but-on-that-other-side

[but-on-that-other-side]

petrichor

september

Like every ending, I can point to the exact moment it happened.  It’s the first text that gets left on read after Cas lands in Boston.

I know that the first to dtr is the first to lose, but I tell you my truth anyways.  I make it to Rome, but weary and late.  By the time I kneel between the pews it is an old woman’s joints that crack and the question I ask God is ‘the nature of marriage - is it truly to weather the periods where you’re sure you’re forgotten?’

I take my sadness in small parcels.  I know much of it is still left to come, but for some reason it won’t come faster.  I wake up from a dream in which he tells me he and Cat have decided to try being poly.

october

The first time we sleep together again, it’s as good as ever.  I promise that I’ll never curse him for sleeping with Cas because of the things he learned.  

Afterwards, I evaluate critically.  I push my nose into his hair and breathe in.  One of the strong undertones in it’s musky scent is definitely cat piss.  Avi tells me that her ex-wife interviewing at Exxon is helping her healing process.

november

I talk to him.  

“Hey,” he’ll say as I walk from Central to Kendall, in that same tender tone he used when he said “Have a good flight,” and I fell in love with him for the first time.

I do not talk to him.

december

It’s the shortest day of the year on Saturday when I’ll drive from Boston to Michigan.  Seven days after that, when I drive Michigan to Boston, the days will be getting longer and it will be closer to a year from that thunderstorm in Maine than it is to that thunderstorm.  

Piercings are another good way to mark the passage of time.  When I last came to Detroit, my belly button was still swollen.  When I first slept with him, I couldn’t cuddle with my right ear down.  

Time has passed, and sometimes that’s all it takes.

january

We have sex for about 30 minutes.  Neither of us orgasms.  It feels tragic; it is once.

It’s so many months later and I don’t hurt anymore, but I do wonder if I’ll ever drive past the colonial buildings on Memorial Drive and the Harvard footbridge in the fading light again and not feel my body squeeze with want.

[but-on-that-other-side]

march, 2019

In March, we are the copilots to each other’s joy.

2: After eighteen hours of travel I’m dizzy on my own doorstep, M awaiting me inside.  He’s a gentleman so we’re going to dinner where I want and suddenly they’re both gentlemen, indulging me in comfort after hurt.  In true form, we embarrass ourselves and those around us while eating at Monkfish, crawl into bed, and call t.  r tags along to play with us, but leaves for his own bed when we suggest sleep.

3: I flirt with h and the kids are apparently shipping me with the booth behind us.  As we finish up our meal, I make eye contact with r, the coparent, and invite folks over to keep hanging out at our house.

4: It’s work-from-home-Monday and we trek through a slushy blizzard to S&S.  I eat all the foods I wanted in Europe and the ones I developed a taste for there.  It’s decadent - orange juice, omelette, cappuccino, french toast, putting my feet up on the booth.  We look into each other’s eyes and talk about what we care about and stay past when the check arrives, no where to be.

5: When I get home from work, we go to Lucky’s and get our ears pierced.  r heeds my suggestion to get little titanium hoops and I agree that I’m the target audience for rainbow oil-drop earrings.  We wanter around CVS for saline and look at each other with intensity in the basement and wonder why we want more holes.

7: Andy and I go out to dinner and drinks at the Painted Burro.  The edges of my vision are blurry and he talks about advice for K and the demands of the job.  It’s a tryptic:

Panel 1 - K isn’t mean, she isn’t trying to call you out, she asks questions because she wants to understand the situation and what you have or haven’t tried.

Panel 2 - Everything you do at work is for you.  You’re not doing it for K or the company or the client.  You’re doing it to build your skills, to put it on your resume, to make yourself proud of what you’ve done.  Stop doing shit that isn’t furthering that.

Panel 3 - Fuck what K thinks, fuck what anyone thinks or what precedent is there.  Do what you think is best.  He is shaking.

