Every weekend we begged our mothers to drive us to the mall, to leave us at the arched entrance by the Red Robin, and not to look back. We pooled our money. Birthdays, summer chores, quarters from fluorescent plastic Easter eggs. We bought T-shirts emblazoned with the names of bands and bracelets shaped like penises, breasts, middle fingers. We wore our contraband to school under our jackets and swapped shirts while waiting for the buses. No other kids recognized the faces spread across our chests, and we liked it that way. When we stared at our navels, we tugged our shirts tight until the singers’ black eyeliner stretched and smeared, until we were looking in a mirror. We straightened our hair, fried it, frizzed it, teased it with combs and cut layers up to our temples. Only Shyanne could convince her mother to buy the black box dye from Walmart. The rest of us concealed our envy and relief. We once went too far. We met older boys on the internet who sent us songs thick with screams and photos of their beat up cars and blue bangs and wistful eyes. Shyanne’s parents found our messages and phoned the school. We pleaded with the counselor not to tell our mothers. We laid low. We waited for the summer when Kelly would come to Grandma’s for a week. We smuggled a book, Introduction to Buddhism, all the way to New Jersey, desperate to decode the Nirvana lyrics all the blue boys wrote in their statuses. We wore skin-gripping gray jeans to Sunday Mass, and when Grandpa found our Buddhism lessons, he made us sit at the kitchen table while he read from the Book of Job. Grandma felt guilty and drove us to the shore. We wandered the sandy boardwalk, breathed salt air and never changed into our bathing suits. We yanked our tank tops above our ribs and let a local man give us henna tattoos. Peace signs, yin yangs, bold exploding suns. We said No when he asked if we wanted an outline of Italy on our inner thighs. We said Yes when he asked if we had enough olive oil at home to rub into our stained skin. That’s the secret to it lasting longer, he said with a wink. We made a plan to hide our bodies.A few weeks later, Kelly’s mom discovered the olive oil stashed behind the toilet, and we soon fell out. We went back to school, different schools, all of us. We swore we’d talk everyday, but Kelly told us not to call anymore after we tasted vodka with Shyanne’s brother. We got boyfriends, drank too much, lost each other's numbers when we lost our phones in dark rooms. Our lives unfurled on Facebook. We got tattoos, permanent this time. Kelly got married. Shyanne’s profile stayed frozen in our past. A middle school mall selfie. The sun ricocheting off a backdrop of parking lot snow, her black hair catching all the spare light. We have what relics we can remember. Not relics, fossils. The figures that left depressions in the sand are long gone, sand themselves now, returned to a great current I remember the Buddhists call a stream.
I have hurt my child by accident, banging his fine-haired head on open car doors or slipping down the stairs, purpling my spent body to shield his from impact. I used to be able to nurse the hurt away, both of us grateful for the easy relief. My inner voice says I am never glad when an accident happens. Another voice says I want to hurt my child on purpose. Those are the days when I am afraid to love my child, as if my love could eat him. My therapist says the past-abused often feel terrified that they or someone they love will hurt their children. I think of stressed mother rabbits that consume their young in disgraced conditions. How easily a creature breaks from her nature if the nest is sullied. I do not ask about the days I fear I do not love him enough, as if his love could eat me. In a mother velvet spider’s ideal scenario, her spiderlings consume her flesh after birth. Their womb-killing doesn’t prove her love or lack thereof. There is only the flesh of her flesh devouring her. Nature, too, is breakage. Thin white lines connect the nature of love and survival until the deep hunger passes. I let my milk dry. My son, walking and weaned, trips during our game of chase, teeth cutting lip. I kneel to mother his tear-streaked face blooming blood, steady for his burying into my chest. His fingers tug the neckline of my shirt for an opening. One of my hands stops his instinctual search while the other smears his blood on the wall. There, in that stain of flesh that belongs to neither of us, hides a love both familiar and new.“Let’s eat breakfast,” I say when the crying ends, leading him to the kitchen. He watches me with questioning eyes as I crack two eggs into the bowl and hand him a whisk. Together, we begin to beat.
It’s my favorite game I was so happy when you rang my doorbell and asked my mother if I could play because I wasn’t always asked sometimes I would see you all playing running through yards or peeking around bushes looking for the person who was it and once I heard two of you under my window whispering about where someone was hiding and of course I could hear the laughter and the shouting whenever they were found and I would tell myself it didn’t mean anything that I wasn’t asked even though everybody knew it was supposed to be all the kids on the block no one ever said it but we knew it and no one had asked me in a while I didn’t know if it was because of my father or if it was something about me so of course I said yes when the doorbell rang and I had known for a long time where I was going to hide I had picked the perfect hiding spot if I was asked to play again it was behind the garage in my backyard the narrow space between the back garage wall and the fence separating our backyard from the people who live behind us who I didn’t know at all and had seen only once or twice through their windows so when it was my time to be it I ran as fast as I could and squeezed in between the wall and the fence and it’s been okay waiting although it is a tight squeeze and I don’t like thinking that the neighbors might be looking out their back windows and seeing me here doing what they would wonder but I can ignore that the thing is though I have been out here a really long time and no one has found me even though I remember I saw one of you run past and I thought he saw me but he didn’t say anything and that was forever ago and I haven’t heard any callouts or cries or laughing in so long I almost think the game is over but I could be wrong and about to win and I’ve never won before so I will stay out here until someone finds me or I hear them calling even though it’s been so many years now since my father officially went crazy and left me in this town and my mother sold the house and moved away and then died not literally but to me just after my father died really died she was the one who got the news and she decided not to tell me because we were about to go on a vacation together for the first time in years and she didn’t want me not to go so she waited until the vacation was over and pretended he was still alive each time I mentioned him so I haven’t had any family for a long time now and all of us on the block we have all grown up and I think most of you have moved away too but I will stay here until one of you finds me or until someone calls out to say I won and the game is finally over and then we can all shout and laugh together which has to happen sometime one or the other because every game has an end or it isn’t really a game at all and if it isn’t and if it wasn’t if it was a prank or maybe the doorbell never actually rang then I am and have been completely alone and hiding all this time with no one searching in a place where no one will ever find me
1at the airport in lagos, we find out my bags are overweight. it doesn’t surprise me. how was I supposed to fit years of my life into two 23kg suitcases? I buy an overpriced ghana-must-go bag to replace the heavier suitcase so I have more room for my things but my bags are still overweight. my mother is frantic as we pack and unpack, and I decide what else to let go of. “are you sure you don’t need this? the dress is nice on you,” she asks as I hand her another item of clothing to take back home. I nod my head yes, despite the uncertainty that washes over me. I think to myself, maybe I do need this. I still need you. I don’t know what I can do without. my bags are exactly 23kg by the time we’re done. I finally check in and as I hug my mother goodbye, our words become tears. we stay in that embrace, in silence, weeping and weeping until an immigration officer asks me to stop crying because I’ll see my mother again soon. but I don’t know when soon is.2.ten days after I move to houston, I start feeling unwell. I tell myself it’s nothing serious and decide it’s fatigue from adjusting to the peak august heat, but I get progressively worse. my head won’t stop hurting. my throat is sore. my eyes are heavy. I’m burning up. I manage to buy flu and fever meds at a nearby h-e-b. for four days, I am confined to my apartment, weak and exhausted. I don’t have family or friends here yet. I haven’t figured out my health insurance plan. I don’t know if the meds are working. I have no appetite. I wake up each day feeling better and then worse. I cry because I’m so afraid. I set multiple alarms because I worry I will sleep and not wake up. my body feels like foreign matter the city is reacting to. 3.the sickness passes on its own, but for weeks I dread going to bed. I struggle to fall asleep and when I eventually do, I struggle to stay asleep. my dreams feel like malaria dreams: vivid and nonsensical. I dream of childhoods I didn’t have. I often dream of a lagos that I am familiar with but that also doesn’t exist. the events in the dreams blur the line between real and unreal. I wake up confused and worn out. I have to remind myself where I am. I still wake up at the times my alarms in lagos used to go off. my full-size bed feels like it’s consuming me so I start sleeping on my couch because there’s less room for me to wander, for my body to lose itself. in lagos, I had no trouble falling and staying asleep. 4.it’s midnight in lagos and london. everyone I love is asleep. but it’s 6pm in houston and I don’t know who to call or text about my day. I spend my evenings in silence in my apartment. it’s the quietest I’ve been in months. 5.on a saturday in september, I make puff puff from scratch for the first time. I combine flour, sugar, milk, yeast and warm water to form a stretchy dough. I worry that the consistency isn’t right but I cover the mixture with a towel, put it in one of the kitchen cabinets, and hope that it rises. I think about lagos and the small joy that was going on a drive to buy puff puff. and how it’d become a longer drive because I’d remember something else I needed to buy and stop at a supermarket, or two. I think about my regular routes that I could navigate without google maps and ubers and buses that are never on time. the dough rises as it should and I deep fry the mixture in scoops, watching mostly perfect golden brown balls form. I take a picture when I’m done frying the puff puff and send to my mother. I eat puff puff for lunch and dinner that day and then breakfast the next day.6.my screen time is at an all-time high. I don’t want to lose touch. I keep streaks on tiktok and snapchat. I send multiple long voice notes to update my friends. it’s always video calls with my parents and sisters, never audio calls. but I feel like I’m constantly playing catch-up. like I’m missing out on experiencing life happening to the people I love. it will never be the same again. I wake up on a monday morning in october and call my sister. she stays on the phone with me as my voice breaks and the tears fall. I just feel so alone, I just feel so alone. when my professor asks later that day if I’m settling into houston okay, I say that I am.7.I’m aware of my possibilities as a writer in houston, in a way that I wasn’t in lagos. it feels like for the first time in a long time, my writing finally has the space to thrive. I knew I needed to leave lagos. but being here is hard. my god, it’s so hard. 8.if plants aren’t repotted when they need it, they can outgrow their existing pots and become pot bound, causing them to suffer and struggle to survive. however, healthy plants may appear sick after repotting due to transplant shock, a temporary stress response caused by the disturbance of the plant’s root system. in most cases, transplant shock is temporary and while some plants will recover within a few weeks with proper care, others may take several months to fully recover. 9.it’s december. I’m still struggling to sleep through the night.
