There is a lighthouse at the end of Cape Horn, and its southeast side is flaky with crusted, driven snow. The lighthouse is not you.
The town of Ushuaia is paralyzed by ice in mid-August. The nights drag out for sixteen hours, and my days are compressed. The mountains pin the streets to the ice-ridden bay, seem ready to fall, but never do. Rock and snow, ice and the darkness—I’m not this town, though I can’t imagine leaving it.
There are innumerable ends to a rounded planet. One, for us, was a hotel room in Puerto Rico. Another at a beach bar on Koh Samet. Your father’s apartment on the Upper East Side. Calle Escudieri. An empty hospital bed. This e-mail, a string of ones and zeros, something, then nothing—a placeholder. This is just a placeholder, saving a spot for you.
If you’re dead, I forgive you. If you’re alive and you haven’t written, I hate you, but maybe the ice that arrests us is only a matter of geography, the season we’re in.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
The Financial Times
On U Street, at a bar, Inauguration Day 2005. We’d both been at a Michael Franti concert at the 9:30 Club and ducked out of the crowd that had taken over afterwards, pushing the traffic out of the street. Maybe it seemed like the corridor was about to burn because I was lugging around that effigy I’d built from six months' worth of the FT. Or maybe it really was going to burn. Again.
The bar was packed, Facundo ranting from his corner booth, little Mike was collecting signatures and everyone was talking about boycotting something. The city was in a fury, and to keep my asthma at bay I was getting blackout drunk, turning down the sound. The effigy was a part of my disguise, beneath which I had nearly disappeared.
All the shouting and nonsense, and you were sitting on the corner reading and sipping moonshine.
I asked you for a lighter, and you said something about exile, and that ex-pat meant exiled patriot. I don’t know what we talked about, though I know we talked about it at length and ended with an agreement to disappear, either to India or Thailand, whichever seemed more appropriate in the morning.
Sex, and how my shoulders stung under the hot shower after, my blood worming down the drain. The effigy lying unburned against the curb outside the bar. Waking up beside your sunlight hair splayed out over white sheets, your skin neverending, wrapped to hide so sweetly all your muscle and blood. I was surprised that white skin could still seem lovely. I whispered over your shoulders, down your arms while you slept, an easy breeze on the coast of an undiscovered country.
I wanted to live only with passion. So much of my life, bars and work and then even my books, were scentless, muted, tasted of watered down beer and car exhaust. Then you spoke, and the walls began to smolder. You invited me home and the pavement burned beneath your feet, and I followed, and I never stopped following.
The bar was packed, Facundo ranting from his corner booth, little Mike was collecting signatures and everyone was talking about boycotting something. The city was in a fury, and to keep my asthma at bay I was getting blackout drunk, turning down the sound. The effigy was a part of my disguise, beneath which I had nearly disappeared.
All the shouting and nonsense, and you were sitting on the corner reading and sipping moonshine.
I asked you for a lighter, and you said something about exile, and that ex-pat meant exiled patriot. I don’t know what we talked about, though I know we talked about it at length and ended with an agreement to disappear, either to India or Thailand, whichever seemed more appropriate in the morning.
Sex, and how my shoulders stung under the hot shower after, my blood worming down the drain. The effigy lying unburned against the curb outside the bar. Waking up beside your sunlight hair splayed out over white sheets, your skin neverending, wrapped to hide so sweetly all your muscle and blood. I was surprised that white skin could still seem lovely. I whispered over your shoulders, down your arms while you slept, an easy breeze on the coast of an undiscovered country.
I wanted to live only with passion. So much of my life, bars and work and then even my books, were scentless, muted, tasted of watered down beer and car exhaust. Then you spoke, and the walls began to smolder. You invited me home and the pavement burned beneath your feet, and I followed, and I never stopped following.
Sleepless
Remember like I remember (every sunrise, sunset) the wet, billowing heat, the afternoon monsoon crashing into our tin roof, the world shut out from our wooden room, and two bodies lashed by sex. Desire is too weak a word. Our lust eclipsed friendship, love, respect. These were masks hiding desire. You saw how my hands shook? My hands never shake. I stopped writing. What did I care about staining pages?
Did you ever feel like you were upside-down on the world and it was spinning so fast that your hair blew back from your face?
Do you ever drift back into those drowsy lifetimes between asleep and awake when we curled helplessly into one another? Those too-short seconds before the ego awakes, lifetimes where we were whole as an egg.
When you think of me, what does that mean about me? I hope sometimes you think of me kindly.
Did you ever feel like you were upside-down on the world and it was spinning so fast that your hair blew back from your face?
Do you ever drift back into those drowsy lifetimes between asleep and awake when we curled helplessly into one another? Those too-short seconds before the ego awakes, lifetimes where we were whole as an egg.
When you think of me, what does that mean about me? I hope sometimes you think of me kindly.
Run!
Crap jobs, broke all the time, no insurance, student debts, friends in the war—none of my problems were really my problem.
A simple solution: buy tickets on your credit card and go to Thailand with someone you met in a bar and life becomes new. Walking out of the front door is an experience. Work is an adventure. Ordering at McDonald’s is exotic. It seems too easy because it is.
A rhythm enters you. Day, night, day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Everyone speaks in ups and downs, men hold hands and every meal is eaten with a spoon, but people are people. They have eyes and noses. They drive cars and tell jokes.
In time, sounds become words, words become things. Please, thank you, pineapple, what is this? Durian. Okay, I’ll try it. So you eat a fruit that smells like shit, eat a few cockroaches and drink beer and start to forget.
At night we took off each others’ clothes, learned smells and tastes and the stupid faces we make when we’re coming. In the mornings we drank tea. In the afternoons, pineapple lassies or beer or both, or we took a bus and a ferry to some other paradise. We talked about the people we’d been. The pressures that gave us this shape or that, pressures that were slowly slipping from mind, and eventually we stopped talking about “back home” and let the afternoons remain smooth as the sea.
Water clear as moonlight, the sun intense as a staring eye. Conversation that came and went like the tide—fluid, massive movements of varying depth. We did a lot of crossword puzzles. We skinnydipped at night, strung with phosphorescence.
Were we really crazy? My parents thought so. My friends. But I felt more alive, more connected, more real. As a child I had flashes of I exist, but it had been years since I’d felt that explosion of oddness: I am I and I am here. Out of context I still filled my lungs. I occupied space, felt human. And you were there, and you were like me, and we were like them. It felt like the first time someone else takes off your clothes, and you take off theirs. You have parts. I do too. Look at what we are.
A simple solution: buy tickets on your credit card and go to Thailand with someone you met in a bar and life becomes new. Walking out of the front door is an experience. Work is an adventure. Ordering at McDonald’s is exotic. It seems too easy because it is.
A rhythm enters you. Day, night, day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Everyone speaks in ups and downs, men hold hands and every meal is eaten with a spoon, but people are people. They have eyes and noses. They drive cars and tell jokes.
In time, sounds become words, words become things. Please, thank you, pineapple, what is this? Durian. Okay, I’ll try it. So you eat a fruit that smells like shit, eat a few cockroaches and drink beer and start to forget.
At night we took off each others’ clothes, learned smells and tastes and the stupid faces we make when we’re coming. In the mornings we drank tea. In the afternoons, pineapple lassies or beer or both, or we took a bus and a ferry to some other paradise. We talked about the people we’d been. The pressures that gave us this shape or that, pressures that were slowly slipping from mind, and eventually we stopped talking about “back home” and let the afternoons remain smooth as the sea.
Water clear as moonlight, the sun intense as a staring eye. Conversation that came and went like the tide—fluid, massive movements of varying depth. We did a lot of crossword puzzles. We skinnydipped at night, strung with phosphorescence.
Were we really crazy? My parents thought so. My friends. But I felt more alive, more connected, more real. As a child I had flashes of I exist, but it had been years since I’d felt that explosion of oddness: I am I and I am here. Out of context I still filled my lungs. I occupied space, felt human. And you were there, and you were like me, and we were like them. It felt like the first time someone else takes off your clothes, and you take off theirs. You have parts. I do too. Look at what we are.
[…]
You said you would have loved to have been a writer or a photographer—I loved your writing—but you studied economics because you thought you could do the most good. You told me about seeing a bumsicle thrown into the trunk of a police car like she was frozen roadkill. You said “when you can speak entirely in acronyms and you use terms like human capital without wanting to vomit, you’ve been in DC too long.” You said that what you really wanted to do was bomb the houses of insurance and credit card executives. “That’s why I left—I stopped trusting myself.”
At first you said, “I could have lived like this, if I’d been born here. But I’m going to start to go crazy soon. I need to work. I need to do something. There’s so much that needs to be done.”
At first you said, “I could have lived like this, if I’d been born here. But I’m going to start to go crazy soon. I need to work. I need to do something. There’s so much that needs to be done.”
Use
There was something in us that wanted to be debased. Sometimes we made love, but I could count those times on your fingers. The other times we screwed, fucked, used each other the way you might use sandpaper or a toilet brush. Why did I love when you took me by the hair, left bruises on my chest, put your hands around my throat? You loved it when I threw you down, held your arms behind your back. Was that love in the aftermath or just the dreams of a sleeping animal, and how does any of this fit with walking silently on the beach, the moon thin as a string, holding onto each other by our pinky fingers?
Falling
A rapid, uncontrolled descent. But first there was a jump, a choice, with vertigo murmuring in my ear. Then brief freedom from the earth, and a small, wingless prayer: let me die before I hit the ground.
More
You used to hold my hand while we slept, come to cafes to watch me write. You’d corner me in the kitchen, climb into the hammock, interrupt bucket showers in the morning cold. Why do I tend to forget that you wanted me too?
I remember sitting on the rocks looking out at the island monastery with its black dragons carved into the sunset, crabs clacking around us and your turquoise shoes against a tangerine stripe across the gulf. Three silver rings and a white kaffiya. I remember your hair and your perfume, your look and your voice when you said “It’s not fair. I love you more than you love me.”
I was doing it on purpose, you know. Letting you think you loved me more. I took every third or fourth chance, with things I didn’t say, expressions of love that I didn’t return. I was faking a calm I didn’t feel, because you were always in a rush, half-panicked, and I was afraid if you’d known how much I needed you, you would have panicked and rushed off. I was half-dead before I followed you out of that bar. I wanted to be with you—but more, I wanted to be you. With your hard eyes and your half-baked plans and your certainty that everything you did would turn out. I followed you out of that bar and to the other side of the world. Did you really think you loved me more?
