined. The person leaving often wants to seem magnanimous and kind, as if they're doing the other a favor. The person being left often wants to take up the cross and ask why they have been forsaken. The variations on "why" often contain elements of martyrdom:

"I wouldn't have done this to you..."

"How could you have..."

"You'll never do better than me..."

"This will come back to haunt you..."

etc. etc. Anger is concealed. The bruised ego swells to Christ-sized proportions. The leaver shrugs and leaves and the one who is left can't believe their one and only isn't listening to them rage against what invariably amounts to

1) An incompatibility of personal neuroses. 

2) A matter of choice. 

I've uttered variations on both sides of these dull dramas. So have you. So has everyone. They're a permanent part of the social matrix. Break-ups don't take place on on some exciting futurist stage: they take place in the theatre of the banal. Expired domesticity curdles into sludge. It doesn't ferment into wine. It's not even the opposite of the agitated, unsure excitement of new love. That, too, is prone to bad, equally banal theatre of its own and attaches itself to things just as surely as break-ups do: one reason why couples that break up tend to avoid places and things that they associate with the dead relationship until the context for those places and things eventually frees itself from the association. Again, nothing new here. 

Toasters eventually become toasters once the curtain closes, once the fire dies down, once the screaming match ends and the names fade to the past tense: when the is becomes was. There are few, if any, props all that are all that interesting on the stage of the banal. Occasionally someone does something ugly and it splatters the headlines, but there's really nothing new or shocking or of any interest to whatever indifferent power pushes the show along, scripting the highs and lows of couples in turmoil, singles in transition, the world on its axis. Blood and ink dry quickly. The audience moves on. No one is surprised. 

On the stage of banality, there's just a dull, scripted humanity that we share with people we either recognize or decide are nothing like us...and who make the same choices about us. Dress it up in labels. Apply significance where you see fit. Make fundamental attribution errors. Rewrite it. There's not much happening on stage: you might as well amuse yourself by embedding meaning where you might otherwise just embed sliced bread. 

The answer to the question "why" isn't answerable when it comes to asking people about their motivations. I don't think people really know why they do anything they do. The answer, despite whatever transient value we place on it in relation to our outrage, our heartache, our joy, or our bliss, might as well be a toaster.

Sweet Impossibilities: "Engaged"

(Originally published 4/22/14 530AM)

"The best women," I once wrote, "leave at three in the morning." I didn't mean to sound crass, though I wouldn't blame anyone for reading arrogance into it. I wrote it just after 3am one morning; just after a woman left me alone with a half empty bottle of '98 Duval-Leroy half-afloat in a bucket of melted ice. I had waited for her that night, unsure if she'd come and see me. And she did. Out into the cold night, wearing jeans and a sweater.

She was wounded by a breakup. I was bruised by an embarrassing misreading of the pulse of a fling, the sharp sting of rejection. She made me promise that if I ever wrote about her, I would call her Ophelia.

We took refuge in a friendship that blossomed after summer. Eventually, it gave way to curiosity, affection, and the first glimpse of newness. Then 3am came and I knew she was still hurt; still thinking of someone else's touch. I realized that Ophelia could not kiss me, not then, and be lost in the same place I was. And so she left, leaving no trace, not even a taste left on a glass, a reminder of the bittersweet impossibility.

I was profoundly sad when I met her for coffee the next morning. I was in love and she was saying goodbye. Or perhaps I only thought I was in love. Perhaps I wanted to be in love with someone who could not possibly love me so as to not have to deal with the reality of having to love someone or something possible. 

It is easy to love the impossible because the impossible can never disappoint you...and you can never disappoint it.

That doesn't make it untrue. That doesn't make it not love.

I never went back to where we met. It will always be the city where she left me at 3 am, the city of a wobbly table and her hands and the end of fall. I leave it there, untouched, in an eternal November, an eternal impossibility. She left a few months later. I cannot imagine that there is anything there that would remind her of me.

We lived in the same city for a few years, but never spoke, never saw each other. We never met for drinks. We never texted. I never ran into her by chance coming out of the deli or buying a bottle of wine for an apartment warming party. I emailed an apology once, just in case I had done something wrong. Sometimes I think we apologize simply because silence becomes unbearable. Should I never have kissed her? Should I have asked her to stay? Should we have had another martini at dinner or not had martinis at dinner? She replied in the gentle, even, archaically agreeable way that she had always replied to my emails and she did her best to thin whatever residual shame I had in losing a friend in an attempt to find something more where nothing more could exist. It had nothing to do with me, she wrote. I wrote back, but after that, I never heard from her again.

I think of her now only because, in a way, I am where I am because of her. The day she said goodbye, I sat at a desk in the hotel and I wrote "Engaged," an essay that, to this day, people have told me is the best thing they have ever read; that people ask whether or not is true. 

In it, I ponder the impossibilities that we face and how time blurs things. Were her eyes blue or brown? Did she actually care for me? Who will she be with? Does she remember me? Will she? 

Those aren't just questions we ask in the past tense. They flood our minds in the present tense when things are new, when things are beginning...and when they are ending. What will happen? What is possible? Who is this person who feels so natural? Why can't I commit to this night, these kisses, drink this mouth like a Lethean well and forget?

The answers come weighted with the impossible. Those last kisses at 2:45 am murmur the end of everything possible and the beginning of everything that cannot be.