I was almost five years old, it was Christmas day, and I knew something was wrong because I’d gotten everything I’d asked for: a blue and white-checked gingham romper with buttons up the front; black, mid-calf cowboy boots with red stitching; and, most surprisingly, a fluffy black puppy with a bright white chest whom I would come to call Kentucky.I had never been to Kentucky and am not even sure how I’d learned the name, but I’d tested out several words from my dog name list and determined this was the best one.
A dog’s name should ring out when shouted. “Ken-tuck-yyyyyyyyyy!” I hollered from the back door, “Ken-tuck-yyyyyyyy!” I liked the way it sounded in the wind across the field. Yep, I thought, he would come to that.
***
My mother, her boyfriend Sonny, and I had just moved into an old farmhouse. It sat in the middle of a field at the edge of a trailer park down the gravel road from a lake, just north of the invisible line separating North Carolina from Virginia. They chose Virginia because that’s where Sonny’s three best friends had decided to start a business together, and they were cutting him in. They were dental techs–the fancy word for people who make false teeth–and running your own studio was the only way to make actual money in that profession back then. We were poor, so we moved.As we drove out of North Carolina and into Virginia, my mom pointed out countless road signs that told us Virginia was for lovers. I whispered Virginia is for lovers over and over again like an incantation under my breath–all the way until we made it to the new house. Maybe if I said it enough times, it might actually come true, I thought. Maybe we could really love each other there. And we did. Our Kerr Lake year was the happiest of my life. The house was old. The roof was a rusty blue tin that sounded like needles when it rained. The downstairs floor was made of shellacked brick that stayed cool all year long. Mine was the only bedroom. It was downstairs next to the kitchen, and my mom and Sonny slept upstairs in a small loft. The kitchen was tiny, with a half-sized oven, two burners, and a built-in griddle top. There was a fireplace, but there was no insulation. It was perfect.
***
Me, Kentucky, the boots, and the romper were inseparable. So inseparable that, even after days of wear, my mom would have to wait until I was asleep to take the romper from me and put it in the wash. When I’d awaken and realize it was gone, I’d be totally inconsolable while waiting for it to dry. I’d end up wearing that thing for years, only abandoning it once it started giving me a permanent wedgie that no amount of slumping could disguise. Just a few days after Christmas I came home from school and my mom was acting weird–extra nice–when she greeted me at the door. I noticed a swing inside, hanging from the eaves. It was made from two long ropes and a flat piece of wood, shellacked just like the brick floor. I wondered where it came from and why it was inside.“Do you want to, maybe, swing on it?” my mom asked playfully as she gestured toward it.Of COURSE I wanted to swing on it! I was the only kid I knew to have a swing INSIDE the house, and I couldn’t wait to brag about it to everybody at school.“Where did it come from!?” I asked.“Sonny made this for you.”“Really? Why?” I was suspicious considering Christmas had already passed.“Because he loves you.” She pushed me on the swing, high into the air, in the middle of the house. I pumped my legs, but the whole thing felt strange. Like a trap. And I wondered if I’d get punished later even though the whole thing had been her idea.“Hey,” she continued, “What would you think about Sonny becoming your dad?”I stopped swinging my legs. “But I already have a dad.”“Well,” she pushed, “What if Sonny were your dad instead?”“How does that work?”“Sonny would sign some papers saying he wants to be your dad, and after, your birth certificate would show his name instead of Mark’s.” “Will he want me to call him ‘Dad?’” I asked. I had never even called my birth father ‘Dad.’ I called him by his first name, Mark. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the word.“I’m sure,” my mother responded.I thought back to the last time I’d seen Mark. It had been a few months—our final visit together before we moved to Virginia—and as my mom drove us away, he cried, “Ryan! Ryan! Don’t go!” His arms were outstretched, but he ran slowly. Even at that age, I could tell the difference between acting and sincerity, and he wasn’t trying hard enough to fool me. But it didn’t matter. Just hearing the words felt good. I didn’t care that they weren’t real. But then I remembered how my mom told me that when I was a baby and she had to leave for work, Mark would place me, screaming, in front of the window facing the driveway so she’d feel guilty as she pulled away. I didn’t know what to think. I felt the swing hard beneath me. I felt the boots snug on my feet. The gingham, scratching against my soft skin. I watched Kentucky, asleep on the sofa facing the back window. I liked this life–this house, this place, how we were together–and I wanted to keep it. So I said yes, and wondered when I was supposed to start calling Sonny "Dad."
***
My mom loved creative types but craved the stability of a solid career. The two didn’t usually go together but Sonny seemed to fit the bill. They were in their mid-twenties when they met at a houseparty. Sonny’s band was playing, and his stage presence caught her attention. Learning that he also had a career got her hooked. To earn a living, he’d found a trade where he could make use of his creativity–one where his skills in porcelain and carving and color theory set him apart. Back then in the early 90’s, before advanced computer software and 3D printers, dental techs had to be artisans–each tooth a tiny, nuanced sculpture that you had to get just right. It wasn’t the best job in the world but it was enough, and it was steady, and so was he. Once Sonny entered our lives, we were safe, we had a regular place to live, and for the first time, I felt a sense of belonging and possibility that dissolved the anxieties our former conditions had produced.
***
January was really cold. The grass crunched underfoot. ‘Tucky played in the snow. I had started visiting a neighbor when I got bored–the woman living in the house across the field from ours. She managed the trailer park down the gravel road and I’d stop by to help her move rocks around. Something about creating sections for her garden.One day she told me how, when mama birds were really desperate, they would build their nest right on top of another family’s. They were willing to kill, she explained, to give their babies a safe place to hatch. I didn’t believe it. But then she opened a birdhouse and showed me two nests, one stacked on top of the other. She lifted the top one so I could peek between the layers and, sure enough, the bottom nest was filled with brittle, unhatched, abandoned eggs. I thought about the mama bird. I wondered if she’d ever gotten over it.
***
Winter turned to Spring and all the conversations I overheard in the house centered around wedding planning. Late at night when I should have been sleeping, I’d press my ear to the crack at the bottom of my bedroom door and hope to hear my mom and Sonny talking about it. I’m not sure what I thought I’d learn but I distinctly remember wondering when the whole dad switch was going to happen and if it would coincide with the wedding. Maybe it had already happened. I didn’t know how these things worked. I was looking for clues.One night I heard them argue. Sonny’s business partners had decided to cut him out of the business, but they had already agreed to be his groomsmen. They could afford to keep him on as a part-time employee for a little while, but he would have to find a new job soon. How would they pay for the wedding? What would he do? Where would we live? My mom was furious and said he should uninvite them, but he said no. Spring turned to Summer, and Sonny married my mom in the backyard underneath the big oak tree. It was beautiful. My mother wore a faded rose silk antique dress she had found at a thrift store. The sleeves were puffy, the skirt was full, and it seemed to have a hundred pearl buttons going up the back. She couldn’t reach them herself, so she had to be buttoned in and unbuttoned by somebody else. It was probably a young girl’s cotillion dress at one time. I was the flower girl. I walked down the aisle first after Sonny, and stood beside him waiting for my mom. Sonny was fairly tall–about six feet–and stayed tan all year long. He was fit in a casual kind of way, with greenish hazel eyes, and had a tidy, permed, chestnut mullet. I’d never seen him this dressed up before and he looked funny in his tux, like he didn’t belong in there.My mom came down the aisle next and she looked like a goddamned angel. There had been a light drizzle that morning–a sign of good fortune, everyone said–and the whole world glowed. The sun streamed down softly from behind the clouds and created a halo behind her. I didn’t recognize either of them, looking so adult and dressed up and respectable. The couple said their vows, and Sonny gave my mother a gold wedding band that he had made. They kissed, everyone clapped, and then Sonny turned to me. He pulled another ring out of his jacket pocket and got down on my level. He took my little gloved hand, put a tiny gold ring on one of my little gloved fingers, and said something like, “I’m yours for life, too.” I cried. His groomsmen weeped. And the bridesmaids swooned. Sonny was a good, good man.
***
Sonny couldn’t find work after all, so not long after the wedding, we had to move back to North Carolina. My mom’s drinking picked up again and she began getting jealous of how much time Sonny and I spent together. One night when she was drinking and just the two of us were watching T.V. in the den, she looked over at me and said, “You know, the only way a new person can adopt you is if the other one agrees to give you up.”“Your father,” she said, “owed a lot of child support. So I told him that if he gave me a computer, and signed you over to Sonny, I’d agree not to sue.”She laughed, “Can you believe that!?” and then went to bed.I turned off the T.V. and walked to the guest room where we kept our IBM. This room would become a nursery just two years later but, for now, the only person using it was Sonny. He’d get high and then spend hours alone with the door closed, creating portraits of Jerry Garcia in Microsoft Paint. I looked at the computer and wondered how much it weighed. How much it was worth. I called Mark to ask but he did not answer. I went into the garage where ‘Tucky lived and cuddled him for a while in his dog bed before going to my room.
