The influence of this woman on my life is ridiculously disproportionate to the duration (and perhaps even action) of our Thing, whatever it was. And in my more persistent doldrums, I sometimes wonder what would have become of us if back then I’d consented to proper medication, and kept on my person a half-milligram of Xanax to alleviate the sort of anxious panic that proves ruinous to relationships. It should be stated up front that I don’t believe in the reality of an eternal soul, but find useful the idea of the soul as something symbolically real and semantically different from “consciousness,” but which does include it—a squares/rectangles sort of thing. And so I can say that, whatever relatively insignificant role I may play in her memories, this is the one who took most of my soul with her when she left. It wasn’t malicious; she was welcome to it. But it’s not the sort of thing that grows back like a broken fingernail. For better or worse, I am not who I used to be; love has never felt like this again, and I am sickeningly guilty of half-assing the relationships, including an engagement, with the two women I’ve since dated.
When you said it, we were in a parked car so cold that our breath instantly solidified on the insides of the windows—it became big crystals in a layer thick enough I could have scraped some free with a fingernail, eaten your words if I didn’t believe, but I did, because I felt what you said: You said you loved me and I felt it; you loved (a verb), and I felt your love (a noun), as it penetrated my skin, like rays of comic book radiation turning me into a second self, someone better than I’d been; I felt it physically, I felt someone else’s love within me, which had never happened before.
The night I can’t forget was near Christmas: After having dinner in with your parents, we absconded to the outside hot tub to drink scotch, our bare feet melted the fresh snow on the patio, but our steps were soon covered up again; the hot dome of air hovering above the bubbling water thawed even the fat flakes as they fell from above, so we sat, in a light rain though it snowed around us, under the dark winter welkin, dotted with pinpricks of light which prompted you to teach me about the camera obscura. Your father was a doctor, your mother worked with art—in a museum, I believe—and you seemed to understand everything: I was in awe of your intellect when you held forth on any subject and, immediately after that evening, I enrolled myself in a university to get a four-year degree in the hope of simply keeping up.
Around eleven, we retreated to the living room with its walnut-paneled entertainment wall, and spent the next several hours reclined on a piebald couch, sharing a square velveteen pillow, the bouncing zombie light of TV illuminating the room, tinting our skin and making us both, January pale, glow like blue ghosts as we stared up at your ceiling, at its the snow-dappled skylight; we slipped seamlessly in and out of consciousness (maybe a little whiskey-drunk) and when awake, we alternately eyed each other silently, smiling, chatted idly, or kissed like we were sixteen years old—like it was new, like we were under the impression we’d invented it, like we’d just figured out our tongues and lips and had yet to entertain thought of any other sexual agenda. When together we tended to regress like this, we were not grown-ups, but kids again, rediscovering the greatness of “making out”: At the bar, especially if Our Song came on (because, like teens, we even had a Song), we’d creep into far outdoor corners and balance against the waist-high fence; other times, I’d press you up against a wall made not of stone, only graffiti, by the locked chain link, in the seediness and thick reek behind the dumpster, and there we’d settle happily into the heavy shadow; we’d run off to someone’s car to kiss and cop a feel of each other (sometimes we’d turn the key for heat, sometimes we didn’t bother); in a friend’s apartment, during an after-party, we crept into the kitchen and hid behind the refrigerator as everyone else in the other room passed a glass bowl and watched a video; in the middle of the afternoon we once found ourselves overcome in the Barnes & Noble Parking lot and, by the time we reached the doors, we’d both managed to forget our reading list.
Once, we sipped steam-singed lattes in a coffee shop that wasn’t yours and discussed our favorite authors—their themes, their tropes, their exact words, and implicit synecdoches: if you added it up, what did their entire oeuvre mean?—and you insisted, for shits and giggles, that you’d map my work like that, pretend you were putting together an academic essay on the meaning and merit of my texts, and I brushed the idea aside like a gadfly, ears red with embarrassment, suggesting that surely there wasn’t enough substance in my paltry prose, a statement which made you laugh (it was one of your genuine laughs, one of my favorites, which emerged when you were earnestly amused by surprise: a monosyllabic explosion which turned the typographic ‘Ha!’ from an onomatopoeic approximant to a literal representation), ask if I was kidding, then say: “I’ll totally do it; I’d love to show you what you’ve already said.”
On the couch that night, I slipped for a minute into sleep and woke to find you staring at me, tangled strands of hair hanging in your eyes; I wiped my mouth, worried I’d drooled and humiliated myself, but found it dry, and so asked what it was you were looking at, to which you replied, “I’m so in love with you that it sometimes feels like I’m losing my mind,” and I couldn’t kiss you because I’d forgotten how to breathe.
When we’d stepped from the hot tub, my body temperature was through the roof and the walk to your kitchen, dripping in a delicate but frigid wind, did little to cure the condition, so I got only semi-dressed, slipping into jeans but nixing boxers or socks, buttoning up my long-sleeve, but ditching a crisp red tee-shirt commemorating, for some reason, the victories of the ’81 Phillies; I figured I’d gather my shed vestments before I left but, when I did, I was so stoned on you I was surprised to find I could drive. I could not, however, sleep, so around ten the next day (an hour unknown to my crepuscular schedule), I stopped at your coffee shop for a hot cup—actually caffeinated—to maybe wake me at least a little for what was guaranteed to seem like an unbelievably long afternoon and evening; I was surprised to find you there, having picked up an early shift, and because I was so new to any idea of Us, it was dizzying how intimate it felt to find you both behind the counter in my clothes, that now-rumpled red shirt sitting big on your slight-shouldered frame, and making no mention of that fact—as if rolling out of bed and into my clothing was something you did every day.
Ironically (or maybe not), if you now embarked upon that analysis, you’d find only yourself in my fiction—our first kiss became Kara Harrison’s; your eyes, like crystallized canalwater cut by a lapidary, are now Melody Rion’s (as is the coiled hairband you once drunkenly slipped onto my finger, explaining “Either because it’s killing my wrist or we’re getting quite quickly engaged: You choose”); the perfect curve of your figure, between armpit and hip, belongs to Julie Day (a thief who remains a sad old man’s best memory); your freckles, a cowl of sunspots that matched your sienna hair, I lent to Annie Van Camp (even the white one to the left of your lips which may have, in fact, been a relic of chicken pox); your smile, complete with a lupine eye tooth that, with certain of your wrier grins, gently dents the pillow of your pink lower lip, was lent to Marie Viciente; and your wit, your brilliance, your resilience was all given to Alexandra Haynes, who is the center of my best story but, if in your analysis you were paying close attention, a woman you’d also stumble upon as a subtle presence mentioned in, haunting seven others—because, you see, when everything ended between us, I was sorry to find that I did not, and so every story I wrote, and indeed the ones I still write, I write to remember you.