I thank him without meaning it, but I’ll thank him later for potentially the best advice I’ve been given up to this point.

I stumble onto the T and get the key into the lock after a few tries.  I strip off my stuffy sweater and on impulse go downstairs to talk to r.  We laugh and touch and eventually wind up back in his bed to cuddle and enjoy being horizontal.

I know the kinds of touches that lead to sex, and I squeeze hard back.  He moans and proves the things I think I know about him to be wrong and teaches me things I’d forgotten about desire.  He leaves me spinning in my room, staring wide-eyed at orange walls.

11: It’s another work-from-home Monday and we walk to Darwin’s for First Sandwich in a sunlight that makes me wonder if I need Vitamin D.  We have coffees and simple pleasures and consider simpler lives.  I check Teams guiltily and he appears not to work at all.

I have a Mike’s in hand by noon and I spend a fair amount of the afternoon tossing my laptop aside and complaining that I have to take on another client.  r packs for San Francisco and eventually joins me in his bed.  I spoon him and touch his chest and his stomach and breathe into his ear until we’re well and properly fooling around.  He stops us to catch his plane and messages me from the airport about Second Sandwich.

30: At 8pm, I think I’m down and I don’t know if I’ve had a good trip.  I’m yelling and not tasting the Cava I’m eating and I understand that I’m definitely not down.  I get to the Lab and I immediately need to leave as the video games are Far Too Much.  I get back from a walk that involves some prophesying and also pouring milk on the grass and sit down in the dining room - r is there.  

That night, I learn that r has a phenomenal gift, and it’s talking to tripping people.  He listens to you as though what you’re saying is interesting and intelligible, and talks to you, not just the drugs.  He works to match your energy level. “Emotional party mom,” he’ll say.  “Come lay on me,” I’ll say.  I mention we could do this better at home.  H calls us straight and r is Not Fine as we walk home.  I sit concerned and he makes ramen.

We go downstairs and lay in bed, talking of the deep things. When r says I’m easier to communicate with now, there are still happy angles and sad angles and I’m still scared of holes and sea mammals are on the ceiling.  We talk gender and sexuality and style and why we talk and why we don’t.  It gives me the deepest care for this human being.  It’s only about sixty percent the drugs.  I want to tell him I love him.  I want to kiss his face.  He starts to touch my body and it’s assuredly the best back massage I’ll ever get.  I warn him that I’m not entirely here, but I rub his body anyways.  I rub more of his body and we grind and I want the hard bulge in the gap in my pelvis in a groaning, pit-of-my-stomach way.  I ask for him inside me and I’m still nervous of what this might take, so I ask.  He says that he’s worked up enough to be easy and that makes me hot enough to ride him until he comes inside me.  I fall asleep under my comforter in his bed, wondering what I’ll find in the morning.

31: I’m a mess in the morning.  I take stock of sweaty limbs and a lube-slicked hand and eyes that refuse to unwiden and decide to table the face that my vagina is bleeding.  I think I’m emotionally okay because I can initiate tasks, but after having a fight with M because I’m still soul-bonded, I know that I’m not really okay.  r and I commiserate.  I feel like co-pilots, but I can’t feel any joy.  By the end of the day, March is over.

[but-on-that-other-side]

healing

The healing is slow.  So slow even, that I don’t realize it’s happening until it’s months later and I’m looking back at how sad I used to be.

I think it starts the week before I leave for Europe.  I chase through the sights of campus and talk to ASTI about all the wonderful things that happened to me here.  K and I bond, Nat hugs me when we pass the spinning arts rehearsal.  I raise a chai latte as I run between calls and the training I’m supposed to be running, and my hands shake with missing hours of sleep from holding J until late into the night.  I remember finding the sun one afternoon, and laying outside the windows of the room for a few paused moments.  I start to learn to not let the work wear upon more of me than I let it.  I’m tired, but not defeated. 