***
A couple years passed, my mom was pregnant with my sister, and the guest room had become a nursery. It was a Friday and she unexpectedly picked me up early from school. We suddenly needed to go visit Sonny’s mom a few hours away in the mountains, but she didn’t say why. We’d need to stay a couple nights to make the trip worth it but, unlike previous trips, we couldn’t afford to pay someone to watch Kentucky. With a new child on the way, my mother was worried about money, so instead of boarding him or hiring someone to watch him, she put Kentucky on a chain behind the house. She filled bowls with food and water. I cried and begged her not to. The chain wasn’t very long and I was worried. Other neighbors let their dogs roam around and they weren’t very nice. What if they picked on him and he couldn’t get away? She laughed off my concern and promised that he would be fine.While my parents packed, I walked door to door begging neighbors, tearfully, to keep Kentucky while we were gone. I had a terrible feeling that something bad would happen while he was out there by himself and even asked people I’d never met before. I was desperate. But they all said no. I insisted my mom let me stay home alone with him that weekend, but I was eight and that wasn’t allowed. I refused to pack a bag, so my mom did it for me. She forced me into the car and promised to punish me for being insolent when we returned home from the trip. I didn’t care. I was devastated. I couldn’t stand the thought of ‘Tucky thinking I’d left him. My mom put the car in reverse and began backing away from the house. Everything around me went in slow motion, while everything inside me raced. My stomach churned, my heart beat out of my chest, and big, hot, tears flowed down my cheeks. I watched from the back window as we drove away and strained to see ‘Tucky from the road, but I couldn’t.When we returned home from the weekend, I ran out of the car as fast as I could. I didn’t understand what I was seeing at first. Bowls of food knocked over. A chain lying limp in the grass. Kentucky, nowhere to be seen. I made the same neighborhood loop, knocking on every door, asking all the neighbors if they’d seen him, but nobody had. I walked home slowly, then stood outside in the backyard until long after the sky had turned black and the lone street light had turned on. I looked toward the tree line and called, “Ken-tuck-yyyyyyyyyy! Ken-tuck-yyyyyyyyyy!” But he didn’t come.
***
I made flyers on the computer. I didn’t know how to get ‘Tucky’s photo on them, though, so I used clip art to search for a dog that looked something like him, then described him in detail. I added our phone number and said, “PLEASE CALL!” in really big, bold letters. I didn’t have any reward money to offer, so instead, I promised to do chores for anybody who could point to his whereabouts. I printed them out and put them in all the mailboxes around the neighborhood. When nobody was looking, I peered into windows and fenced-in backyards, hoping to see that Kentucky was stolen rather than lost. After getting the fliers, one of the neighborhood kids called to tell me they’d seen him floating in the pond across from my house. Another called to say her father had shot him while hunting in the woods. I was afraid to go into the woods after that. And afraid to look at the pond. I tried not to fall asleep because I had started having a nightmare.In this recurring dream, I’d be lying in the bathtub with my eyes closed and the water would feel, suddenly, full of fur. I’d open my eyes and ‘Tucky’s skin would be on top of me in the tub, empty and flat as a bearskin rug. I’d try to scream, but when I opened my mouth, the fur pushed inside me and no sound came out. I had insomnia at night and was riddled with anxiety during the day. I was a wreck and eventually, had to move on. I stopped looking, but sometimes I’d still go into the yard late at night and call his name, just in case–“Ken-tuck-yyyyyyyyyy! Ken-tuck-yyyyyyyyyy!”–but he didn’t come. And he never came again.
***
Time wore on. My sister was born, we moved again, and I, eventually, moved out. Then, in my early twenties, my mom and Sonny got divorced. Nobody told me at first, but I had stopped hearing from him and his family and I started to wonder. My little sister eventually broke the news, right before Christmas. I guess everybody just thought I wouldn’t notice and they could avoid the subject altogether. My sister–his biological daughter–still got presents from Sonny’s parents that year. I did not. And, just like that, I heard Sonny had a new girlfriend with two boys, and I got this sinking feeling that he had decided not to be my father anymore.
***
By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I hadn’t spoken to Mark, my biological father, in over twenty years. My sister was a teenaged heroin addict, I was an alcoholic, and I had dropped out of school. I was estranged from my mother and hadn’t heard from Sonny for the better part of a year. I wanted to preserve the relationship with him–I needed to preserve the relationship–so I called him, crying, drunk, and begged him to keep being my dad. “You’re the only dad I’ll ever have!” I argued, “You are my one shot at this! I don’t get another chance to be a daughter! Can’t you just pretend that I come to mind, even if I don’t? Can’t you just lie to me?” I bargained, “All you have to do is put a monthly repeating call reminder in your calendar and then you don’t even have to remember! Just pretend, for like ten minutes once a month to care about what’s happening in my life.”He said he would.But I didn’t hear from him. Another year passed and Christmas, once again, was just a couple months away. I reached out and reminded him that if he couldn’t manage a monthly call, not to bother sending me an obligatory holiday text. He said OK, but nothing changed, and then my phone pinged on Christmas. “Merry Christmas to the best daughter!” the text read.The words were like stones in my stomach. I took a swig of wine and wrote back, “I told you what the deal was. You don’t get to reach out to me at the holidays if you don’t talk to me the rest of the year. It’s just too painful a reminder of what’s missing from my life.” He didn’t respond, and I didn’t hear from him again.But I did hear that he’d decided to marry the woman with the two boys. I wondered if he would promise anything to his new sons at the altar, and wondered if he would mean it.I erased Sonny’s number from my phone, Googled How to get parents removed from my birth certificate, and drank down the last of a bottle of wine. I thought about enrolling in cosmetology school, but decided to go to AA instead. I wanted to tell somebody, to ask for help, to cry, but didn’t know who to call. I was nobody’s daughter now.
Back then, the law center sat in a squat square flanked on one side by a free needle exchange and on the other by a flophouse that rented its rooms by the hour. I was late to class. I think it was Civil Procedure. One hundred pairs of eyes calculated my chances of failing as I took the only seat available in the first row next to her.She had red hair and green eyes and the kind of adorable tipped-up nose that I have always wanted to have. She came from a working class Irish Catholic family with priests and nuns dangling from foreshortened branches of the family tree. She was the first in her family to attend law school.I was the child of immigrants. We lived on the wrong side of Los Angeles in a cinder block house with Westinghouse Appliances in avocado green. My family consisted of engineers and mathematicians and no one who worked in words. Somehow I assumed life at an East Coast law school would be no different from my college days in sunny Southern California, where a girl could bop about braless. At law school, I could not understand all the attention I got. It shocked me to see my undergrad housemates snort cocaine between lectures, that other classmates took uppers or downers to ease the stress of exams. Neither she nor I had the money for recreational drugs. We had made it into law school against the odds, fueled by scholarships and parental sacrifice. We had no choice but to succeed. I don’t think my parents wanted me to climb the social ladder. I think all they wanted for me was financial security. But I was reckless in those days. I thought I could still run away.I have photographs of her from our first year in law school. The shots are all bad. Dark, out of focus, without any context to tell me when or why they were taken. Surprisingly, we all look happy.By day, we students were competitors in a zero-sum game that would lead to a summer associate position at a prestigious law firm or a clerkship with a prominent judge. We were graded on classroom recitations of case law and at Moot Court competitions. Maybe everyone was smiling because the gloves had come off for the night. Here’s a photo of her and me sitting behind what looks like a piano, my glasses thrown on the closed lid but still in view of the camera. My hair was long then, down to my butt. The only thing that shines in the photo is her smile.Here’s another one with her and three of our classmates. Everyone’s shirt is buttoned up high. She always wore blazers or plaid shirts. I thought, at the time, this was an East Coast thing.This one shows her and me and my housemate on the front steps of the law center. We’re facing the law school parking lot, perched at the end of a no man’s land and the projects that spread from there. The sun has already gone down. My housemate and I look cold. We’re still layering clothes in an attempt to acclimate. She wears a long white cardigan open over a brown checked shirt and dark brown corduroy trousers. She holds herself slightly apart as if she’s a casual bystander or needs to stop herself from doing something stupid. Her green eyes blaze. In all these photos, I am relaxed and smiling and utterly oblivious of the jockeying that is going on around me in plain sight. The family connections, the alumni associations, Mom or Dad putting in a good word for Junior before the first semester grades are released. She and I have no one to give us a leg up. We’ll have to do it all on our own.When Thanksgiving came around that year and she heard that I wouldn’t be going to Los Angeles, she invited me to come home with her. I was grateful for the opportunity. This would be my first break from law school and I was eager to get away. By then, I had been cornered in the library by a classmate who was a fellow Angeleno. He had dark curly hair and alert eyes that calculated the value of what I wore from my hair clips down to my sneakers. He didn’t have to ask which side of town I came from. He said, wow, you must have struggled to get here. It was the first time I thought of myself as deprived. She told me to forget about it, I’m pretty sure. She knew what it was like to have slurs flung at her head. By Thanksgiving, we had been the closest of friends for almost three months. By then, I knew what she wanted. She thought I was the one, the woman she would love for the rest of her life. Together, we would run from the future her family had planned for her. For this dream, she was prepared to pay the highest price: ostracism from her family, excommunication from her church, every branch