Write me.
I remember sitting on the rocks looking out at the island monastery with its black dragons carved into the sunset, crabs clacking around us and your turquoise shoes against a tangerine stripe across the gulf. Three silver rings and a white kaffiya. I remember your hair and your perfume, your look and your voice when you said “It’s not fair. I love you more than you love me.”
I was doing it on purpose, you know. Letting you think you loved me more. I took every third or fourth chance, with things I didn’t say, expressions of love that I didn’t return. I was faking a calm I didn’t feel, because you were always in a rush, half-panicked, and I was afraid if you’d known how much I needed you, you would have panicked and rushed off. I was half-dead before I followed you out of that bar. I wanted to be with you—but more, I wanted to be you. With your hard eyes and your half-baked plans and your certainty that everything you did would turn out. I followed you out of that bar and to the other side of the world. Did you really think you loved me more?
Write me.
Soft-Boiled Eggs before Work
It stunk when we woke up. The old guys below us were too groovy to bathe, and it was a third-class sleeper in the summer—hot, wet, and now reeking of hippie. It was 4 am when we got off in Chiang Mai, your eyes swollen and ringed, my mouth dry and my hair matted with sweat.
You asked if I’d bothered to find a hostel, and I reminded you that you said that you’d do it before you fell asleep. “Whatever,” you said. “We’ll just ask a tuk-tuk driver.” I told you at least twice that I was running out of money, and you told me at least twice that you were sick of third-class trains and half-star hotels. I told you I was going to have to get a job, and you answered as you always did: “I have plenty of money, don’t worry.”
You looked at me so sweetly, despite your swollen eyes and mosquito-bitten cheeks, that I believed the little pressures pushing us towards argument would stay little, and we’d fend them off with jokes and habitual kindness, and if we had to strain to be polite, it wouldn’t be hard, or last long, or mean much. We moved beach to beach, laid in yawning fields, walked in the mountains, did the things tourists do. And we fought about the things people fight about when they’re traveling. Then, eventually, I did get that teaching job and we moved into the little wooden house over the stream that processed small tensions, eased them out windows and through screens, and every night we pulled down the mosquito net, threaded our limbs, and fell asleep together.
So we fought about the things people fight about. You always made soft-boiled eggs. I left my wet bathing suit in the hammock, and you were right, it did eventually grow mold.
You asked if I’d bothered to find a hostel, and I reminded you that you said that you’d do it before you fell asleep. “Whatever,” you said. “We’ll just ask a tuk-tuk driver.” I told you at least twice that I was running out of money, and you told me at least twice that you were sick of third-class trains and half-star hotels. I told you I was going to have to get a job, and you answered as you always did: “I have plenty of money, don’t worry.”
You looked at me so sweetly, despite your swollen eyes and mosquito-bitten cheeks, that I believed the little pressures pushing us towards argument would stay little, and we’d fend them off with jokes and habitual kindness, and if we had to strain to be polite, it wouldn’t be hard, or last long, or mean much. We moved beach to beach, laid in yawning fields, walked in the mountains, did the things tourists do. And we fought about the things people fight about when they’re traveling. Then, eventually, I did get that teaching job and we moved into the little wooden house over the stream that processed small tensions, eased them out windows and through screens, and every night we pulled down the mosquito net, threaded our limbs, and fell asleep together.
So we fought about the things people fight about. You always made soft-boiled eggs. I left my wet bathing suit in the hammock, and you were right, it did eventually grow mold.
Little House
Our little house set the scope of our days and smoothed over the cracks between us. I loved that house like a person, and so did you. We became like it—flexible as wood, on stilts, waiting for the stream to flood. Wood walls, wood floors, wood countertops, rafters, tables and chairs made of twisted branches and shaped trunks. The midday shade from the banana trees, the breeze stirring the mosquito net, the haze it spread across everything outside of bed. Roosters beneath the floorboards at sunrise, tea before work in the morning and long naps in the hammock during the hottest hours. Hard rain on the tin roof like hundreds of thousands of toy drums rolling, and the thickness of the air that always came with that sound, making every breath like a long drink. The smell of rain and slow decay.
Now, when I think of my love for you, I think of the rain on our tin roof. I think of that smell, and of sunlight falling on our low wooden bed.
Now, when I think of my love for you, I think of the rain on our tin roof. I think of that smell, and of sunlight falling on our low wooden bed.
Rasta Baby
At the Rasta Baby, when Pi-Nung asked us if we needed a place to stay and offered us the hammocks in the bar and you thanked her in Thai you’d learned on the plane. It was the look on your face when you concentrated on getting the tones right—scrunched up, and little lines between your eyebrows. That was where it hit me. Watching you holding pink and purple bills, counting baht, learning to speak.
But part of it came from being with you watching a sunset over an ocean I never thought I’d see. Part was Nung’s generosity; part was the sandy path and the tall stilts and the pavilion in the treetops where the jungle met the beach. Part was that day’s monsoon, and just thinking about the word monsoon. Part of it was that the week before we had walked behind a hired guide through a rice paddy, stopped to take off our shoes and carried on muddy-footed through the fields to the village to be welcomed by a family of eight people—an old, a middle-aged and a young couple and two children—with a pot of sticky rice and another of river weeds, and that we sat on reed mats on the floor, the grandparents came to eat and drink rice wine and the men killed and boiled a chicken and we ended up staying up long after dark at the low candlelit table taking shots and making jokes with our hands. Love came from the air and the Thai smiles, it was in the food and the tobacco color of your skin, getting darker every day.
I was more in love with the world than with you, but it was so hard to tell where we ended and everything else began. It might have helped, to have realized that at the time. Your smile, my happiness, elephants marching in the trees on a family trip—it all mixed in me, and what came out came unchecked, because it had to, the pressure inside from a joy bigger than I could contain maybe shouldn’t have come out as I love you, but it did, and it felt right so much of the time that I didn’t notice until I’d already fucked up.
But part of it came from being with you watching a sunset over an ocean I never thought I’d see. Part was Nung’s generosity; part was the sandy path and the tall stilts and the pavilion in the treetops where the jungle met the beach. Part was that day’s monsoon, and just thinking about the word monsoon. Part of it was that the week before we had walked behind a hired guide through a rice paddy, stopped to take off our shoes and carried on muddy-footed through the fields to the village to be welcomed by a family of eight people—an old, a middle-aged and a young couple and two children—with a pot of sticky rice and another of river weeds, and that we sat on reed mats on the floor, the grandparents came to eat and drink rice wine and the men killed and boiled a chicken and we ended up staying up long after dark at the low candlelit table taking shots and making jokes with our hands. Love came from the air and the Thai smiles, it was in the food and the tobacco color of your skin, getting darker every day.
I was more in love with the world than with you, but it was so hard to tell where we ended and everything else began. It might have helped, to have realized that at the time. Your smile, my happiness, elephants marching in the trees on a family trip—it all mixed in me, and what came out came unchecked, because it had to, the pressure inside from a joy bigger than I could contain maybe shouldn’t have come out as I love you, but it did, and it felt right so much of the time that I didn’t notice until I’d already fucked up.
Blessed with Bile
I’m drinking too much again, writing all this to you. This morning was bile. Electric yellow. A color that doesn’t belong in nature, that especially should not come out of a living body. Tastes like gasoline. I huddled around the toilet, face close to the cool, thinking it’s not so bad. Thinking tomorrow I’ll be fine. Thinking that when I finish whatever this is—these e-mails, stories, drafts of our memories—maybe when I’m finished then it will mostly be over. Thinking that if you haven’t written back, you have to be dead. Thinking that if I keep writing…I don’t know. I’ll come back to life.
You would love the ice on the bay. The glaciers on the mountains during the sunrise are so fucking beautiful.
You would love the ice on the bay. The glaciers on the mountains during the sunrise are so fucking beautiful.
Test-Drive
It was a hot night. I know that’s not why, that it’s not a good excuse. But why couldn’t it be just as stupid as that? I was that stupid.
It was a hot night and you were away at your five-hundred-dollar-a-week yoga class and I went to Samet after work on Friday because the kids were driving me nuts and I wanted to swim in the ocean. I was lying at a table at Naga Bar having dinner with a book, and so was she, so we started talking about books, then movies, then places we’d been. You’ve had the same conversation a million times. So have I. We were both still wearing our bathing suits, and sweating, so we went for a swim, and I went back to my room alone. Then in the morning she knocked on my door, and there were those two seconds, like we talked about in New York, and you were right, I saw through your eyes, and I could have said no, but I didn’t.
I promise I’m not going to apologize again. I just wanted you to know that you were right. I was shopping for a new life. I was latching on to people and places for a few days at a time. Test-driving.
We’d only been together for four months, and you knew things about me that it took me years to realize, even after you’d told me. So tell me this: why did I let you leave? How did I think I was going to live?
It was a hot night and you were away at your five-hundred-dollar-a-week yoga class and I went to Samet after work on Friday because the kids were driving me nuts and I wanted to swim in the ocean. I was lying at a table at Naga Bar having dinner with a book, and so was she, so we started talking about books, then movies, then places we’d been. You’ve had the same conversation a million times. So have I. We were both still wearing our bathing suits, and sweating, so we went for a swim, and I went back to my room alone. Then in the morning she knocked on my door, and there were those two seconds, like we talked about in New York, and you were right, I saw through your eyes, and I could have said no, but I didn’t.
I promise I’m not going to apologize again. I just wanted you to know that you were right. I was shopping for a new life. I was latching on to people and places for a few days at a time. Test-driving.
We’d only been together for four months, and you knew things about me that it took me years to realize, even after you’d told me. So tell me this: why did I let you leave? How did I think I was going to live?
Quietly
We sat there taking our clothes out of each others’ bags, repacking separately, and I was thinking of the night we met. You smashed two glasses in the street that night, on two separate occasions, and you told the bouncer you were going to kick his ass. This time you were so quiet. I tried to talk about Spain, to get you excited. Dumb. You would look at me, sigh, and go back to sorting clothes. I wish I’d lied. I still feel that quiet.
Sunrise
Here, now, the sun doesn’t rise until noon, and it sets before five. I got out of bed at eleven today, a Thursday, in the dark. Showered. I went to a café and drank a coffee beside a black window listening to the winter howl. At twelve I took the bus to the lighthouse at the end of the world.