When I get to London though, I am defeated.  The skies are grey and the ground feels too hard underneath my feet and I pay eighteen euros just to sit down for a little while in a movie theatre.  In Leipzig I’m too ashamed of my English to go out to eat.  

Stepping off the plane into the hazy mountains of Florence is the most visceral relief I’ve felt in months.  Florence is easy to navigate with a passing knowledge of Italian and a past affair with the city.  There’s no way to describe the experience but lovely.

But there is though: I walk the backstreets up to the Piazza de Michaelangelo, finding a walled garden on the way where the sun can play on my skin and I can imagine the roses that are here in June.  I told my parents I was quitting on Thursday while I drew sharp lines over my project plan, but now I think about Dave and Fred and the beautiful CONOPS deck I made and wonder if there’s something real keeping me here.  

I sit down to watch a would-be Bono play Rocket Man and the landscape dwarfs the Duomo dwarfs the town.  Small planes take off over the mountains and for some reason the sight is full of such emotion.  The sun sets on the red roofs of the old city and I ask myself what someone genuinely dedicated to the enjoyment of their own life would do.

Max arrives late in the night and I meet him on the Ponte Vecchio with my sweatpants tucked into my work shoes.  It’s hardly cold at all, and we catch up in the moonlight and the smell of the river at night.  Max talks of Paris like it’s Leipzig, and I start to understand how sad it’s possible to be.  Why does anyone ever leave their homes, I wonder.  Stay there, plant your trees, exist in your family, don’t travel by car for fear of getting more than two miles from your own home.  In the dark, different hours in which J and I laid in my bed I told them that I’m not just myself, that people need their roots and their context to be content.

The next morning we walk right across the street to sit down for our preferred countries of breakfast - Italian and American, respectively - and the mirrors that line the walls show the joy in my shoulders.  I’m content to savor my cappuccino but Max, deadpan as always, says hurry up, we have a lot of meals to get in today.  

And we do.  We look out over the area from the summer of the belltower and text Rohde and talk of the deserts we love.  We eat flatbreads in the enormous shadow of the Duomo where we leave our postcards and need to tear through a museum full of white-washed figures to get them back.  I take Max back up to the Piazza where Rocket Man played last night and we take gelato and for whatever reason I talk about Turbully Wilson and Scooby Doo under the David on the hill like it’s the most usual thing in the world.

We have dinner in a lovely corner with an abundance of soft lighting.  Max worries about spilling his red wine on his creme shirt and I enjoy the best cheap prosecco I’ve ever had and worry about nothing at all.  We talk of our friends from high school, where they are and what they’re doing and why we lost track of them.  The lights shine off our glasses and I taste the floral notes and I think about the relationships I’ve failed to salvage.  

It takes me a long time to internalize the lessons I learn in Florence.  The next week in Leipzig is, if anything, worse.  On the final day, when there is finally enough to do, I feel some breath of energy.  On the Saturday when I fly home, I work an 18-hour day.  I get on top of my shit.  It feels like agency.  

Healing is like a veil being lifted on my judgement.  I lay in J’s bed, sober of my need where they’re the opposite.  I evaluate where their body touches mine, where I want it to, and how I feel about that.  I have a breadth of perspective now that was breathtakingly limited by immense sadness.  I know I just wanted J for sex.  For human touch.  For access to EC.  For a bed to sleep in.  For a reason to come home on weekends.  For a love that now feels foolish.  They are a beautiful disaster.  I don’t know if I’m beautiful, but I am no longer a disaster.

[but-on-that-other-side]

fall, revised

I am 

resculpting

as Marta and I are walking back from Trader Joes.  The moon is high and the chill in the air nibbles rather than bites, and I understand why October is Christian’s favorite month.  It feels okay to be softer now.

I am 

resculpting, reworking

my idea of fall to include hot days with cider donuts and vibrant pumpkins.  Avital asking if I’ll be at waffles to press a soft kiss to my cheek.  Unprompted intimacy with Al.  Flannels in orchards.