and twig cut off until nothing remained but a trembling trunk.I remember that her home stood on a steeply sloped street. I remember a clock ticked loudly in the hallway. I remember an afternoon when everyone went to church except us.In the front room stood a couch that was surprisingly hard all over, as if it were too good for the family to use. It was covered in velvet upholstery, perhaps, smooth on my skin, in dark green or maybe that was the color of her eyes. A crucifix on the wall promised salvation. White skin revealed freckles in the most surprising spots, strangely cold to the touch. We had sex on that couch. It was the first time with a woman for either of us.I call it sex because that’s what it was for me though I knew even then that it meant something different to her. When I count the number of sexual partners I have had, I am tempted to call myself a predator. But that term would imply I had intentions. A more accurate description of my sex life then would be that of a rock stuck in a riverbed of streaming water. She happened to be running up that river and I got in her way.No, that’s not true either. I was running, too, from a man who had convinced me that I wasn’t worthy of love. In those days, I would fall into the arms of anyone who would take me in his stead. At law school, that fall, she and I crashed into each other, headed in opposite directions. I didn’t think of myself as queer at the time or, for that matter, now. We’re all queer, aren’t we, albeit to varying degrees. In another time and place, we might give in to our Sapphic urges. But society imposes norms and families project expectations. In those days of Cyndi Lauper and androgynous boy bands, you could only buy wedding cakes with a man and a woman on top. Few of us had the strength of mind to choose desire over the path of least resistance.She had the narrow shoulders and hips of a ten year old boy and a stiff-legged walk as if she wanted to seem dangerous. She had a low-timbre laugh not easily evoked but when she did let it go, her voice hummed in my throat. She chose a queer life knowing the cost. She was playing for keeps.The fact that she wanted me was enough reason for me to throw the dice. If by doing so I might cause harm then that was part of the game.I cannot remember how long our affair lasted, whether it was a one-night or a two-night or a several-week stand. I like to think we would have stuck it out at least until exams had passed and everyone could retreat for Christmas. In any event, I’m pretty sure that she and I did not talk about what you might call our future.Turns out that we never needed to have that talk. Turns out she was pregnant by some guy she met on the Greyhound bus, at least that’s what she told me. Turns out it didn’t matter that she didn’t know his name or where to find him because it was an ectopic pregnancy that went undetected until her Fallopian tubes blew her into the hospital. I wasn’t there when she was put into an ambulance, though I heard after the fact that she could have died. Her family clamored for her to come home. I could imagine her back in her childhood bedroom, surrounded by loving parents and siblings. But that would have meant giving up law school, re-applying next year, maybe getting rejected. She refused to go home. She had run this far. There was no going back.While she recuperated, I brought her my lecture notes and copies of law journal articles. Together, we poured over Property and Contracts and Criminal Procedure case law. She didn’t need to study very hard. She was better than me in all of our classes.I don’t remember what we did for fun on those long wintry afternoons, other than gossip about our classmates. Who was fucking whom, which of our classmates had flubbed their recitation of the day’s case, who was already angling for a clerkship. I think I made her laugh and cooked her dinner. I’m pretty sure I did everything she wanted me to do except fall in love. As soon as she was strong enough to attend class again, I ran. A few months later, I moved into a new student house with another group of law school classmates. She and I no longer had friends in common. We would only see each other in the carrels of the law school library or milling about the hallways between classes or by the vending machines in the basement. Then, we would smile broadly at each other as if we were still the best of friends. Somehow I thought all that tutoring I had done while she was recovering from her ectopic pregnancy was enough to prepare me for exams. I almost failed law school that first year. My grades were so bad that my chances of a decent-paying job were close to zero. Any sane person would have quit law school and gone home to lick their wounds. I would have taken a bath financially but I wasn’t thinking about debt. I had never failed a class in my life and was not about to start. I applied to a law journal and was accepted. My road to success re-opened.Was it cosmic retribution then to be robbed at gunpoint? It was late at night. There were three of us leaving the library and we thought we were safe. The parking lot was, after all, on the other side of the street. Our assailant found us among the cars. He could not have been more than twelve years old. He looked like the kind of boy I grew up with on the wrong side of Los Angeles. Different color, same lack of prospects. When the view from the window shows broken-down tenements and abandoned cars and white people afraid to walk on your side of the street, what else can a kid do but run? We gave the kid what we had and let him go.As I approached my third year, job-hunting became my priority. I had a financial aid job in the Student Placement Office. Normally, I could do my research in peace. Suddenly, my classmates were thumbing through files of prospective employers: public or private, Wall Street or Main Street, in-house or outside counsel. We would all have debts to pay upon graduation, even the richest among us.Throughout law school and long after graduation, she and I lived in the same city. For all I knew, we were never more than a few subway stops apart. She went to work for the government. The law firm where I had spent time during law school as an intern and later a summer associate took me on full-time. My starting salary was more than either of my parents had ever earned.There were three of us associates who started together. We unironically called ourselves the Mod Squad. How else to describe a trio of friends: the white man, the Black man, and the Asian Peggy Lipton? For our first few weeks, we worked by day and bar-hopped by night.At our firm, on the bulletin board, next to the coffee machine and above the free donuts, hung a list of every lawyer at the firm and the number of hours he or she had billed in the previous week. I stayed in the office until nine o’clock every night when FedEx stopped accepting packages for overnight delivery. My cohort knuckled down. All the same, our Mod Squad disbanded by the end of the year. Not all of us could meet the monthly billable hour quota. It wasn’t like government lawyers had it any easier. They lived under the pressures of budgets, legislative sessions, and a personnel shuffle each time the administration changed. I could have learned more about the life of a government lawyer. We could have met for drinks like other young professionals did. We might have reconciled. Instead, I turned her into a distant memory that hurt only when touched.A decade after we graduated, I saw her for the last time. I was married by then and had recently moved to The Netherlands, where I was struggling to find my footing. I longed for the familiarity of the States where I thought I understood how things worked.I don’t know why I thought that seeing her again would be a good idea. It had to have been my idea because she could never have found me in Amsterdam. I wonder now how welcome my overture was.In any event, she agreed to meet. As the local, she got to choose our rendezvous point. An organic farmers’ market had sprung up not far from our old law center. I remember navigating my way past mounds of local produce and coffee roasters and hanging plants in macrame pots. I think it was wintertime because I remember that the light was sharp that day and the lines around her eyes cold and clear. She had a certain hardness to her jaw that I did not recall. She was beautiful, if a little tired looking.I wish I could remember what we discussed. All I have left is a spatial memory: how stiffly she stood, her back as straight as any soldier’s, always more than an arm’s length away from me. A rebuke perhaps, an acknowledgment that I had wronged her, the expectation of an apology? We left these matters unsaid and I flew back to The Netherlands.There are days when I forget her last name and I wonder whether I made it all up. The me that I am now keeps my hair short and my shoes sensible. I don’t have sex on couches. Insofar as I long for those days, it is the sanitized version I play back, the one in which my intentions were always good. On other days, the heat of her laugh rises in my throat and that green velvet couch spreads beneath my thighs as smooth and hard as ever. Then I have no choice but to look for her on the internet, both curious and frightened to see who she has become. I find housewives, nuns, obituaries. Surely she would have run faster and farther than that?
I am 41. Standing at the Formica counter of a roach-friendly Queens apartment five lifetimes ago, I crumble gorgonzola over flatbread dough, then stud it with gems of diced dried apricot and fresh thyme—ready for the oven. The man I chose to wed is miles away in the next room weighing down the couch as he wrestles his way through another hangover, offering some caustic rebuke of my failures.Today I failed to provide the right sports drink, so I’m fucking stupid and goddamn selfish. Wordless, I return to the grocery, buy two six-packs of whatever he prefers. Something pink, as I recall. Sugar-free. I slam the sweating bottles on the coffee table directly between his mottled red eyes and the Rick and Morty marathon he’s prioritized for the day. Now I am a fucking child. He’s right, I suppose. Passive aggression is a reflex for any child raised by drunks. Back in the kitchen, I mash the now-stale apricot cheese mix into the dough, a silent rage. I crush it to a pulp until it oozes between my fingers, staining my cuticles blue. Garbage. Everything is garbage.He shuns me for the rest of the afternoon. I take myself out for a late brunch and mimosa. Daydream my blissful exit (simple: never return). Later, I whisper back to walk the dog because he won’t and I’m expected to and there’s no reason for the dog to suffer. Garbage. Everything.The man I chose to wed ignores me with ferocity. Shuns me through the night into late morning. Orders breakfast delivery from our favorite diner, offers me none. I walk the dog. Pick at a plate of crackers. Tackle a bag of laundry.When he’s ready to forgive, he finds me in another room sorting his socks. No further mention of my wretchedness. He grunts his way into me without a word. I am absolved, so I stay. Never again mistaking the wrong sports drink. Never again attempting gorgonzola-apricot flatbread.I let him steal tiny bits of me like this for years.