No one ever really leaves. They persist as sweet impossibilities: always there, always out of reach. They shine light on the things that are possible, the loves that we must suffer for, the hearts that we hope still beat for us and that call us into our eternal Novembers at three in the morning.

You know this because you hold her still, but mostly you know it because you cannot hold her and you will not hold her again.

But not yet, not yet. Those things will be, but not now.

Put them away, then, and feel her fingers circling yours.

And kiss her again. You have no time.

2021 Note: ironically, she did go to law school and get married. Although we live in the same city, we never spoke again.

No One Flying Nowhere.

(Originally published 2010, the predecessor to "6F")

I am no one on an airplane. 

If I was someone, I might not like it. 

Air travel is sitting in a metal tube with your legs cramped and your feet hot and your elbows tucked close to your body as you try to saw a piece of barbecued chicken or eat a bite of iceberg lettuce from the tiny square bowl covered in plastic that was brought to you. Your elbows are tucked in so you don't disturb the person next to you. 

That person doesn't give a damn about disturbing you. That's why his iPod is turned all the way up so you can hear it over the white noise of the engines and that's why he's eating like he's at the trough at whatever local buffet he usually frequents. Rotten bastard. You hate him for an hour or two and then you forget all about him. 

You never remember the faces of strangers on a plane. 

Air travel is sitting for twenty minutes with a full bladder waiting for the flight attendant to clear your neighbor's tray and your tray so that you can get up, walk unsteadily down the aisle, and then cram yourself into a closet-sized lavatory, steady yourself against the wall, and piss into the stainless steel bowl filled with the bluest liquid you have ever seen, trying to not miss out of courtesy to the other passengers. 

Or at least that's how it is if you're a man. I feel bad for women: they have to contend with dealing with actually sitting on the damned thing. 

Air travel is the boredom of reading about the best steak houses in Charlotte or the top day spas in Seattle in the in-flight magazine. The flight attendant will tell everyone that they are welcome to take a copy with them when they leave, but judging from the half-filled-in crossword puzzle (how could the person before you not know that number four down was coral?) and the torn out sudoku page, no one ever does. You're sure that you'll never want to buy a ring with the birthstones and initials of your children because you don't have any, so you leave the relic in the seat pocket in front of you along with the safety information card that nobody ever looks at. I never take the damn thing, anyway. Maybe other people do. People who want rings with birthstones and initials. 

I always sit by the window. I used to sit in the aisle because I hate trying to pass people sitting next to me. I got tired of people jostling my elbow or my shoulder, though, especially with the drink carts. A lot of airlines don't have drink carts anymore. This plane is an Embraer RJ135. The only really good seat on this plane is 11B: the exit row aisle seat. I'm sitting in 6A. This is a pretty good seat because there's no one next to me: there can't be on this plane because it's a 1:2 configuration. I'll be among the first out of this big metal tube and although I don't have the leg room that I would have in row 11, I'm closer to the door. 4A was available, but the number 4 is synonymous with death in Japanese so I never sit in the 4th row, even though I am not Japanese. 

I like not having anyone sit next to me because then I don't have to make the small talk that people seem to make when the plane is about to land. Few people talk to strangers in the air or during takeoff. During the descent, everyone seems relieved and wants to make small talk with their neighbors. The conversation always starts the same way: "so, are you coming home or here on business?" I always want to say something strange, just to see what their reaction might be, but I don't want to call any attention to myself so I grudgingly play the game with them. I usually say that I'm in town for a wedding. That way I don't have to talk about what I do for work. It might be fun to say that I'm in town for gender reassignment surgery, but again, I don't want to call attention to myself. Not having a seat neighbor solves the problem before it starts. 

The plane takes off. The plane lands. I get out into the airport. 

I know airports very well. All roads lead to dead ends or baggage claim. Baggage claim is always on the same floor as ground transportation: cabs, buses, limos. You put the big gate numbers behind you and walk straight and fast. Avoid the moving walkway: there's always someone who is standing perfectly still on the left-hand side. Stand right. Walk left. Simple? You'd think so. Avoid it. I get in a taxi and tell the driver where to go. I have everything written down on an index card. Flight number, flight times, hotel address, hotel reservation number: everything contained on one piece of paper. If I lose it, that's ok. I have it in my phone, too. 

I get to my hotel and check in. I get in an elevator. The elevator doors open and close and open. There is a mirror above a small table with a phone and some flowers on it. There's a placard on the wall indicating two series of room numbers and two arrows pointed in opposite directions. I feel a sense of control returning to my life as I slip the plastic key into slot above the brushed steel doorknob. A red LED light turns green and I hear a small click before I push the door open and walk into my room. The layout is identical to every other mid-priced hotel I have been in. Toilet and shower are immediately to the right. There is a small closet with 4 hangers, a bag for laundry and a bag to put your shoes in if you want them shined. There's an iron and a small ironing board. In the bathroom is a small coffee pot and filterbags of Starbucks Pike Place. There are three rocks glasses covered with paper coasters and a miniature bar of soap. In the main room, there's a desk next to the television which faces the bed. There's a lamp and a landline. The room smells like some type of cleaner and cheap linen. I know that the room attendants probably didn't put fresh sheets on after the last guest left. I try not to think about it. I hang up my jacket, loosen my tie and I sit on the bed. It is cheap and comfortable. Predictable and uniform. 

 The room is anonymous. 

 So am I.