There aren’t many tourists in Ushuaia in the middle of the winter, but on the bus were a young Canadian couple, an old German couple, and three Chilean girls. Local custom would dictate that I hit on the girls. Instead I sat in front, put on my sunglasses and waited.
The sun came up slowly: snow, mountains of snow, trees buried in snow, slivers of water like lightning flashing in the channel. More snow, more ice. Reflected light. The killing crystals made of simple molecules arranged just so.
I sat with my back to the lighthouse, facing land, looking at my own footprints over the frozen salt water. There, out of the wind, I wrote your name on a cigarette. I watched the smoke flee my fingers and mouth and cylinders of ash rolling over the crust, scattering and becoming indistinguishable against the white. Your name blackened and crisped, whitened, and was gone.
It didn’t work. But I did try.
There aren’t many tourists in Ushuaia in the middle of the winter, but on the bus were a young Canadian couple, an old German couple, and three Chilean girls. Local custom would dictate that I hit on the girls. Instead I sat in front, put on my sunglasses and waited.
The sun came up slowly: snow, mountains of snow, trees buried in snow, slivers of water like lightning flashing in the channel. More snow, more ice. Reflected light. The killing crystals made of simple molecules arranged just so.
I sat with my back to the lighthouse, facing land, looking at my own footprints over the frozen salt water. There, out of the wind, I wrote your name on a cigarette. I watched the smoke flee my fingers and mouth and cylinders of ash rolling over the crust, scattering and becoming indistinguishable against the white. Your name blackened and crisped, whitened, and was gone.
It didn’t work. But I did try.
Mai Pan Rai
After you left I stayed home, ate white rice, moved bed to hammock to bed. Drank and drew pictures of our banana tree.
After two weeks, Pi-Joy knocked on the door. I hadn’t paid the rent, so he came over with six quarts of beer and his wife went into the kitchen and made spicy shark fin and tom yum and som tam while me and Pi-Joy got drunk on the porch. He didn’t ask about the rent, and he only asked about you once. “She’s gone,” I said, and he said “Mai pan rai.” Don’t worry about it. “Hot soup, cold beer.”
I cheated on you and didn’t pay the rent and Pi-Joy bought me beer and his wife made us dinner and we sat there watching the geckoes on the walls and listening to the monkeys in the trees and the little stream burbling and he told me mai pan rai. He was so nice to me, and I deserved it so little. I wished I’d been born Thai and understood mai pan rai. But all I had left of you was the worry that you might not have enough music or enough to read, that you might be living alone in some dirty apartment in Spain without anyone to make sure you ate. That you were missing our little wooden house and Pi-Joy and the weeping of the monkeys and the peace that grew out of the night.
After two weeks, Pi-Joy knocked on the door. I hadn’t paid the rent, so he came over with six quarts of beer and his wife went into the kitchen and made spicy shark fin and tom yum and som tam while me and Pi-Joy got drunk on the porch. He didn’t ask about the rent, and he only asked about you once. “She’s gone,” I said, and he said “Mai pan rai.” Don’t worry about it. “Hot soup, cold beer.”
I cheated on you and didn’t pay the rent and Pi-Joy bought me beer and his wife made us dinner and we sat there watching the geckoes on the walls and listening to the monkeys in the trees and the little stream burbling and he told me mai pan rai. He was so nice to me, and I deserved it so little. I wished I’d been born Thai and understood mai pan rai. But all I had left of you was the worry that you might not have enough music or enough to read, that you might be living alone in some dirty apartment in Spain without anyone to make sure you ate. That you were missing our little wooden house and Pi-Joy and the weeping of the monkeys and the peace that grew out of the night.
[…]
Why did you invite me to Barcelona? Did you know that in a different city I could be a different person? Were you counting on my guilt being a long enough lever to move me? Or were you already planning your revenge?
Near You
You let me live near you, but not with you.
“Promise me nothing,” you said. I secretly promised you everything, which was maybe my second mistake. “Forget Thailand,” you said. I forgot nothing.
Guilt made it okay to become what I’d wanted to be in the first place: an extension of you, something inseparable, a limb of some value like an arm or a foot. How I admired you. Tiny and indestructible, full of energy, like a universe set to explode. And the way you drew people towards you, rearranged places and events to fit like cobblestones beneath your feet. Did you know how awkward I felt next to you? Did you know that I tried to imitate you, hoped that with enough time I would become like you? I think maybe you figured it out, and despised me for it.
But for a while good times came back, aided by hashish and boxes of sangria, sand-baking on a crowded beach, hungover and napping on the train to Sitges. Small coffees in Plaça Reial, walks down Las Ramblas and afternoon sex and tea on your terrace, the sounds of Barri Gòtic rising, making love to the barking of dogs, harmonica players, the smell of piss and bohemians rising from the living city.
We loved the way we sent texts, in lowercase letters, not trying to mine eternity, not planning a life or even a trip to the grocery store. Just: hi how ya doin? good you? Time to: fuck, eat, fuck, sleep, eat, have coffee, go somewhere, fuck, eat, fuck, sleep (but underneath, something difficult: trying to live alone after you made it hard to wake up, hard to breathe, hard to lie on a beach drinking beer. To love something besides you: impossible).
“Promise me nothing,” you said. I secretly promised you everything, which was maybe my second mistake. “Forget Thailand,” you said. I forgot nothing.
Guilt made it okay to become what I’d wanted to be in the first place: an extension of you, something inseparable, a limb of some value like an arm or a foot. How I admired you. Tiny and indestructible, full of energy, like a universe set to explode. And the way you drew people towards you, rearranged places and events to fit like cobblestones beneath your feet. Did you know how awkward I felt next to you? Did you know that I tried to imitate you, hoped that with enough time I would become like you? I think maybe you figured it out, and despised me for it.
But for a while good times came back, aided by hashish and boxes of sangria, sand-baking on a crowded beach, hungover and napping on the train to Sitges. Small coffees in Plaça Reial, walks down Las Ramblas and afternoon sex and tea on your terrace, the sounds of Barri Gòtic rising, making love to the barking of dogs, harmonica players, the smell of piss and bohemians rising from the living city.
We loved the way we sent texts, in lowercase letters, not trying to mine eternity, not planning a life or even a trip to the grocery store. Just: hi how ya doin? good you? Time to: fuck, eat, fuck, sleep, eat, have coffee, go somewhere, fuck, eat, fuck, sleep (but underneath, something difficult: trying to live alone after you made it hard to wake up, hard to breathe, hard to lie on a beach drinking beer. To love something besides you: impossible).
Party
It looked like a party. Small clusters of people standing around talking. Some people talked more, some people more loudly, some people more passionately, but everyone talked. The voices just piled up, and I looked at the windows, nice ones, large doors opening onto a thin cement balcony with a woven wrought iron rail. Cigarette smoke grew downwards from the ceiling, encroaching on people’s headspace.
Someone tapped a glass and gave a speech in Catalan, and throughout the guy with the violent eyes whispered in your ear. Immediately after the speech people starting arguing, presumably about what’d been said, and you began listening ferociously.
Eventually, someone asked me in English what I thought. “I missed the subject of the conversation,” I told him, and he asked what I felt about the situation of working people in the United States. I told him I didn’t know because I decided not to work there since most of the people I knew hated their jobs.
Then they asked you, and you told them, specifically, how many millions of people worked but lived poor, how many were uninsured, the unemployment rate, etc., etc., etc. They were much more impressed with your answer—I was impressed too, but I didn’t know whether those numbers were abnormally high or low or what. Where you learned them and what you made of them were a mystery to me. I felt dumb, and that’s why, when you found me later, slightly drunk and staring at the moon, I told you I didn’t really have fun at the party. It was a good party. I’m glad you took me.
Someone tapped a glass and gave a speech in Catalan, and throughout the guy with the violent eyes whispered in your ear. Immediately after the speech people starting arguing, presumably about what’d been said, and you began listening ferociously.
Eventually, someone asked me in English what I thought. “I missed the subject of the conversation,” I told him, and he asked what I felt about the situation of working people in the United States. I told him I didn’t know because I decided not to work there since most of the people I knew hated their jobs.
Then they asked you, and you told them, specifically, how many millions of people worked but lived poor, how many were uninsured, the unemployment rate, etc., etc., etc. They were much more impressed with your answer—I was impressed too, but I didn’t know whether those numbers were abnormally high or low or what. Where you learned them and what you made of them were a mystery to me. I felt dumb, and that’s why, when you found me later, slightly drunk and staring at the moon, I told you I didn’t really have fun at the party. It was a good party. I’m glad you took me.
Ushuaia
I went again today to the lighthouse, and made the mistake of wandering too far, seduced by all that white. In the summer, the lighthouse is on an island, but from July to November the salt water freezes thick enough to walk on. I’d only ever seen it frozen, so I didn’t brace myself when my right leg went through to the hip, and I toppled so abjectly that head slung forward and my nose cracked in two on the ice. Then, trying to lift myself out of the trap, my other leg plunged through and I was left encased to the hips, pinned by the weight of the snow and the splay of my legs, watching roses budding in the snow.
I rested, to slow my mind and gather strength, let the burning flow out of my legs. I listened to the sound of the wind over the ice, watching the slow pant of my own breath crystallize and fall. Apart from that, there was nothing. The small declivity I was in hid the lighthouse and the sea, the tourists and their brightly colored coats. The sky was grey and even, the earth a crisp white, and my legs numb as I could ever have hoped.
Warmth crept out from my chest, made me drowsy, and I wandered into a dream. I saw a twig protruding from some buried bush; a teardrop of blue hung on the horizon. High over my head a seagull circled, a speck of grey moving against the grey, slow as a hypnotist.
I slipped further, comfortable for the first time in a year. My life seemed a quiet and a calm thing. I yawned, and settled. Then, something was erased. I didn’t know what, because it was gone, but I felt a subtle lightening. Maybe I knew I was dying, and that my last vision wasn’t of you, but of that small patch of sky. What did you see? Or have you decided never to answer me?
I lay there for a long time. Then, about to fall asleep, I heard a scuffling behind me, and I felt two hands pulling at my parka, and my eyes began to open. The guide pulled me out of the snow, led me back up the small hill and sat me in the bus beside the heater, took off my boots and unzipped my jacket. “Why don’t you call me for help?” she asked. “I’m fine,” I told her, still dreaming. “Don’t worry.”