I want to tell you about a day in late August of 2009. It is just past noon, and this is a clear day, a gorgeous day with almost zero headwind. I am sitting on the street-level deck of an Upper East Side coffee shop named M. Rohrs’. M. Rohrs’ is located just off of 86th and 2nd. The traffic is moving briskly throughout this part of town, and that is because the city has settled into a malaise, an annual two-week period that bridges the divide between true summer and the academic fall. This is a quiet time in New York City. This is a bittersweet time that is meant to usher in new things. When I think of this time, I tend to think of the outer boroughs, and I tend to think of the vacant parking spaces along open streets. I tend to think of the downtown and of the West Village. I tend to think of the Meatpacking District, and of the West Side Highway. I tend to think of the docks, and of the rhythmic plunging of waves against cement. I tend to think of the Rockaways and of City Island, where the steel and the asphalt give way to front lawns, to grass and rock and, eventually, to sea. For whatever reason, I tend to think of all these places as existing short of sundown, within some cosmic frequency that is perennially wave-jumping between the outgoing sax of HAIM’s “Summer Girl” and the opening strains of “White Dress” by Lana Del Rey.The outside deck at M. Rohrs’ runs empty. I am joined now by a girl named Zuzana. Zuzana is from Prague, but she has traveled to the US on a working visa for the summer. Zuzana is cute and unpretentious and she is engaging in a way that exudes charm. Every now and again, Zuzana will attempt to teach me Czech phrases, but I have struggled to retain these in the way that I have retained bits and pieces of Italian and German and Spanish and French. Zuzana is affectionate. Zuzana looks at me with what one might refer to as the petal-dust eyes. On July 4th, a week after the two of us first met, Zuzana agreed to go watch the fireworks with me along the Hudson River. Only we never made it to the Hudson River. We stopped off instead inside a corner bar where we got wasted while listening to the jukebox. Our songs played out to the sonic echo of pyrotechnics. Our songs played out to an electrified sky. Zuzana and I do not demand a great deal of each other. Our interests hedge toward the mundane … dinner and a movie. Last week we went to The Metropolitan, where we sat by a window and discussed Pieter Bruegel’s The Harvesters while gazing out across Central Park. The two of us prefer to stay at home and eat takeout. The two of us prefer to sit along the esplanade and read. The two of us prefer to have ravenous sex, the kind where the windows shake and the walls run damp with perspiration. On nights, and there have been a handful of them, when I have slid my arm from beneath Zuzana’s shoulders, only to tiptoe into the kitchen where I can write, Zuzana will appear several minutes later, her face cast in the ghostly glow of my computer screen. “Why do you need to do this now?” Zuzana will ask me. On certain nights, I will allow Zuzana to lead me by the hand back into the bedroom. On certain other nights, I will convince Zuzana that she should just go back to sleep. Zuzana and I are similar in certain ways, yet we are not similar enough to justify anything beyond what we have been doing. And it is because of this that I have decided to break things off. There is someone else, a woman who has been away for most of the summer. This woman and I had gone out a couple of times back in the spring, and while I am uncertain whether we are meant to be friends or something more, I also recognize that this woman is inbound, and that Zuzana is outbound, and that the city moves too quickly for anyone to stand in wait until he can be sure. Entire theses have been written about this, which is to say the meet-cute world of serial dating in a metropolis, about the ill effects of trading up or swiping down. Lipstick Jungle. Guinea Pig of Love. Throughout Gotham Proper, any long-term commitment takes on the auspices of a surrender. Exchanging vows signals the beginning of a slow and steady drift toward the suburbs, toward North Jersey, toward Long Island, toward the crimson edge of everything that had drawn one toward Valhalla in the first place. Among the undesirables—And I include myself among those ranks—dating in New York City serves as a reminder that we will always be the underclass, and that we will never be well-suited to the pass/fail immediacy of surface apps. And so we demure. Either that or we search for an outlet, and whereas that outlet might provide us with fulfillment, it might also provide us with an excuse. It's not about me, it's about the work, and so on … even though the work is almost inevitably about us, for better or for ill.“I see,” Zuzana says after I have explained the situation. Zuzana runs one finger along the pattern of her dress. I sip my coffee, and then I begin to atone. “No,” Zuzana interrupts me. “She is coming and I am going, and so there is no need for you to say anything more.” Zuzana has shifted in her seat, and she is facing west now, toward 2nd Avenue. “Part of me just feels sorry for you,” Zuzana continues. "Based on what I have seen, I think you are going to keep on doing this whenever anybody attempts to get close to you. And I think that you are going to end up alone when you are in your fifties. By then it will be too late.” “Too late for what?” I say. Zuzana scoffs. Her jaw is set in such a way as to indicate that there will not be any further discussion. And so we allow for the white noise – a distant car horn, a whirling blender. I think that you are going to end up alone when you are in your fifties. I sidestep any display of emotion by generating a mental checklist of all the would-be baptisms, birthday dinners, wine tastings, graduations, church socials, bad art openings, group vacations, investment opportunities, weddings, funerals, hospital visits, housewarmings, engagement parties, holiday traditions, fishing trips, recitals, and general inclusiveness I will be able to avoid just by remaining unattached. I enjoy being in a relationship, I do, right up until the point at which a paramour’s friends or family begin to insist that I do not meet their standards. It’s not that I don’t think you’re a nice guy, the drunken sister of an ex-girlfriend once informed me. I’m just not sure whether you are the right guy for her. That comment burned, and it left its brand upon my id. Why not tell a man with pockmarked skin that he should have taken better care of his complexion as a teenager? I have spent the bulk of my adult life feeling as if I have been a burden upon the people whom I adore. I struggle with this, although I have struggled a great deal more with the idea that I am not the caliber of human being that others would like to receive at their front doors. The moment passes, and, eventually, it comes time for Zuzana and me to say our goodbyes. The two of us hug, a halfhearted hug that leaves one arm dangling like an empty windsock at our sides. Then a brief wave, and Zuzana heads uphill toward the 6 train. I, in turn, hightail it back to my apartment so that I can get some sleep. Around 7 PM, I set out toward Central Park. Once there, I follow the ellipse until it lets me off along the north side of the Delacorte Theater. The Delacorte is home to Milton Hebald's Romeo and Juliet sculpture. Whenever I think of Hebald’s sculpture, I tend to think of it in deep winter, with a 2-inch mound of snow accumulating along the back of Romeo’s head. I would die here, Hebald's bronzework seems to say. And it would not be a tragic death, to perish now, at the celestial height of all emotion. This is love as an act of bravery. Or is it love as an absolutely glorious mistake? Love as an elegy; the poison pill that lovers take. Elizabethans. I have mentioned another woman, and I am on my way to see that woman now. Besima. Besima is Canadian and she is a schoolteacher. Besima stands 5'9” and she is bookish and brilliant and she wears Louis Vuitton frames that bring out the accents in her cheeks. Besima and I met online. We exchanged emails. We shared our first date at a bar called David Copperfield’s, and, once there, I presented Besima with a copy of Oliver Twist (as a playful nod to the whole Dickensian motif). At the end of that night, Besima gave me a quick peck just before she disappeared into a taxi. Three weeks later, when Besima and I met up again, I leaned in to kiss her at the end of the night. Only this time the gesture seemed contrived, as if I had been seeking reassurance along a nonexistent front. Besima left to spend the summer in Ontario a few days after that. Tonight will be the first time that she and I have seen each other since. Besima and I have the potential to become great friends, which would be grand given that I need great friends. But our great friendship, which is to say our potential friendship—a friendship that will require several months before it can be cemented—that friendship is commensurate upon me understanding not to push things beyond their established limits. Historically, this has been an issue for me, and it has been an issue because I tend to view male-female relationships from a perspective of wins and losses. I am referring here to a negative trait, long-standing and hardwired, that finds its basis in my lack of self-esteem. I do not think myself attractive, and so I seek out others who can provide that validation for me. This harkens back to my childhood, and to my peer group, and to a suburban rejection of everything I held dear, if not the pedestrian idea that the brooding measure of a man has something to do with heterosexual prowess. I come from a place of Catholic guilt and shame and deflection (based on hypocrisy). I come from a place where people define themselves based on what other people insist that they should be. I want to be loved. No, what I want is to be wanted. No, what I want is to be someone who is perceived to be wanted. Whether that is true or not makes almost zero difference to me. I crave attention. I am a child of Eros. I grew up on the suburban myth of a big-city romance. As a teenager, I would idealize men and women based on movies like The Apartment and Manhattan and When Harry Met Sally. I came to envision love as resembling some sort of a thunderclap, an epiphany, a jolt from out of nowhere that went off like a starter pistol, precipitating a breakneck sprint along the uptown streets. Bring it in … and now cue the strings. Only none of that was real. In fact, it wasn’t even real to any of the writers who had originally imagined that it could be. A case in point. I remember reading a 1991 New York Times profile about Woody Allen and Mia Farrow that explained how they lived across from each other along opposite sides of Central Park. Whenever the two of them were on the phone, they could signal, wave and gesture, Woody from high atop his 5th Avenue penthouse and Mia from an upper-floor apartment along Central Park West. As a seventeen-year-old from the suburbs, this struck me as idyllic. As an aging cynic (with the added benefit of hindsight), it strikes me as emblematic of just how complicated any of these big-budget romances tend to be. I am close now. Besima and I have agreed to meet at an outdoor bar just off of Riverside Drive. Besima lives 1.5 miles north of that bar, a half-mile south of Columbia University, which seems appropriate, given that she is an academic. Besima arrived in New York City around the same time I did, which was 2006, when the country was still in its post-9/11 era. For a Canadian whose parents had emigrated to Ontario by way of Bosnia, adjusting was not easy. At the time, Besima could not purchase a cell phone in New York City without a background check, and she could not travel within the US freely. Her address and her employment status were both being monitored. She had applied for a green card, but the process kept getting delayed. Despite this, Besima immersed herself within the city, and she gravitated toward its pockets. Given the choice, Besima opted to teach in the public education systems of the Bronx and Harlem, as opposed to the more prestigious academies located south of 96th Street, and in Brooklyn.I make one final turn after which I can see Besima. I can see Besima sitting alone at a table in an otherwise deserted dining area. Unfortunately, my mind is still fixated on whether Besima and I are destined to be friends or something more. We are destined to be friends. My heart and my gut seem to be in agreement, and I am fairly certain that Besima has already arrived at that exact conclusion. The only issue is my ego. A fit of conquest. The need, yet again, to be perceived as a person who is wanted, as a person who keeps pace. I need clarity. I need to be able to comport my affairs in a binary manner so that my friends will not be confused. Or maybe I need to make new friends. And maybe I keep chasing all of the new friends away. Is a life about reporting back? It is not. Yet I know that I will have one drink before hedging the conversation toward a place that it should not be.