The man’s head on my stomach as he trips, the light fading as we hold each other, talk, listen to Pork Soda.

The mist obscuring the moon and me, rewiring.  

A cold that nibbles, like a lover.

[but-on-that-other-side]

the mother slime

When I’m packing up after Christmas at my parent’s house, I find a stack of management books from the ‘80s left in the corner of my childhood room where my parents have, in the last five years, come into the habit of leaving things they think I may want to take back to Boston.  I know they belonged to my mother, but she denies leaving them for me.  

On the very side of my bed, where I have become counter-intuitively accustomed to lying when I don’t have company, I crack open KAIZEN and her slime literally falls out of it.  A long yellow feather from a pet cockatiel she had for almost twenty years.  A page of notebook paper covered in her nearly-illegible handwriting, detailing a discussion schedule for the book.  

In my sister’s dimly-lit room, I find a candid family photo I haven’t seen before tacked to her mirror.  I’m maybe 4 or 5, so it must be around 2000.  My mother has the same haircut as I do now. 

I think one of the reasons I didn’t want to be like my mother growing up is that my mother wasn’t very happy.  For much of my younger years, my mom was at work, stressed and suited.  When she closed the door on her corporate job, she did not open one into a relaxed early retirement but instead many years of trauma recovery, existential horror, and struggling to find a place in our family.  She worked for environmental agencies.  She cooked very bland food.  She wrote prolifically.  

When I was in Kindergarten, we made time capsules to be opened when we graduated high school.  I read mine then, so I know what it will contain, but as it shook me then, it shakes me now to see the words written, in my own hand: “When I grow up, I want to be a mom.”

As I imagine happens when one’s parents argue, the kids pick sides.  Prior to leaving for MIT, I was a dad-stan for as long as I can remember.  Now when I go home, I can’t relate the choices my father makes in response to conflict.  I can relate viscerally to the responses my mother has.  I wonder if my friends, lovers, and hypothetical children will think that I’m crazy.

For quite a while, my mother tried very hard to get me to read Little Women.  I brushed her off at the title, believing it too feminine for me.  I watch Little Women at the AMC at Park Street and cry continuously for almost half the film.  Some lines, characters, interactions are like a ton of bricks.  I haven’t told her I saw it yet, and it’s this question that stops me - will it bring her more joy to know that I like it (her) now, or frustration that I wouldn’t try to then?

[but-on-that-other-side]

thunderstorms, prelude

It’s St. Patrick’s Day 2018 at _house, but I can’t remember who asks the question that has me answer:

“My type is people with tired eyes who I feel responsible for.”

* On what feels like a rare week of home but is nowhere near as rare as it will be in the coming months, I stop at home for Chick Chick Boom and continue on the T to East Campus.  I leave Thai food on J’s door and know that they’ll know it’s me.

*

I wonder if this is why I tend to get together with the people I comfort from their breakups.  Thinking back, it’s been many - Tom, Al, Miles, J.  I’m not convinced of this explanation.  I just remember knowing that when I held a sobbing Miles on my couch after Lui broke up with her that we were going to get together.  I don’t remember how I knew.

*

It’s that night in March when I realize how low the bar for “feel responsible for” is.  He’s across the room, about to sign a lease for the same house as me, with the lines on his cheeks and eyes that look heavy to raise, and I understand that “lives under my roof” counts.

*

The Van Trip acted as a hard reset in a lot of ways - or rather, I felt like it was a hard reset a lot more than it actually was.  I don’t think we get hard resets.  We just forget and remember and forget again.

*

I remember wanting him, thinking about how it would feel to have him inside me, driving across Nevada and writing about bisexuality in Tahoe.  I remember taking off my shorts to walk by him in a thong a few times while he’s laying on our couch after Pride.