I rested, to slow my mind and gather strength, let the burning flow out of my legs. I listened to the sound of the wind over the ice, watching the slow pant of my own breath crystallize and fall. Apart from that, there was nothing. The small declivity I was in hid the lighthouse and the sea, the tourists and their brightly colored coats. The sky was grey and even, the earth a crisp white, and my legs numb as I could ever have hoped.
Warmth crept out from my chest, made me drowsy, and I wandered into a dream. I saw a twig protruding from some buried bush; a teardrop of blue hung on the horizon. High over my head a seagull circled, a speck of grey moving against the grey, slow as a hypnotist.
I slipped further, comfortable for the first time in a year. My life seemed a quiet and a calm thing. I yawned, and settled. Then, something was erased. I didn’t know what, because it was gone, but I felt a subtle lightening. Maybe I knew I was dying, and that my last vision wasn’t of you, but of that small patch of sky. What did you see? Or have you decided never to answer me?
I lay there for a long time. Then, about to fall asleep, I heard a scuffling behind me, and I felt two hands pulling at my parka, and my eyes began to open. The guide pulled me out of the snow, led me back up the small hill and sat me in the bus beside the heater, took off my boots and unzipped my jacket. “Why don’t you call me for help?” she asked. “I’m fine,” I told her, still dreaming. “Don’t worry.”
Barcelona
You’d joined a half dozen groups by the time I got there. The ISO and Women against War, the Esquerra Nacional and the American Expatriate Voice. Others, with high-flown names and acronyms that all ran together.
I envied your energy and commitment, but it had no faith in –isms. Your friends were hip, well-groomed, clever, and I was jealous of the men, and tried to avoid talking to the women.
Instead, while you were at meetings, I walked around the city. Barri Gòtic like a maze of stone and iron, streets thin and winding as a life, sometimes empty, sometimes crowded with echoing voices, cloudy with hash. I would get lost and wander until, abruptly, I’d be hit by the smell of the sea and the tiny street I was on flushed me into the port, the torn sleeves and curbside bottles stopped flat by suits and the clatter of wineglasses. I’d sit on the shore in Barceloneta, the oily skein of commerce on the water hidden by the night, only the relief of moonlight on breaking foam and the heavy, old smell of salt. Las Ramblas under halogen, the young and drunk laughing their way into the clubs and bars, the McDonald’s or the Bosc de las Fades. The botanical gardens on Montjuic in the middle of the afternoon, the city laid out like a picnic blanket and the drowsy hum of bees, all the sea just a mirror for the sun.
In the end, I can’t say whether or not I’m sorry that I never joined your fight. I only have disconnected memories of being a stranger indoors and out. I was a stranger everywhere except near the sea.
I envied your energy and commitment, but it had no faith in –isms. Your friends were hip, well-groomed, clever, and I was jealous of the men, and tried to avoid talking to the women.
Instead, while you were at meetings, I walked around the city. Barri Gòtic like a maze of stone and iron, streets thin and winding as a life, sometimes empty, sometimes crowded with echoing voices, cloudy with hash. I would get lost and wander until, abruptly, I’d be hit by the smell of the sea and the tiny street I was on flushed me into the port, the torn sleeves and curbside bottles stopped flat by suits and the clatter of wineglasses. I’d sit on the shore in Barceloneta, the oily skein of commerce on the water hidden by the night, only the relief of moonlight on breaking foam and the heavy, old smell of salt. Las Ramblas under halogen, the young and drunk laughing their way into the clubs and bars, the McDonald’s or the Bosc de las Fades. The botanical gardens on Montjuic in the middle of the afternoon, the city laid out like a picnic blanket and the drowsy hum of bees, all the sea just a mirror for the sun.
In the end, I can’t say whether or not I’m sorry that I never joined your fight. I only have disconnected memories of being a stranger indoors and out. I was a stranger everywhere except near the sea.
Asthma
In Barcelona in 2004 I had a Canadian flag sewed to what I called my rucksack but thought of as my backpack. The fact that you found me burning an effigy was just a fluke—if I ever met George W. Bush in a dark alley, I’d probably ask him for coke. I had no interest in sitting in bars and parties fighting over welfare plans and school zoning laws. All I was interested in was you, and you wanted to join and lead a movement, so I spent a lot of time in bars and parties hearing people righting all wrong between sips of their Cuba Libres. I also spent a lot of time being blamed for two wars I knew about and any number of covert wars I didn’t.
“Don’t you care what your country is doing? In the Middle East? What you did in South America? Southeast Asia? Then you have to scream, no? You have to protest, to fight! This is a war, comrade. Make sure you know which side you’re on.”
I had to laugh. I watched the protests at home, the commentary in Catalan. Watching on mute would have been more accurate—a million protesters together still wouldn’t have the money to buy a voice. How could I scream when I couldn’t even get my asthma treated?
“Don’t you care what your country is doing? In the Middle East? What you did in South America? Southeast Asia? Then you have to scream, no? You have to protest, to fight! This is a war, comrade. Make sure you know which side you’re on.”
I had to laugh. I watched the protests at home, the commentary in Catalan. Watching on mute would have been more accurate—a million protesters together still wouldn’t have the money to buy a voice. How could I scream when I couldn’t even get my asthma treated?
[…]
It was so hot that summer. It seems impossible, cold as I am now. I’ve covered my windows with blankets to keep it out, and I sit here typing with another wrapped around me. It’s been so long. Three months since you left the hospital. Where are you? I could kill you.
Gringo Go Home
“Fine, go.”
It was at that demonstration on Calle Escudieri. Red paint, shouting, screaming, really, the press of flesh and the smell of sweat and anger and hate. You were yelling in Catalan, and you were so angry, and the guy next to us was carrying a sign that said FUCK AMERIKKKA, and all I wanted was to sit with my dogs by the pond in the woods near the house where I grew up, the leaves and the grass so green in August, the trunks of the oaks imperturbable, the air humid and heavy with oxygen, the breathing of the trees.
“I meant for you to come with me,” I said, and for a second I thought you were going to hit me, or spit in my face.
“Are you insane?”
“Not forever. Just for a while. To rest.”
“No.”
“I’m not talking about getting a mortgage and a car loan and credit cards. I’m not saying let’s have kids in the suburbs and drive a giant car and drink oil out of champagne flutes. I just want to visit, see my parents, catch up with friends. A month, two months.”
“No.”
“Don’t you miss anyone? You’re not at all curious about what’s going on at home?”
“This is what’s going on, and that’s not my home anymore.”
“The stamp on your passport says tourist, same as mine.”
All that chanting and pushing and those garbled bullhorn voices made it impossible to think, made it seem like only a drastic reaction would do. For the record, I’m sorry about what I said—it wasn’t true at all.
It was at that demonstration on Calle Escudieri. Red paint, shouting, screaming, really, the press of flesh and the smell of sweat and anger and hate. You were yelling in Catalan, and you were so angry, and the guy next to us was carrying a sign that said FUCK AMERIKKKA, and all I wanted was to sit with my dogs by the pond in the woods near the house where I grew up, the leaves and the grass so green in August, the trunks of the oaks imperturbable, the air humid and heavy with oxygen, the breathing of the trees.
“I meant for you to come with me,” I said, and for a second I thought you were going to hit me, or spit in my face.
“Are you insane?”
“Not forever. Just for a while. To rest.”
“No.”
“I’m not talking about getting a mortgage and a car loan and credit cards. I’m not saying let’s have kids in the suburbs and drive a giant car and drink oil out of champagne flutes. I just want to visit, see my parents, catch up with friends. A month, two months.”
“No.”
“Don’t you miss anyone? You’re not at all curious about what’s going on at home?”
“This is what’s going on, and that’s not my home anymore.”
“The stamp on your passport says tourist, same as mine.”
All that chanting and pushing and those garbled bullhorn voices made it impossible to think, made it seem like only a drastic reaction would do. For the record, I’m sorry about what I said—it wasn’t true at all.
[…]
I knew from the way you turned around that something was coming. My blood knew. There was a stilling, so that I could hear you over the crowd. You looked me right in the eye and yelled, “I’m married.” Six months earlier. When I was still in Thailand. You married when your visa expired, instead of driving six hours to renew it at the border. You said you lived with him for a few weeks, and parted as friends. You said you knew I’d take it the wrong way.
I wouldn’t have, you know. Taken it the wrong way. And I did understand, once I had time to think about it. But by then I was on a plane. Thinking about scratching out the window seals and squeezing down thin as smoke, the falling and flying and crashing through your window to land in a heap at your feet.
It’s amazing how far your mind can bend on a twelve hour flight with complimentary drinks. How a walk-out can turn into an exile sentence, how jealous can turn simple loneliness into an obsession, a compulsion to enter your work, your life, your skin—a longing powerful enough to overcome anything, except the stubbornness of wounded pride.
I wouldn’t have, you know. Taken it the wrong way. And I did understand, once I had time to think about it. But by then I was on a plane. Thinking about scratching out the window seals and squeezing down thin as smoke, the falling and flying and crashing through your window to land in a heap at your feet.
It’s amazing how far your mind can bend on a twelve hour flight with complimentary drinks. How a walk-out can turn into an exile sentence, how jealous can turn simple loneliness into an obsession, a compulsion to enter your work, your life, your skin—a longing powerful enough to overcome anything, except the stubbornness of wounded pride.
Massive
I’ve read that there’s a massive hormonal shift when you break up with someone, and that’s why you stop tasting food, sleep too little or too much, lie around in dark rooms all day wanting to die. Even if that’s the explanation, it’s still not the point.
What matters is that love invades the body, roots in the millions of miracles, the still-unknown processes that keep us alive against all probability, that have ties to the amoeba and the ape and have brought us bloody into the world through ice ages and droughts, left us squealing on riverbanks and in the dirt of sacred caves. That it’s something I’m no more able to control than the growth of my own hair, the peeling of my skin, that when love goes it leaves a hole all of Brooklyn could fall into.
What matters is that love invades the body, roots in the millions of miracles, the still-unknown processes that keep us alive against all probability, that have ties to the amoeba and the ape and have brought us bloody into the world through ice ages and droughts, left us squealing on riverbanks and in the dirt of sacred caves. That it’s something I’m no more able to control than the growth of my own hair, the peeling of my skin, that when love goes it leaves a hole all of Brooklyn could fall into.
Nothing to Declare
I died on the plane. The nervous energy, two years of constant stimulus, all collapsed, and I with it. The stewardess said it took her ten minutes to wake me up to change planes in Madrid, and I remember nothing of that airport. I slept through the entire Atlantic Ocean.