***
Zuzana. She existed in the middle of things, arriving as she did sixteen years after the first time that I had experienced true love and thirteen years before the place that I am now, which is alone. I am writing to you tonight from a one-bedroom walk-up which is situated directly across from a post office, roughly one half-block from a railway (but not a train station), and approximately two-tenths of a mile from the Lehigh River in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Nothing happens here, and the townspeople prefer it that way. On an April night when the weather allows for the windows to remain ajar, one can hear the neighbors coughing from a hundred meters away, just as one can hear the diesel blast of the tractor trailers barreling hard across the I-80 bridge. This is not a place where I would have envisioned myself, nor am I the person whom I would have envisioned myself as becoming. I am a shipwreck, and I have washed ashore here. To some extent, I have been subsisting in exile, even though I am financially secure (at least for the time being), and I have a meaningful job at a company that emphasizes the right things. For me, exile exists as a place where, to quote the poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert, “not suffering [becomes] a form of suffering.” My life is calm here, but I prefer the chaos. I seldom reflect upon the periods in my life when fortunes soared and stasis ruled the day.A bit of context. When I left New York City, I had no money and no prospects. I had been sober for five years; I had not dated anybody for four. During the summer of 2017, I took to splitting my time between Manhattan and the Poconos. In short order, I had been offered a full-time job in the Poconos area, and at about the same time, I had met a woman there, as well. In the job, I saw an opportunity for stability. In the woman, I saw an opportunity for escape. But, oh, how much of love is dependent upon slanted truths and omitted details? It’s that old story wherein one partner says to the other, “Do not move here on account of me,” and the other partner insists that he or she had been planning on moving there all along. Only this woman and I, we were not partners so much as we were co-conspirators. Our first kiss felt arcane. It felt like witchcraft, or perhaps the beginning of some unholy alliance. The two of us were sitting by a fire in the backyard of a lakehouse, and the October breeze came rolling in from off the water, and the embers crackled, and the two of us got high, despite the fact that I would rarely get high even before I had gotten sober. I made a pass, and this woman rebuffed me. Shortly after, she relented, but only if I would agree to take a sip of wine first. And so I did. If I wanted a second kiss, this woman contended, then I would need to smoke a cigarette with her. And so I did. At some point during that cigarette, this woman looked toward the fire and she said, “I’m gonna hurt you, Bob.” She said that with concern and she said it with forewarning, and I ignored her, and that is on me. By mid-November I had fallen in love with this woman, and I told her as much. She did not tell me that she loved me until two months later, when the two of us were lying in bed one afternoon. She had her back turned toward me, and she whispered the words as if they were an allocution, or a mea culpa. (She had admitted to sleeping with an ex of hers ten days prior.) Our relationship lasted from October until May, and there were several breakups in between. One night when it was all but decided, I went over to this woman’s house and we put her kids to bed, and we went downstairs and we sat in the living room and we watched TV. My heart felt light, and so I smiled, and this incensed her. “Whatever it is you’re feeling,” this woman said to me, “I don’t feel it.” – a comment that dug its nails into my psyche. When I went home, I wrote these words inside a notebook: People who are in need of saving should not develop a Messiah complex. It brings things low, and it breeds enablement. Our dismount was awkward, and it took place in stages. By early spring, the two of us were living seventy-five meters apart along the same street. We could wave to each other in lieu of texting. We could walk over to see each other in lieu of a phone call. Less than a month after this woman and I had called it quits, she took to seeing a woodcutter who lived one block away; a woodcutter who had also been the previous tenant in the apartment where I was the current lessee. I cursed the wind. I began to long for the city, where sorrow only lasts until one turns the corner. There are no soulmates in a metropolis. There are no soulmates anywhere, really. Soulmates are for platitudes. Soulmates are for small towns and bad fiction. Soulmates are for suburban stopovers where the talent pool is limited and where people marry for lack of knowing how else to proceed. In the wake of this affair, I felt unlovable, and, as such, I began to question whether I had been attempting to force love out of people before they could get up the energy to leave. I had a checkered past. I had objectified women. I had been a good boyfriend, but a bad bachelor, and it seemed as if all of that was beginning to pirouette its way back to me in streams.
***
Nightfall, and I am looking out a tenth story window from inside the Hotel Richland. The Richland is located along the southern boundary of the Lower East Side. Tonight is Mischief Night, and I have been here for six days. I was initially scheduled to check out this morning, but I added an extra night due to a hangover, my second of this week. The first hangover was mild, and it occurred after a twelve hour binge in Greenwich Village. This second hangover carries with it a reminder of the old ways, of a melancholy that all but shrouded me throughout my thirties. I feel skittish. The only light in the room comes from the ghostly glow of the TV. I am wearing sweatpants and I have the heat turned up to seventy-two. There are fast-food wrappers crumpled up along an end table and there are breadcrumbs in the sheets. I have no cash left in my wallet. I withdrew $220 from my checking account during the overnight hours. This according to a pair of receipts.I feel spineless. I want to divebomb through this window. I want to sweep down low across the rooftops; I want to springboard over ledges. I want to glide my way through Chinatown, then veer left onto the Bowery, toward the colonnades, up through the arches, onto the bridge, where I can dematerialize into a ray of light that’ll cascade like so many particles into the river. I want that. I want to transcend. Only I am stuck here, a fool and his bad choices. I deal in self-deception. As such, I prefer to look out at things that cannot look back. Up here, there is no barrier between what is art and what is architecture, between what is progress and what is preservation. Up here, every bit of skyline is being bought up by the speculators. So many structures, a great many of them already living under the threat of demolition. Will you become a landmark or a relic? It is the quintessential question of aging. I can trace this back to its flashpoint, the glint of the muzzle. Toward the end of 2019, I began to allow myself a drink on occasion. I did this as a matter of ceremony after eight years off the sauce. Only now I am backsliding. I am giving in to the wrong impulses. I am wading into what are both bleak and terrestrial waters. Last night I turned a three hour outing with an old friend into a twelve hour trainwreck on my own. I have no wisdom to impart. I am not penning an advice column. The starch has faded, and my line has gone slack. I look forward to drinking these days. I spend two hours of every binge feeling charismatic, and then I spend the rest of those evenings chasing the glow. I am in the bars again, and being in the bars means barhopping, and, at least for me, that barhopping means a babbling stream of toxic chauvinism and wasted money and awkward rejections and shameful boasts. I lack control. The longer the night, the more compelled I feel to meet somebody, to end up dick-deep in some woman whose name I cannot recall. I pursue this not out of a need for companionship, but as a means of compensating for the extra hours spent desperate and semi-lucid and alone.Be aware that these are the fledgling stages, a series of unremarkable deviations. The skin loosens; the jowls sag. I do not lie so much as I omit details. I commit oversights. I go from running five days a week to running four. Minor variances, but they can lead to a place where the road narrows and there is nothing but the Valley of Gehenna below. I have struggled to reclaim my honor, and I have no interest in an about-face. I need to stop drinking. Nostalgia is for the discarded. Three days from today I will turn forty-nine, and as I enter year fifty, I have occasion to consider that the most gratifying period in my life took place between 2012 and 2016, an incandescent metamorphosis during which I was newly sober and entirely celibate and only sporadically employed, all while still living in New York. Those years felt like deliverance; they felt like nirvana. Those years felt like coasting through a sundrenched mist after a quarter-century spent charging into a headwind with a massive chute fused to my spine. I ate better upon getting sober, and I slept better, and I began to turn inward. I had divorced myself from the conceit that one needs a lover – or some ongoing bevy of sex partners – to make him feel whole. This past August, I received an email from an ex-girlfriend, Meghan, my first true love, and one of the two great loves of my life. Meghan and I were in a relationship from the spring of 1993 until the fall of 1995. I was young and she was younger, and we both had separate worlds we needed to explore. There was a breakup, and following that breakup, Meghan and I lost touch. For a time, I would hear things, that Meghan was doing well and that she had married well, and that she had settled long in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, there was no way of knowing. I had gone looking for Meghan online, only to discover she had the digital footprint of a person who does not want to be found. But then there was this email, and at the heart of it, a question: Would I be open to Meghan coming to visit me in the Poconos? I was, which is to say that I had accepted. And, thus, one night toward the end of summer, Meghan and I built a fire and we ate outdoors, and we worked through a quarter-century of gasp and void. It was the beginning of something, a reclamation. It was an eleven hour conversation that did not ebb until the dawn. Meghan has been to visit me a few times since that night. Earlier this week, she came here, to the Lower East Side, and the two of us spent a couple of days together. We walked through Little Italy and Tribeca and Washington Square. We went to the Whitney and the Met. We had dinner at the White Horse Tavern, after which we attended the fiction writer Sara Lippmann’s book launch at P&T Knitwear. After P&T, Meghan and I disappeared into the Village, where we got drunk, a good drunk, a warm drunk, the kind of drunk that makes me wish that I was capable of doing things in moderation. Meghan grounds me, and I am spellbound by her. I should also mention that Meghan has been tremendous for my psyche. When things went sour with that woman who had cheated on me, I stopped believing in myself. I took a header into the dark south. Intimacy, or at least the physical manifestation of it, is like a drug. It is like a mainline cocktail to the soul, the sudden removal of which can create a vacuum. I did not want to overcome that emptiness so much as I wanted to avenge it. I wanted to meet somebody, somebody who was fierce and smart and accomplished and who could make me seem attractive by association. And I did meet somebody like that eventually, only when I did, I resorted to drinking because I thought I needed to. This cheapened me, not only in my own eyes, but in the eyes of everyone who had supported me. I could go on for another ten paragraphs. I could expand on the idea of love and its apparent station in my life. I could comment on the age of androgyny and the inevitability of an asexual revolution; of the cultural shift from time management into energy supply. I could tell you that I like to think about love as a way of honoring the principled people in my orbit, but that I also like to think of it as a form of integrity. I could bring matters full-circle by explaining how Besima and I have become the closest of friends, how I met up with Besima this past Thursday, and how we went to see a movie at the Lincoln Square 13. I could run deep along any number of tangents, but instead I would simply like to impart that my life, at its most profound, has been about moving forward. And that my fears, at their most paralyzing, have arisen from remaining idle for too long. Companionship has been a struggle, particularly because I am selfish and I have an overwhelming indifference to remaining on my own. That aside, I feel privileged to be able to sit here and look out across Valhalla on a Saturday in late fall. There is more. There is an ocean. But the room is paid for, and we’ve got time.
