14th Street Exchange

Remember Crobar, when you were dancing with me, then turned around and started making out with the guy behind you, and when I asked you the next day how the rest of your night went, you told me “good”? What kind of pleasure did that give you?

I remember the night my brother and his girlfriend came out to meet you, and after last call you went home with the bartender.

Why did you invite me to Puerto Rico for the fourth of July? Why, when I made it to your hotel at midnight, did you have another guy there? You told me “it’s okay, we have a sofa.” I slept on the beach in the rain, with the aid of a liter of rum and a can of Coke, drinking until I could stand the rain, impenetrable as a seed, waiting for the summer to come back.

Part of me thought I deserved it, because of Thailand. Part thought you should be as free as you liked. Part of me wanted to believe that we were above jealousy, done with archaic social norms, the right to point at another person and say ‘mine’. In New York I thought you were going through a selfish phase. Then I fought back. In Quito I found it was easily justifiable, and tried to tell myself that it had passed and we’d survived, were diminished but growing. Now, I guess it really ended in Spain.

Coming to see you took me an hour on the N/R with a change at Union Square to the 4/5/6, and going home at night, trapped in a half-lit compartment, I wondered if my entire life would be underground, furious and monotonous, relentless as the pounding of the wheels.

I rode the train to see you, and someone called and you had to go. I rode it home. I rode the train to see you, and two guys answered the door and said you were in the shower. I rode it home. I made love to you, then you politely suggested that we both had to wake up early in the morning, and I rode the train home from two to three AM, my life faded and stuck into a tunnel, where there used to be the sun and the air.
I thought I could forgive you. But I was wrong—it wasn’t you who needed forgiving. I should have left you a thousand times. But how do you forgive yourself?