Coming into customs, I was gripped by an unreasonable and overly generalized fury. Everyone seemed so loud and pushy and fat and self-satisfied that I wanted to kill them all. I thought of Thai people bowing in silence, the intense dissatisfaction of your comrades in Spain. And you I imagined doing god-knows-what with your husband. How did you keep something so big a secret for so long? Was that why we didn’t share an apartment? (In retrospect, I bet you wished he mattered to me as little as he mattered to you, and I begin to understand how small and manipulative we both were).
“Passport.” I loathed the little blue book. I loathed the half-shaven, triple-chinned official who didn’t say please, who looked at me like the country would be better off without my long hair and jet-lagged eyes. “What was the purpose of your trip abroad?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’d suggest you change your attitude real quick, partner, or you’re going to be spending a long time in an airport holding cell.”
Standing at the baggage claim there was more room to breathe, and the desire to strangle someone abated. What was the purpose of my trip? I wanted to leave, and I wanted to follow you. So I did. For two years. Could it have been that simple? I stretched for something deeper, and found inside myself absolutely nothing.
Coming into customs, I was gripped by an unreasonable and overly generalized fury. Everyone seemed so loud and pushy and fat and self-satisfied that I wanted to kill them all. I thought of Thai people bowing in silence, the intense dissatisfaction of your comrades in Spain. And you I imagined doing god-knows-what with your husband. How did you keep something so big a secret for so long? Was that why we didn’t share an apartment? (In retrospect, I bet you wished he mattered to me as little as he mattered to you, and I begin to understand how small and manipulative we both were).
“Passport.” I loathed the little blue book. I loathed the half-shaven, triple-chinned official who didn’t say please, who looked at me like the country would be better off without my long hair and jet-lagged eyes. “What was the purpose of your trip abroad?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’d suggest you change your attitude real quick, partner, or you’re going to be spending a long time in an airport holding cell.”
Standing at the baggage claim there was more room to breathe, and the desire to strangle someone abated. What was the purpose of my trip? I wanted to leave, and I wanted to follow you. So I did. For two years. Could it have been that simple? I stretched for something deeper, and found inside myself absolutely nothing.
[…]
I stayed with my sister and her boyfriend in Park Slope. They took me out for Thai food and tapas. They gave me some money, then found me a job waiting tables at a wine bar in the neighborhood. I moved into my own apartment after a month. I remember almost nothing from this time, except the sensation that there was a hollowness inside me that could devour everything. It did devour everything. Nothing from that time survived.
Loneliness
It was a great way to lose weight. For me, it was cheese sandwiches without mustard in an empty kitchen at sunrise. It was cigarette breath and going three days without hearing my own voice, so when it came out it was cracked and dry as the skin of an old woman’s hand. Loneliness was your name in the morning, and crying into the mirror. Tap water and pornography.
It was so many things. The telephone you never called. Loneliness was e-mail. Eventually it became the internet in general, cell phone towers, the waves they emit that penetrate everything, everywhere, all the time.
Sleep was what I had. But even in sleep was the knowledge that if I slept for a hundred years I would still wake up choking on your absence. It’s not time that heals—it is suffering.
It was so many things. The telephone you never called. Loneliness was e-mail. Eventually it became the internet in general, cell phone towers, the waves they emit that penetrate everything, everywhere, all the time.
Sleep was what I had. But even in sleep was the knowledge that if I slept for a hundred years I would still wake up choking on your absence. It’s not time that heals—it is suffering.
[…]
I tried, eventually, to resuscitate myself by artificial means. I saw friends, and spoke to my parents on the phone. I listened to music and started running. I started saving money. I went to museums, admired Modigliani.
None of this worked. I hated you for all of it. Hated you when I was inspired, because you inspired me. Hated you when I found some excitement in the city, because I imagined your life was far more exciting. I hated you because you never wrote. I hated you for letting me leave. I hated you for not rerouting my plane back to your bedroom. I hated you for not following me. I hated you not because I was alone, but because I was halved. I hated you at parties, because I was only functioning, merely charming. I hated everyone for not being you. Hated you for not being me. Above all, I hated myself for hating so much.
But eventually my shelves filled with books, my walls with paintings, and a life piled up around me. Everywhere I’ve ever gone has eventually become home, and Brooklyn was no different.
None of this worked. I hated you for all of it. Hated you when I was inspired, because you inspired me. Hated you when I found some excitement in the city, because I imagined your life was far more exciting. I hated you because you never wrote. I hated you for letting me leave. I hated you for not rerouting my plane back to your bedroom. I hated you for not following me. I hated you not because I was alone, but because I was halved. I hated you at parties, because I was only functioning, merely charming. I hated everyone for not being you. Hated you for not being me. Above all, I hated myself for hating so much.
But eventually my shelves filled with books, my walls with paintings, and a life piled up around me. Everywhere I’ve ever gone has eventually become home, and Brooklyn was no different.
Ushuaia, Spring
The warming air draws fog from the snow. People merge, buildings fade away and appear without reason, and it is easy to imagine that I’ve become a ghost, some impalpable, mute, formless thing stirred and carried in tendrils by passing breezes. If I am one of the dead, then in time I’ll find that this fog stretches out over the continents, obscures the sea, the sun and the stars.
Salt
You appeared.
“What the fuck?” You said nothing. “How did you get my address?”
“I needed to see you.”
“Why didn’t you write? Where have you been?”
“I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me.”
“Good guess.”
“You’re the one who left me crying in the street.”
“Whatever.”
“Can I come in?”
Your perfume confuses me. I am susceptible to your smell, and your haircut angers me. Why didn’t you die when I was gone? I try to focus, but I slide off and who let you in?
I am a marionette. You are one, too. We fiddle with each others’ strings, but who sustains and motivates us, I do not know. This is why we describe our gods as fickle and cruel.
“I have something I have to tell you.” And then you tell me.
“That’s. A dirty trick.” But it wasn’t.
First I cry, then I break my hand. Blood and tears, salt and water: that’s mostly what I’m made of. I let them run, but there always seems to be more. Enough for everyone.
“What the fuck?” You said nothing. “How did you get my address?”
“I needed to see you.”
“Why didn’t you write? Where have you been?”
“I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me.”
“Good guess.”
“You’re the one who left me crying in the street.”
“Whatever.”
“Can I come in?”
Your perfume confuses me. I am susceptible to your smell, and your haircut angers me. Why didn’t you die when I was gone? I try to focus, but I slide off and who let you in?
I am a marionette. You are one, too. We fiddle with each others’ strings, but who sustains and motivates us, I do not know. This is why we describe our gods as fickle and cruel.
“I have something I have to tell you.” And then you tell me.
“That’s. A dirty trick.” But it wasn’t.
First I cry, then I break my hand. Blood and tears, salt and water: that’s mostly what I’m made of. I let them run, but there always seems to be more. Enough for everyone.
Formulaic
The waiting room at Sloan-Kettering was a Petri dish for the breeding of new strains of feeling, and love washed up like a red tide. My certainties were unstable. My emotions tumbling through an embarrassing alchemy where jealousy and love made hate, and hate, pity, and fear of loss made love again. Realizations like the rampant glittering of microbes. The destructive over-propagation of our own nuclei, and health and sickness just a matter of proportion.
Your father is in Hong Kong. He is in Tokyo. By long-distance telephone, he pays the bills, which have more zeros on them than I will ever own.
I pester, I spread my fear over a number of doctors and nurses. She’s fine. The tests will take time. She’s watching TV, she’s eating, she’s sleeping (she’s doing better than you). She laughs a lot, she’s brave.
Waiting tables at night, sleeping in the waiting room until dawn. Waiting, testing, waiting with one plaster hand, its words snapped off at the metacarpals. Fear isn’t fear when it lasts this long. The soul stretches out like gum between a shoe and the sidewalk, much farther and thinner than you’d think it would go. Waiting, always and forever waiting, and everything I ever felt for you became please don’t die. Your cancer was my recovery.
The weeks add up. They signify, because if this isn’t love, then why am I sleeping on burlap chairs in stale air bleached by fluorescent lights? I feel terror. It must be love.
Your father is in Hong Kong. He is in Tokyo. By long-distance telephone, he pays the bills, which have more zeros on them than I will ever own.
I pester, I spread my fear over a number of doctors and nurses. She’s fine. The tests will take time. She’s watching TV, she’s eating, she’s sleeping (she’s doing better than you). She laughs a lot, she’s brave.
Waiting tables at night, sleeping in the waiting room until dawn. Waiting, testing, waiting with one plaster hand, its words snapped off at the metacarpals. Fear isn’t fear when it lasts this long. The soul stretches out like gum between a shoe and the sidewalk, much farther and thinner than you’d think it would go. Waiting, always and forever waiting, and everything I ever felt for you became please don’t die. Your cancer was my recovery.
The weeks add up. They signify, because if this isn’t love, then why am I sleeping on burlap chairs in stale air bleached by fluorescent lights? I feel terror. It must be love.
Changing Pressure
The snow drops in pumpkin-sized clumps from pitched roofs and my hand aches from the changing pressure. There is a springtime in the arctic. Today I write like breathing, a sign of life. My heart beats, and I trace lines of ink over ink-lined pages. I think this might never end. I think I am a moth chasing the moon.
These words will end, and continue. The same words, organized by my will and by the changing of the seasons and the contents of my belly.
I’ll live another love, more or less the same. Shaped by the changing of the seasons, the contents of our bellies.
So will these words then serve some other end? Or will I always hang them at the end of the dock, a green light calling you in?
These words will end, and continue. The same words, organized by my will and by the changing of the seasons and the contents of my belly.
I’ll live another love, more or less the same. Shaped by the changing of the seasons, the contents of our bellies.
So will these words then serve some other end? Or will I always hang them at the end of the dock, a green light calling you in?
Happy
After the surgery they let me wheel you out on your back. The slice through the muscles of your abdomen made it impossible for you to sit, twist, roll over in bed.
Your father’s apartment is bigger than the house I grew up in. I never told you, but he offered to pay me to stay with you while he was away. I was insulted and I took the money.
I cooked for you, emptied your bedpan, changed your sheets, was happy again.
Your father’s apartment is bigger than the house I grew up in. I never told you, but he offered to pay me to stay with you while he was away. I was insulted and I took the money.
I cooked for you, emptied your bedpan, changed your sheets, was happy again.