CW deep griefSmionagar (Irish word meaning shattered fragments or pieces). It is an orchard bathing in fog but you would have described it as a swatch of your life receiving its daily powdered kiss. It is a ramshackle house, your former home, but you would have said it’s where you learned that some parasols don’t always give shade to their own suns. It is the anger that you are gone and that the sunrise doesn’t have the decorum to abandon its rays. It is having no jurisdiction over when and where your unpunctual and formidable smile will thaw the freezing demesne of my grieving mind. It is silly, insignificant things like knowing we pronounce vase and scone the same way. It is the crying shame that not all saw the elegance of your ballerina’s legs as they danced. It is lazy, useless afternoons and the even longer nights that were talked into morning. I never told you that smionagar is my favourite Irish word but only when I’m in a tenebrous mood. It is those conversations we shared that were carbonated by the soda stream of realising we were for all intents and purposes the same. It is those laughs forged by the abstract silhouettes of others’ otherness and our similarities in reverse. It is the free-wheeling anarchy of a concert featuring a violinist on the triangle. It is recognising in hindsight that every moment shared was an occasion. It is all the obsolete joys when the world is devoid of the waterfall of your gentle voice. It is life’s cruelty that refuses to let it scrape its dishes. It is the privilege of calling myself your daughter. It is the defenestration of futures and their gradual replacement with forevers. It is knowing that nothing but love beautified the landscape of your mind as it died.
Ten years, Dad broke his back for the railroad for ten years and they laid him off, leaving him unemployed with a new mortgage and us two boys to raise on his own. My little brother Jeremy and I became the poorest kids of our middle-class neighborhood. The unnurtured ones, the unsupervised ones, the ones who strayed the streets in the middle of the night. Feral beasts snapping at the moon. The ones sent into the store with a book of food stamps while our father waited in the car. And when we objected, because we had pride too, our father would say, “It doesn’t matter to me. You guys are the ones who want to eat. If you don’t want to eat, then fine, don’t use them.” We did want to eat. We were always hungry. This was around the same time I realized something was wrong with my balls. Not every morning, but most, I’d wake up with a dull pain in my gut. Not enough to be debilitating, just enough to be uncomfortable. And sometimes when I walked, I could hear a suction noise coming from down there. That was the worst part. A faint pulling a shoe from the mud-type-sound that I hoped nobody else could hear. At the time I was navigating through the beginning stages of puberty when everything is a bit strange anyway and I hoped this problem was just another symptom of becoming a man, like getting hair in places I never had hair before. But one afternoon I found the courage to bring it up. While getting dressed in the city pool locker room with my friend Ryan, I asked to see his balls. “To compare,” I said. And like a good friend, he obliged. His were both the same size and symmetrical and they were small, barely even there. Totally different from mine. I only had one, one gigantic ball, the size and shape of a mango. Even if I wanted to get it checked, Dad couldn’t afford the doctor, not without the insurance he lost with his job. Medical care was no different than a new pair of Jordans to my brother and me, just another luxury we couldn’t afford. Dad was constantly stressing about all the things we couldn’t afford. It was his version of preventative care. Staving us off with guilt prevented us from asking for things. Besides, what child wants to go to the doctor? My parents, like most, charged hard into the Win-One-for-the-Gipper-Day-Glo-Nuclear-American-Grudge-Fuck of the 1980s. They bought our first home the summer before I began grade school. No more trailers or cramped apartments for us. We were moving on up! As I’m thinking and writing about those early days on Everglade, it’s the smells that return more than anything. Milkweed, sunflowers and sage, the rain, creosote from the railroad tracks, smoke from mom’s Marlboro Lights. Pioneers smelled many of the same things, I imagined. The Oregon Trail crossed less than 100 miles from there. Perhaps the pioneers thought of it as the smell of some bright future, the way we did. We lived on the last street of the sub-division. Beyond our backyard was all prairie. Standing on the back deck, you could see the Great Plains unfold clear into Nebraska. That first summer in our home I saw a tornado back there. The sky turned from blue to black. The rain came down in sheets, then the hail. Just as quickly the rain and hail stopped and it became deathly quiet. A funnel poked out from the clouds. Just a little tail at first, but it kept stretching and reaching until it touched the horizon and it would suck the earth up into it and get bigger and louder until it sounded like a freight train was going to come barreling out of all that dust. Mom’s eyes widened with panic. So wide and blue. I noticed a vulnerability in her I had never seen before, like maybe she didn’t know what to do. This frightened me as much as the tornado. Parents always knew what to do. Dad was out of town cleaning up a derailment somewhere out west. Mom was our only protector. She hurried Jeremy and me under the stairs. She asked what two things we wanted to save in case everything blew away. I wanted my plastic cowboys and Indians. She ran upstairs and got them, along with her Marlboro Lights, a radio and stuffed animals for my brother. We stayed under there until the DJ on the radio said it was safe to come out. Some homes were left with their tops peeled back and some weren’t left at all. People stood in the wet street sobbing. One screamed, “Dear God please!” I wanted to tell him it was God's fault in the first place. How did he not know this? I was just a dumb kid and I knew. It was only a couple of months later when I caught Dad bawling on the back deck. The first time I’d ever seen him cry. He wouldn’t tell me what was wrong but deep in the tissue of my heart I felt a sadness, a loss—like things would never be the same. Seeing my dad cry knocked my world off axis. I witnessed a secret world, the adult world, a world I wasn’t meant to see. One where your parents aren’t bulletproof. By that winter, they had split-up, living in different places. Dad took custody of my brother and me. We stayed in the house while Mom moved across town to a small basement apartment.Seventh grade would be starting soon. I’d be in a new school, with new kids and a chance to mold my own reputation. To do that, I needed a pair of parachute pants. My mind was set on them. I had many fantasies of the nylon swish swishing as I walked down the halls of Johnson Junior High. The other students whispering to each other, Is that kid from the big city? I bet he’s a professional break dancer. I begged Dad for weeks for these pants. “For back-to-school clothes,” I said. And I think he saw how important they were to me, because he took me to look for them. We found one pair in all of Cheyenne that were cheap enough for him and small enough to fit my puny waist. Of course, they weren’t the real Bugle Boys, just knock-offs. I didn’t care. Anything not hand-me-down, was designer to me. When I got them home, I found a small rip in the crotch. I was disappointed but I kept my mouth shut. If I told Dad, he’d force me to take them back. Like I said, they were the only pair, anywhere. One day I was just messing around and I pulled my big ball through the rip—a furless rodent squeezing through a quarter-sized hole. A big furless rodent with protruding veins all over it. That’s what it looked like. We’d be walking down the street, or down the aisles of the grocery store and I’d have that one ball hanging out of my parachute pants just waiting for my friends to notice. When they did, I’d pretend I didn’t know it was hanging out, they’d laugh, then I’d laugh even harder and we’d feel better than before, because laughing releases feel-good chemicals in the brain. And I was really hoping one of them would say, “Hey mine looks like yours.” Then I wouldn’t feel so alone. And I guess it worked because one night, my brother confided in me that his balls looked like mine. He showed me, and it was true. They were like mine, only smaller. Which made sense, since he was two years younger. He made me promise I wouldn’t tell anybody and I promised. I felt some relief knowing I wasn’t all alone. It wasn’t one of those “one in a million” deformities. To register for seventh grade, students were required to get a physical. Dad had no choice but to fork out the cash. I’d heard the horror stories from older kids. Tales passed down from generation to generation. A creepy doctor forcing them to pull down their pants and cupping their balls in his long arthritic fingers. “Cough,” the doctor would say. And he’d say it with a cigarette hanging from his lips and the cigarette’s long ash would be about to fall on the floor. And what if when he told me to cough, I got hard? Could penises tell the difference between the hands of a doctor and the hands of a lover? In those days, before the internet, a black and white photo of a woman wearing a bra in a JC Penney catalog would get me hard. But if I got hard when a man touched me, that would mean I was gay. In Wyoming, in the 1980s, gay was not normal, but doctors who smoked were. I don’t believe much has changed. The Urgent Care next door to Kum and Go was running a back-to-school deal on physicals, only $19.99. I cut the coupon out of the paper and Dad drove me over one rainy afternoon in August. He handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “What about tax?” I asked.