Move
I left Ushuaia last week on a bus that carried me two days across thawing Patagonia. Green creeping up the Andes, the roads muddy and rutted. In the sky, predator birds circle, waiting for small rodents to stray from their holes.
In Buenos Aires it is already late spring. It is traffic like a bar fight, miniskirts and high heels, the sun screaming down on suits and cellphone calls like machine gun fire, sidewalk cafes walls of conversation.
I rented a small flat in Palermo, in a tall building with a west-facing balcony. You would love the watery light that thickens the air just before sunset. In the mornings I wake up to taxi drivers lying on their horns and a bakery so potent I can smell it from eight stories above. I read a lot. In the mornings, I drink small coffees so thick that sugar sits in a pile on top of a layer of tan foam. An old man waits the tables here, and we are becoming friends.
I spend my afternoons in la Librería de Ávila. The books here, like me, like you, are ordered loosely by whatever system’s handy. Subject, genre, time-period. But there is some order, if you look for it, and there is the calm of dusty shelves. They are stacked as haphazardly as the buildings of the city, like a Tetris game gone awry, and each day I leave with a small volume which I put on the nearly empty shelf in my new living room.
The city, the café, the bookstore: these things grow in me like the spring—carefully, in search of the sun.
In Buenos Aires it is already late spring. It is traffic like a bar fight, miniskirts and high heels, the sun screaming down on suits and cellphone calls like machine gun fire, sidewalk cafes walls of conversation.
I rented a small flat in Palermo, in a tall building with a west-facing balcony. You would love the watery light that thickens the air just before sunset. In the mornings I wake up to taxi drivers lying on their horns and a bakery so potent I can smell it from eight stories above. I read a lot. In the mornings, I drink small coffees so thick that sugar sits in a pile on top of a layer of tan foam. An old man waits the tables here, and we are becoming friends.
I spend my afternoons in la Librería de Ávila. The books here, like me, like you, are ordered loosely by whatever system’s handy. Subject, genre, time-period. But there is some order, if you look for it, and there is the calm of dusty shelves. They are stacked as haphazardly as the buildings of the city, like a Tetris game gone awry, and each day I leave with a small volume which I put on the nearly empty shelf in my new living room.
The city, the café, the bookstore: these things grow in me like the spring—carefully, in search of the sun.
Fray
First the gash seared, then throbbed, then it ached, then it itched. You could roll out of bed and stand upright. In another week, you could twist, another and you could sit up, the muscles of you abdomen knitting your symmetric sides back together. The scar was as long as my forearm, a tidy red ridge from your ribs through your bellybutton, threads hanging loose on either end like you were a sweater starting to fray.
You said you wanted me to be a part of your life, meaning that you didn’t want me to be a big part of your life. “Don’t be so heavy,” you said. Heavy like how? “Heavy like that, like the tone in your voice.” You said you had another round of tests in six months, that you were going to be in New York, that you wanted to see me, and a lot of other people, too.
“I might not have a lot of time to live, so I want to live a lot.”
You said it so plainly. What was I supposed to do? After three weeks you didn’t really need me except to stretch for things on high shelves. And what you wanted was universal as one plus one.
“I notice you didn’t bring this up when I was your only source of food.”
“That? That’s too heavy.”
I should have gone to Addis Ababa. Sex was a bad, bad idea. At the time I told myself that it was worth it, the highs and lows to come, to feel every second, to feel until even my dreams were charged and alive. To live with passion was the only way to live. I should have run—I knew you were turning into a devourer of worlds.
I could hear it in your voice. Doubt excised and all weakness cauterized, talking about living. What is life besides doubt and weakness? You seemed to know. I knew what was coming. I thought I would survive. It wasn’t like you were actually going to kill me.
You said you wanted me to be a part of your life, meaning that you didn’t want me to be a big part of your life. “Don’t be so heavy,” you said. Heavy like how? “Heavy like that, like the tone in your voice.” You said you had another round of tests in six months, that you were going to be in New York, that you wanted to see me, and a lot of other people, too.
“I might not have a lot of time to live, so I want to live a lot.”
You said it so plainly. What was I supposed to do? After three weeks you didn’t really need me except to stretch for things on high shelves. And what you wanted was universal as one plus one.
“I notice you didn’t bring this up when I was your only source of food.”
“That? That’s too heavy.”
I should have gone to Addis Ababa. Sex was a bad, bad idea. At the time I told myself that it was worth it, the highs and lows to come, to feel every second, to feel until even my dreams were charged and alive. To live with passion was the only way to live. I should have run—I knew you were turning into a devourer of worlds.
I could hear it in your voice. Doubt excised and all weakness cauterized, talking about living. What is life besides doubt and weakness? You seemed to know. I knew what was coming. I thought I would survive. It wasn’t like you were actually going to kill me.
Other
On East 88th Street you were taxis and limos, never the subway. You were the theatre, and cocktail parties for the Party. Your meetings became hundred-dollar bottles of vodka and champagne, and you’d come home bubbling and fall asleep on the couch, rather than on fire and up all night. You were exclusive, your friends were famous, rich, or famous and rich, and when you had to speak to someone like me you would freeze, not out of rudeness, but as if you were required to speak a foreign language, and terrified of making a mistake. You talked about your life as if it were something detachable from its surroundings, a thing you would plan and execute.
Were you always this other person, waiting to be born, some different self cut loose when they took a twelve-pound tumor from behind your stomach? You were always wild, a roamer, a sensation-seeker. But within some limits. After, you were as inconsiderate as a god.
Then, one weekend, maybe two weekends a month, you were fisherman’s trousers and a hoodie, books on the balcony, cigarettes in the freezer, watching movies with me. And I could imagine you as a Thai island, or as the cathedral on the cliffs at Sitges. The woods on the Lake, the Ramble in Central Park.
I thought I knew you on several occasions. Now I try to catch hold, and you slip like fish around my hand.
Were you always this other person, waiting to be born, some different self cut loose when they took a twelve-pound tumor from behind your stomach? You were always wild, a roamer, a sensation-seeker. But within some limits. After, you were as inconsiderate as a god.
Then, one weekend, maybe two weekends a month, you were fisherman’s trousers and a hoodie, books on the balcony, cigarettes in the freezer, watching movies with me. And I could imagine you as a Thai island, or as the cathedral on the cliffs at Sitges. The woods on the Lake, the Ramble in Central Park.
I thought I knew you on several occasions. Now I try to catch hold, and you slip like fish around my hand.
Shitty Love
Parents tell their children, when they become teenagers and adults: I fed you, I clothed you, I washed you and changed your diapers. Did that give me some claim on you? Apparently not. But, carrying your shit and piss, some enzyme you secreted crawled up my nose and into my blood and told me I am yours, love me.
What else could I have done?
What else could I have done?
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?
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?
Sorry
You had to have been expecting some kind of explosion. It’s just volatility and compression. Frankly, I’m not sorry. If you didn’t want people to know you fucked half of the state finance committee in Albany, then you shouldn’t have fucked half of the state finance committee in Albany. People were saying that they were impressed with your negotiating abilities. So am I, really.
I’m not sorry for any of my ridiculous claims, nor am I sorry for dumping that 40 over your head when you came to apologize. I’m still happy that I fucked your new secretary and Veronica, and yes, I was the one who stole your Cat Stevens record from the party.
I am sorry that I turned into the kind of person who gets into loud, bitter arguments in cafes. I am deeply sorry that I lost myself. But you expected me to, didn’t you?
I’m not sorry for any of my ridiculous claims, nor am I sorry for dumping that 40 over your head when you came to apologize. I’m still happy that I fucked your new secretary and Veronica, and yes, I was the one who stole your Cat Stevens record from the party.
I am sorry that I turned into the kind of person who gets into loud, bitter arguments in cafes. I am deeply sorry that I lost myself. But you expected me to, didn’t you?
Good Airs
Looking southeast from my balcony I can see the Rio Plata, the Silver River, which is actually the color of chocolate milk. Romantic names, labeling things as we wish they were. As they used to be or could have been.
The Rio Plata must have been named for the silver stolen from Alta Peru, now Bolivia, shipped through here on its way to Spain. The blood you drew from me left me dry. I fared just as poorly as one of your misnamed colonies.
Even in the spring the air in Buenos Aires is not so good, except around los lagos, the lungs of the city, which are filled with good air and transvestites. But every evening I watch from my balcony as the smog gathers the bleeding rays of the sunset and strings the fallen day into a cat’s cradle.
The Rio Plata must have been named for the silver stolen from Alta Peru, now Bolivia, shipped through here on its way to Spain. The blood you drew from me left me dry. I fared just as poorly as one of your misnamed colonies.
Even in the spring the air in Buenos Aires is not so good, except around los lagos, the lungs of the city, which are filled with good air and transvestites. But every evening I watch from my balcony as the smog gathers the bleeding rays of the sunset and strings the fallen day into a cat’s cradle.
Moving
You had identical faces during fights and during sex. Fighting in the stairwell, I knew we were going to fuck at the top. Why did I have to act like an asshole to get you back? Why did it work?
At brunch in a packed diner in Williamsburg we decided to leave together. Again. You had a job offer in at the UN in Quito, and I had nothing, but it was better than a paycheck that disappeared into rent and insurance and a job teaching in the ghetto.
You bought me a ticket and we moved to Quito like painting over rotten drywall. Patching up what should have been cut out and replaced. Instead we rented an apartment in Guapulo and danced salsa in the kitchen, killing time until the cave-in.
At brunch in a packed diner in Williamsburg we decided to leave together. Again. You had a job offer in at the UN in Quito, and I had nothing, but it was better than a paycheck that disappeared into rent and insurance and a job teaching in the ghetto.
You bought me a ticket and we moved to Quito like painting over rotten drywall. Patching up what should have been cut out and replaced. Instead we rented an apartment in Guapulo and danced salsa in the kitchen, killing time until the cave-in.
Habit
We moved, now by habit, and I found myself waking up to Ecuadorian mornings, going out to the bakery at sunrise, my first words of the day in Spanish with the baker’s boys. The elevator door opening into the living room, and in the kitchen, I set two cups of coffee and warm pan de yucca on the glass table. The sound of your hairdryer down the hall. I cut pineapple, kiwi, strawberries, any fruit at hand, into a bowl with yogurt and brown sugar. A cigarette by the window, the tile floor in the sun. Then you’re gone, and it’s the traffic on Republica del Salvador while I write at the empty table. Reading instead of looking for a job. Meeting you after work for canelazo on the terrace of Café Guapulo, watching the sunset in the valley, the cathedral hung out over acres of empty space. We’d take a cab to dinner in Plaza Fosch. Go dancing. You felt like an actor, right? Pretending not to notice what was missing. Hiding resentment, feigning interest.
That’s why I sometimes got into fights.
And I’d wake up with a black eye and go to the bakery. When I came back, there’d be two cups of coffee on the glass table. Our peaceful morning routine.
That’s why I sometimes got into fights.
And I’d wake up with a black eye and go to the bakery. When I came back, there’d be two cups of coffee on the glass table. Our peaceful morning routine.
I Heart NY
You leased a white Volvo and we drove around the mountains, spent colibri weekends in Mindo, drove down the volcano highway and hiked through the Cajas fog, darted to Guayaquil and the coast, then swung north to Montañita for a weekend and ended up staying for a week. Were we compulsively wandering, hiding out in small surf towns hoping that our un-fights couldn’t find us? The reggae from the bars on sandy streets helped. The highland lakes in Cajas, the road always ahead, paved, unpaved, meandering through the Andes and falling into the emerald coast—for a time, constant movement like a kaleidoscope of bright green and blue befuddled mutual resentment.
But a black, spiked city sat at the back of my brain, the site of my humiliation; in your mind were lights strung like diamonds over all the buildings and streets, a city shared by the world. Just hearing you say “I miss New York” made me seasick, made the ground turn liquid and filled my throat with rubber.
Fuck New York. Fuck the art world, the music scene, fuck the fashion industry and all my friends there. Fuck the N/R and the 4/5/6, fuck Union Square and Museum Mile, and especially fuck napping in Strawberry Fields, waiting for you to take me out.
Your New York was twenty-seven languages on the way to work, was Frieda Kahlo on loan, was debates in the restaurants where debates actually matter. Your New York was a view from a penthouse.
I never really hated New York. It was just that one of our cities had to prevail.
But a black, spiked city sat at the back of my brain, the site of my humiliation; in your mind were lights strung like diamonds over all the buildings and streets, a city shared by the world. Just hearing you say “I miss New York” made me seasick, made the ground turn liquid and filled my throat with rubber.
Fuck New York. Fuck the art world, the music scene, fuck the fashion industry and all my friends there. Fuck the N/R and the 4/5/6, fuck Union Square and Museum Mile, and especially fuck napping in Strawberry Fields, waiting for you to take me out.
Your New York was twenty-seven languages on the way to work, was Frieda Kahlo on loan, was debates in the restaurants where debates actually matter. Your New York was a view from a penthouse.
I never really hated New York. It was just that one of our cities had to prevail.
I Hate You
It doesn’t matter who said it first, though I know it was me. Once it was said, it echoed, like the first I love you. Echoed your tone of voice when you asked me to pass the sugar. In the inviolable space between us while we slept. I wanted to stop thinking it, and for a time we could live normally, having our coffee, walking the dog, but after more than two drinks, one of us would say something vicious.
How long did it last? I have no idea. Like steam escaping through a too-small duct, our mouths, pressurized by the insufficiency of words. From then on, it wasn’t safe for us to have two consecutive drinks together, or to disagree over a small thing. All that drama. Where did it come from? What was the point?
I would have dumped me, too. You can’t live with someone who thinks they hate you.
How long did it last? I have no idea. Like steam escaping through a too-small duct, our mouths, pressurized by the insufficiency of words. From then on, it wasn’t safe for us to have two consecutive drinks together, or to disagree over a small thing. All that drama. Where did it come from? What was the point?
I would have dumped me, too. You can’t live with someone who thinks they hate you.
[…]
There is no end to a round world, so anywhere can be an end. For us, the end came in the middle. But we kept on, oblivious as inertia, like planets trying to touch the sun.
Stuck
You know how I knew? Two coffee circles on the glass table when I came home from work. I saw them, ignored them, but they stuck. You never mentioned them. I knew. I wasn’t going to say anything. I’d brought you sunflowers, and I sat them there next to the coffee stains, looked for two seconds, just to the point before it registered. The sunflowers were because I’d done something terrible the night before—I think it was the night we went out drinking at The Blues and I told you I wished you’d died.
A week later, a sofa pillow lying on the floor, which I also managed to ignore. A bare footprint on the dust in the laundry room, too big to be either of ours.
I walked around the city feeling sick, pretending I didn’t know why. One day I got hit by a car. I never told you, and I remember it now only hazily, like something that happened when I was drunk. It was mid-afternoon, but maybe I was drunk, I don’t know. I rolled right up onto the hood of the car and laid there looking up at the sky. It was so blue, so clear.
A week later, a sofa pillow lying on the floor, which I also managed to ignore. A bare footprint on the dust in the laundry room, too big to be either of ours.
I walked around the city feeling sick, pretending I didn’t know why. One day I got hit by a car. I never told you, and I remember it now only hazily, like something that happened when I was drunk. It was mid-afternoon, but maybe I was drunk, I don’t know. I rolled right up onto the hood of the car and laid there looking up at the sky. It was so blue, so clear.
Dropped
Then, the cave-in. One morning, in the sun, I remembered our first morning and I kissed your shoulder and moved a finger under the waistband of your pyjamas, and you told me “I can’t. I’m with someone.”
You looked me right in the eyes as if you’d been practicing; you were ready. But the worst part was that you were trying to hide your excitement, a sloppy grin suppressed out of pity, or only politeness. You were in love, and I was just a ghost of a life that happened to be stirring the curtains.
“So I guess I should move out.”
“You packed your bags three weeks ago.”
“I bought you flowers.” You just shook your head.
“So is that when it started? Three weeks ago?”
“More like three months.”
“We’ve only been in the city for four.”
“It just happened,” you said. Like you’d dropped a pen, bent to pick it up, and found yourself holding a boyfriend instead. Something not even worth mentioning.
You looked me right in the eyes as if you’d been practicing; you were ready. But the worst part was that you were trying to hide your excitement, a sloppy grin suppressed out of pity, or only politeness. You were in love, and I was just a ghost of a life that happened to be stirring the curtains.
“So I guess I should move out.”
“You packed your bags three weeks ago.”
“I bought you flowers.” You just shook your head.
“So is that when it started? Three weeks ago?”
“More like three months.”
“We’ve only been in the city for four.”
“It just happened,” you said. Like you’d dropped a pen, bent to pick it up, and found yourself holding a boyfriend instead. Something not even worth mentioning.
Forgetting
Last fall’s leaves stick along the side of the spring-wet street, and hundreds of drops run the course of a window in the café where I came to have an espresso and think about someone I’ve just met. Memories of you hide in the leaves and in the droplets, but she is the café, the hum of the lights and the still air.
Sometimes I dream of you and me in rocking chairs, the wet knot inside untied, or cut in half by some passing philosopher dressed as a dog. I wake, and I wait, and I outgrow my anger. In the meantime, my life is a series of studio apartments. Café menus in any language but my own. E-mails addressed to the people you were. Memories stick to the streets, clog up the drains. Leech into our roots to feed the next season’s flowering.
She’s the daughter of a friend of my aunt. I met her at a dinner in Ramos Mejia, tried to talk to other people at the table, but kept falling back into conversation with her. After, we shared a cigarette in the garden, and I kissed her without considering. I sit here remembering the soft resistance of her lips, the tip of her tongue, the edge of her tooth. People hurry out of the rain. The streets glow, and the drains clog up with leaves.
Sometimes I dream of you and me in rocking chairs, the wet knot inside untied, or cut in half by some passing philosopher dressed as a dog. I wake, and I wait, and I outgrow my anger. In the meantime, my life is a series of studio apartments. Café menus in any language but my own. E-mails addressed to the people you were. Memories stick to the streets, clog up the drains. Leech into our roots to feed the next season’s flowering.
She’s the daughter of a friend of my aunt. I met her at a dinner in Ramos Mejia, tried to talk to other people at the table, but kept falling back into conversation with her. After, we shared a cigarette in the garden, and I kissed her without considering. I sit here remembering the soft resistance of her lips, the tip of her tongue, the edge of her tooth. People hurry out of the rain. The streets glow, and the drains clog up with leaves.
Blame
Maybe if I’d yelled and screamed and stuffed the sunflowers down your throat it would have saved me months at war with my memories.
Instead, I left quietly furious. I hated you too much to dare to speak. By the time I had bought my ticket and checked in for my flight, I started to miss you. On the plane, I put a sweatshirt over my head to cry, and soaked the two sleeves through.
It got worse, the farther I got from you. A week earlier, I couldn’t stand the sight of you. Couldn’t stand your voice, your rice cakes or your morning breath, your prodigious collection of shoes. By the end of the flight, I had missed each shoe in turn, left by right. I cried, thinking I’d never wake up to your morning breath again, craved rice cakes, and wanted only to find a place to buy a cell phone so I could hear you tell me that it was not what it seemed, not permanent.
Instead, I left quietly furious. I hated you too much to dare to speak. By the time I had bought my ticket and checked in for my flight, I started to miss you. On the plane, I put a sweatshirt over my head to cry, and soaked the two sleeves through.
It got worse, the farther I got from you. A week earlier, I couldn’t stand the sight of you. Couldn’t stand your voice, your rice cakes or your morning breath, your prodigious collection of shoes. By the end of the flight, I had missed each shoe in turn, left by right. I cried, thinking I’d never wake up to your morning breath again, craved rice cakes, and wanted only to find a place to buy a cell phone so I could hear you tell me that it was not what it seemed, not permanent.
Story
I didn’t call, because I talked to you so much more once you were gone. I sat in a folding chair behind my parents’ house looking at a winterbare cornfield and reminiscing with you about the time in Thailand when our little stream flooded up the stilts over the porch up to the lip of the doorway. We went back to the cabin in Mindo. We tried to figure out why we’d fought, how we could make up, when I could come back to you. What kind of job I should look for. What toppings I should order on my pizza. How everything is always trying to dissolve into nothing. In the mornings I said good morning, at night, goodnight. I apologized for everything I’d done, and you graciously accepted. You said you were sorry.
I assume you moved in with your boyfriend, or he with you. I don’t think you thought about me. So I invented a new you, one who belonged only to me, and I lived with her. We fought, a lot, and I screamed at you for hours, but she never left, and I could never leave her. And over the months we mellowed and became calm, dull as loneliness, polishing our story.