“Doctors don’t charge tax,” he said. “And tell them to hurry. I don’t want to be sitting out here all night,” he said. “I’m not going to tell the doctor to hurry,” I said as I got out. Dad sat in the truck and listened to 850 KOA Sports Talk Radio, Home of Your Denver Broncos. My heart was pounding, thinking of every terrible outcome. What if it’s a cancerous tumor?Or a stillborn twin that somehow got trapped in my scrotum? A nurse checked my vitals. She said, “Don’t be nervous honey.” A doctor appeared, almost as ancient as the one I imagined. My balls gurgled. I wondered if he could hear it. He tapped my knees with a small rubber hammer. Held my tongue down with a stick. Put a cold stethoscope on my back. Dumb doctor shit. Then came the words I feared, “Drop your drawers young man.” My face got hot and my hands went numb. It took me a minute while I fumbled with the zipper of my parachute pants. I didn’t have any clean underwear, so I didn’t wear any. As soon as I pulled them down and the doctor saw, he said “Something isn’t right.” I played ignorant. Real sheepish and dumb. I said, “What do you mean?” He palmed my testicle and instructed me to cough. I coughed like this: Ach, ach. He shook his head, pushed the ball up into my stomach and held it there. “Does this hurt?” he asked.The pain knocked the breath right out my lungs. “Yes,” I squeaked. He told me to lay back on the bed. Paper crinkled under my bare ass. He squeezed my ball between his thumb and finger and asked if that hurt. Frantically, I nodded. I wanted to hit the son of a bitch. “Young man, speak up.” “Yes, it fucking hurts. You’re pinching my balls,” I said. He told me to watch my language and called for the nurse and the nurse came and he told her, “Put your hand right here.” She held my ball in place while the doctor poked at my stomach. Don’t get a boner, don’t get a boner, I kept telling myself.She wasn’t as pretty as the girls in the JC Penney catalog, but her hands were soft, she smelled good and she was the first woman to ever touch my bathing suit area. Then I told myself not to fall in love. It just wouldn’t work. We were at different points in our lives. When she bent over, a small silver pendant, a cat, dangled in her cleavage. It seemed so warm and comfortable in there. I wanted to burrow down in there, curl up and take a nap. I had to stop looking before I did get turned on. So I thought of my step-grandaddy instead—his yellow teeth, the hair jutting from his nose and ears and the way his boobs sagged when he’d walk around the house with his shirt unbuttoned. The doctor shook his head, sighing as the examination went on. He seemed annoyed that I had a real medical problem, that I was making him work for his $19.99. He asked where my mother was. I said I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen her in a month or so.He asked how I got there.I told him about Dad in the parking lot listening to 850 KOA Sports Talk Radio. He had the receptionist fetch him. When Dad came in I was still on the table with my pants down, the nurse resting her hand on my thigh.“This young man has an inguinal hernia. Most likely it’s congenital. When his testicles dropped, the hole in the tissue never closed back up, allowing his intestines to fall through the muscle into his scrotum. It looks like he only has one testicle, but there are two in there. Bottom line, he’s going to need surgery,” the doctor explained.“How much does that cost?” Dad asked. “I have no idea,” the doctor said. “I’m not a surgeon.”“Are you sure he needs surgery though? Could he just grow out of it?”“Into it,” I said. “My ball is big. I’d have to grow into it.” The doctor paused, his eyes straining over the rim of his glasses. “Mr. Hardung, if his intestines tangle and rupture, it would poison his whole body with waste. He could die. He’s lucky it hasn’t happened already. I can’t give him the go ahead to participate in any physical activities until this thing is fixed.”The pain on Dad’s face, I was feeling that way on the inside, and not just from the hernia. He was stressing over money. On the way home I was going to hear about how we didn’t have any. I was angry at my body for putting this burden on us, for making me uglier than I already was. Puberty was hard enough without the Elephant Man dangling between my legs. I was also really scared. I didn’t want to go at this alone.“Jeremy has one too,” I blurted.“That’s not funny,” Dad said.“I saw it,” I said. The doctor told the nurse she wasn’t needed anymore, and she walked out of my life. I kept looking towards the door waiting for her to turn around and say, “Wait, we can make it work,” but she never did. Dad took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Can I pull my pants up now?” I asked. The doctor said, “Why are they still down?” Then he warned me not to participate in any “rough housing,” until six weeks after the surgery and I said I wouldn’t.As soon as we got home Dad confronted Jeremy. “Pull down your pants.”“Why? I didn’t do anything. Are you going to spank me?” Jeremy asked.“I just need to see something.” “See what?” “Are your balls fucked-up like his?”Jeremy glared at me. “You promised. You baby.”“I’m saving your life. That’s what I’m doing,” I said.“If you don’t show me, I will spank you. This is important. Pull down your pants.”Jeremy argued, but he pulled them down. Dad looked. “They seem fine to me,” he said.“Get closer. Look, they’re just like mine,” I said. He bent down for another look. Once he saw that I was right he threw up his hands. “Well, I’m fucked. Why didn’t you guys ever say anything when I still had insurance?”“Four years ago? I was eight and he was five. How were we supposed to know?” I asked. “Well, how am I going to pay for two surgeries?”Jeremy said, “I’m not having surgery. You don’t need to pay for me.”And I said, “Then your guts are going to get tangled and leak shit into your whole body. Your shit is poisonous. You realize this, don’t you? You’ll die. Is that what you want?” “I guess I’ll die then.” Him and Dad went on arguing while I snuck off to go play tackle football with the super religious kid next door who had one shoe with a tall sole and one shoe with a normal sole, on account one leg was shorter than the other. Then the time came to check into the hospital. I’d be missing the first week of junior high. In some ways it was great, because I was scared to start a new, way bigger school and wanted to put it off as long as possible. On the other hand, by the time I started, the cliques would be formed, everybody would know where their classes were, where they sat at lunch, who their teachers were. I’d be so far behind. After all the nerds had already been tormented for a week, here I’d come, a brand-new nerd. I’d be the nerd the other nerds picked-on to make themselves feel less insecure. Jeremy and I shared the same hospital room. They wheeled me off to the operating room first. The anesthesiologist counted down from ten. Six was the last number I remembered. When I came to, I was naked and thirsty in a brilliant, white room. My skin was stained yellow from my belly button to my knees. Iodine, as I later learned. The two pubic hairs I had been growing out were shaved off and a row of ugly stitches ran across my groin. A person in blue scrubs and a mask hovered upside down, above my face. She said, “You’re done,” and stuck a sponge on a stick in my mouth. Three hours had gone by and I couldn’t recall one second of it. As I became more coherent, the more my body hurt. They wheeled Jeremy into surgery as they were wheeling me out. When we were both done and back in our room, an old lady brought us pillows with tiny storks on them. Her old lady group made them for sick babies to make sick babies feel better. But I think it made the old ladies feel better, like they still had something to contribute to the world. Selfish old ladies always thinking of their needs first. Jeremy was already up, waltzing around the room, fucking around and laughing. Me though, I couldn’t get out of the bed, felt like I took a shotgun blast to the groin. Both Mom and Dad were there, on opposite sides of the room, the first time they were in the same place since they divorced six years earlier. The surgeon popped in to explain his procedure. He wasn’t sure who to address, looking back and forth between the two. The resentment they held for one another was pent-up in their faces. And it hit me, the four of us probably would never be in the same room again unless me or Jeremy got married or died and I thought back to the tornado bearing down on us and Mom running upstairs to get our favorite things and how I never questioned if she’d make it back. I knew it would take more than a natural disaster to keep her away then, but I wasn’t so sure anymore. Seeing them still hating each other like that and all the times I heard them talk bad about each other made it apparent that love wasn’t guaranteed to last forever. Love is a pair of parachute pants. Holes form, we grow out of it. And I couldn’t help but wonder, would they stop loving me one day? A nurse came in, lifted my gown and checked on my balls, in front of my parents, my aunt, uncle, cousins. I think my grandma may have been there. They all got to see. Then the nurse asked about the pain, on a scale of one to ten.“Ten,” I said without hesitation. The nurse stepped out for a bit, she came back with a bag of liquid and hooked it to my IV. Morphine Sulfate, I heard her mention to my parents. It went, drip, drip, drip. My blood went from cold to warm. How spilled ink consumes not just the surface of the paper but the fibers inside it. I could feel it enter each cell from one side and push the pain out the other. The fear and worry I usually carried was gone. For the first time since I could remember, I didn’t give a shit. About my clothes, my balls, about who loved me and who didn’t. I was numb. I was a cloud. I wanted to feel this way forever.