I assume you moved in with your boyfriend, or he with you. I don’t think you thought about me. So I invented a new you, one who belonged only to me, and I lived with her. We fought, a lot, and I screamed at you for hours, but she never left, and I could never leave her. And over the months we mellowed and became calm, dull as loneliness, polishing our story.
Too Alive
The best part about her is that she doesn’t remind me of you. Kissing her is like being kissed for the first time. When she left this morning, I wanted her, not you, to come back.
Now I’m sitting in a café, blushing at last night, thinking the waiters can see.
I itch, am distracted, and it grows into an intense feeling of dissatisfaction, a mad, driving desire that makes my fingertips tingle and twitch. It’s almost pleasurable, feeling a little too alive, unsatisfied again.
Now I’m sitting in a café, blushing at last night, thinking the waiters can see.
I itch, am distracted, and it grows into an intense feeling of dissatisfaction, a mad, driving desire that makes my fingertips tingle and twitch. It’s almost pleasurable, feeling a little too alive, unsatisfied again.
Worldwide Web
From the guest bedroom in my parents’ house I worked as a translator for a medical device company in Venezuela. I found it on the internet. One day on MSN I asked Francisco about a word I couldn’t find in any dictionary. We started chatting, and she congratulated me on the baby.
“I saw on Facebook,” she said. I looked, and there was a picture of you in a hospital gown holding a baby.
I had reached a sort of peace with my imagined version of you. We were just taking a break, and someday soon you would call, and come home. That peace folded up like a map, and all the narrow lines I’d charted between cities were obliterated. I stared out the window of what used to be my high school bedroom, all my books and posters now carefully arranged in the closet. Somewhere in the world there was new life, but it was not mine.
“I saw on Facebook,” she said. I looked, and there was a picture of you in a hospital gown holding a baby.
I had reached a sort of peace with my imagined version of you. We were just taking a break, and someday soon you would call, and come home. That peace folded up like a map, and all the narrow lines I’d charted between cities were obliterated. I stared out the window of what used to be my high school bedroom, all my books and posters now carefully arranged in the closet. Somewhere in the world there was new life, but it was not mine.
Writing
I stand by what I wrote. I tried to be reasonable, and if a few insults slipped in, it was for obvious reasons. Having a baby with someone you just met is far dumber than moving to Thailand with someone you just met. Isn’t it? I don’t know.
And it was a legitimate question. Just because the photos were uploaded in January doesn’t mean they weren’t taken in December. Except for all your status updates on January 3rd. Fuck January 3rd. My whole year, for that matter.
Sorry. Your e-mail was nice. Really.
And it was a legitimate question. Just because the photos were uploaded in January doesn’t mean they weren’t taken in December. Except for all your status updates on January 3rd. Fuck January 3rd. My whole year, for that matter.
Sorry. Your e-mail was nice. Really.
[…]
First, you do not get to tell me that I’m stupid. We are clearly idiots together. Also, speaking of together, idiot, we’re not. You’re not allowed to write me anymore. This is the last e-mail I’m going to answer.
Yes, she was born on January 3rd, you can relax. Dad took the pictures. Isabel is healthy, and home. I moved the washer and dryer into the hall closet, so the maid’s room is a nursery now. I put carpet in, and am slowly baby-proofing.
I’m healthy, too. I’m tired all the time from sleeping in ninety minute spurts, and I’m still fat, but I’m happy. At peace.
Yes, I regret how it happened. I should have found another way. But I don’t regret that it did happen. I should tell you, there was never anyone else. I mean, I was seeing someone before you left, but not really. He left as soon as I told him I was pregnant, and good riddance.
I just needed to find a way to get out of whatever it was that we were doing. That was not living. We were killing each other.
I should also tell you I was diagnosed for the first time a two days before I met you. I didn’t actually intend to go to Thailand. I thought I was going to die. The next day they called back saying that it was benign, and that they wanted to leave it alone for six months, rather than operate on me. Then you called, and you were so excited—you were so alive. All I wanted then was to have some fun. But l learned to love you so quickly. So quickly. It was all such a surprise. I’d dreamed that I would meet someone who would run away with me, and love me so intensely that it would cancel out everything else. I worshipped you, I think—I thought you had the power to keep me alive.
And you did. What I learned from you, from everything, is that there is nothing better than being alive. Every cell in your body aches for it, every system, every piece of you, even while it’s dying, is dying to live. It’s all we have to do.
All you have to do is live. Live as long, live as much as you can.
Love,
Me
Yes, she was born on January 3rd, you can relax. Dad took the pictures. Isabel is healthy, and home. I moved the washer and dryer into the hall closet, so the maid’s room is a nursery now. I put carpet in, and am slowly baby-proofing.
I’m healthy, too. I’m tired all the time from sleeping in ninety minute spurts, and I’m still fat, but I’m happy. At peace.
Yes, I regret how it happened. I should have found another way. But I don’t regret that it did happen. I should tell you, there was never anyone else. I mean, I was seeing someone before you left, but not really. He left as soon as I told him I was pregnant, and good riddance.
I just needed to find a way to get out of whatever it was that we were doing. That was not living. We were killing each other.
I should also tell you I was diagnosed for the first time a two days before I met you. I didn’t actually intend to go to Thailand. I thought I was going to die. The next day they called back saying that it was benign, and that they wanted to leave it alone for six months, rather than operate on me. Then you called, and you were so excited—you were so alive. All I wanted then was to have some fun. But l learned to love you so quickly. So quickly. It was all such a surprise. I’d dreamed that I would meet someone who would run away with me, and love me so intensely that it would cancel out everything else. I worshipped you, I think—I thought you had the power to keep me alive.
And you did. What I learned from you, from everything, is that there is nothing better than being alive. Every cell in your body aches for it, every system, every piece of you, even while it’s dying, is dying to live. It’s all we have to do.
All you have to do is live. Live as long, live as much as you can.
Love,
Me
[…]
Last night I dreamed I was talking to her, but she was wearing your face. Your pine-colored hair, your turned-up nose, the freckle on your arm. But she couldn’t have been you. The conversation was too easy. I told her our story, and it was much shorter and simpler than I’d thought.
Then she became you, really you. I knew because we were on a raft, far out at sea. We had food and water, but the land was nowhere in sight. No ships, no seagulls. Just the sun on the water, and a subtly curving horizon.
Then she became you, really you. I knew because we were on a raft, far out at sea. We had food and water, but the land was nowhere in sight. No ships, no seagulls. Just the sun on the water, and a subtly curving horizon.
[...]
Six months after the last time you wrote, I got an e-mail from you. I deleted it, then a half hour later opened up my trash and read it. You were in the hospital again, and would I please come quickly.
I drove all night from Virginia to the city. It had been a year and a half since the last time I saw you, and I wasn’t even close to being clear of you. I cursed you every day, at every unoccupied second. Crying at traffic lights. Furious while I folded my laundry. So lonely at breakfast. Looking at baby photos on Facebook. I woke up in the mornings with my jaw aching, my teeth slowly turning to powder.
The road that night pulsed with twice-reflected light, sun to moon, moon to asphalt, and the lights on I-95 washed out the stars I’d grown up with, made them distant and indecipherable. The cities along the way, once friends of mine, shimmered at a distance, and my highway brother spoke some dialect of rubber and pavement that I’d never heard. I felt far from myself, an alien looking down at a planet made of water and concrete.
I drove all night from Virginia to the city. It had been a year and a half since the last time I saw you, and I wasn’t even close to being clear of you. I cursed you every day, at every unoccupied second. Crying at traffic lights. Furious while I folded my laundry. So lonely at breakfast. Looking at baby photos on Facebook. I woke up in the mornings with my jaw aching, my teeth slowly turning to powder.
The road that night pulsed with twice-reflected light, sun to moon, moon to asphalt, and the lights on I-95 washed out the stars I’d grown up with, made them distant and indecipherable. The cities along the way, once friends of mine, shimmered at a distance, and my highway brother spoke some dialect of rubber and pavement that I’d never heard. I felt far from myself, an alien looking down at a planet made of water and concrete.
I Missed You
I was devoured by the hospital’s white light, sucked into limbo at the instant of my death. Corridors too thin, and the voice of the receptionist like the pounding of a waterfall. “How are you related to the patient? Is she expecting you? What is your name?” My answers, all lies. Lies that opened the way to an empty room.
There had to have been some hint in her voice, some gesture or movement of her eyes that would have told me one way or another. She sent me to a specific room. You must have been there. Did she not know? Were you in surgery, the bathroom, the morgue? Were you driving home from a false alarm?
I saw only what was directly in front of me. The air was liquid, all sounds and words stretched out into incoherence. I saw the bed was made, the sheets pulled tight as a fake smile. I heard a distant beeping. Everything sterile, inscrutable. I felt nothing, saw little, heard noise. I stood there staring at a white bed in an empty room, and then I left. If there was any clue for me there, I missed it. If there was some remnant of your presence, I missed that, too.
Four hours later, I was on a flight to the end of the world.
There had to have been some hint in her voice, some gesture or movement of her eyes that would have told me one way or another. She sent me to a specific room. You must have been there. Did she not know? Were you in surgery, the bathroom, the morgue? Were you driving home from a false alarm?
I saw only what was directly in front of me. The air was liquid, all sounds and words stretched out into incoherence. I saw the bed was made, the sheets pulled tight as a fake smile. I heard a distant beeping. Everything sterile, inscrutable. I felt nothing, saw little, heard noise. I stood there staring at a white bed in an empty room, and then I left. If there was any clue for me there, I missed it. If there was some remnant of your presence, I missed that, too.
Four hours later, I was on a flight to the end of the world.
Summer in the Southern Hemisphere
It’s going to be a sweltering Christmas. The greens of spring are burning into brown, dead again in a different way. But I feel alive. Mena and I are going to the beach. I’m getting tan, and we’re getting to know each other. It’s all as careless and perfect as a rough draft.
I know you’re not going to write me back, for whatever reason. I hope you’re alive and well. I hope you’re happy, and I hope that you teach to Isabel what you taught me. To live as much as you can.
I’ll still miss you sometimes.
Goodbye my love,
Me
I know you’re not going to write me back, for whatever reason. I hope you’re alive and well. I hope you’re happy, and I hope that you teach to Isabel what you taught me. To live as much as you can.
I’ll still miss you sometimes.
Goodbye my love,
Me
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