*

I will not remember when I fell asleep in J’s bed while they tooled.  I will not remember when I held them and propped them up and bandaged wounds.  I will not remember that it’s really me who needs.

*

I will remember, more than a year later as the quiet waves lap at the shore in Maine and the sky goes gray with the coming rain.  I’ll look across the fire pit and see the lines on his face and understand why I’ve been trying all day to touch him as though that will help his brain chemicals all go back into the right spots.

*

I’ll forget as I’m holding him, toying with him on the couch, dancing in the rain.

I’ll remember someday.

[but-on-that-other-side]

december 2018

1.  My entire project plan thrown out the window during the first day on site.  A nineteen hour day submitted on my timesheet with K at my back.

2. My voice shaking during the Leipzig kickoff call, taken in my car.  My hands shaking amongst seven hundred thousand square feet of freezing cereal.

3. Lyfting directly to East Campus and falling into Th and E’s arms.  It’s blessedly warm when I strip out of the ill-fitting pants and fouled sweaters.  They keep a towel in their room for me, but they don’t really love me.

4. Saying “this is exciting” instead of “this is terrifying”.  This is something I have no idea how to do.  This is something I have no idea why I am doing.  This is something that makes me question most of the things I thought I knew about myself.

6. Hours-long baths on Saturday afternoons.  Tiramisu at the teenager-run Italian restaurant in Hershey.  An unmistakable desire for a fiery sun to consume me.

7. Sending J The Season | Carry Me

12. Driving back to Baltimore in the setting sun, acid flashbacks wracking my body.

14. Mistaking going up on the boom lift in the early morning for a spiritual experience.  Does it count if the man who drives it goes on mission trips?  As far as the eye can see are LPN tags.  The sun slots through the windows to put a dime in the faith jukebox to play the song of a strange god.

15.45. I open the door and cross the aisle.  I want to honk my horn.  Am I the kind of object that beeps?

18#4. I’m crying when I board the plane to Baltimore.  I pull my beanie over my eyes on the plane and my eyes leak until I fall asleep.  I start crying again as soon as I wake up.  I get in the car and I’m grasping at straws for anything that might make me feel okay.  I pull over for a sugary drink and four times the recommended dose of Vitamin D.  I think about stopping into a gas station for cigarettes.  I drive off the highway in search of somewhere beautiful.  In the parking lot of a laundromat, surrounded by fields full of the stumps of corn, I sob at the prospect of losing another week of most of what it means to be myself.  I call my dad and mostly just hyperventilate into the phone.  I try to take a nap.  I say that I won’t start driving again until I can stop crying.  I start driving to Harrisburg again anyways.                     

~.                              dear darkness dear forest

      dear pale flutter dear light-impaled luna dear all the secret

      ways of wood and water dear fire and dear myraid of scars

      dear god this is not faith this is a moth born silent born without mouth

5cD&. Sleepless nights before 5am wakeups.  Abdominal pain.  exitmusic playing by the pond where the geese sometimes rest and where I’ve said for the last time that I’m here to see Tim Carricuto. 

[but-on-that-other-side]

thunderstorms i

The rain keeps us inside the main cabin.  It’s hard to tell what leads to the heat - all of us in here in one small room, or the fact that this man is a human furnace, now not just with his head resting delicately on my chest but his whole body wrapped in mine.  He moans too loud when I pull his hair.  When I run out of tricks I can do that won’t make this blatantly obscene, I ask him if he wants to come outside and play in the rain with me.

To my surprise, he says yes, curling his fingers into mine.  To my surprise, he loves the storms.  To my surprise, he follows me upstairs to the granny apartment we’ve nicknamed the drug den where I pretend to look at a book.  

It takes us very few moments to crash together.  We roll.  My hands are around his neck.  His fingernails sow red seams down my thighs.  When he eats me out, it becomes clear that God has blessed this man with more than just talent in physics.  The rain might be coming through the open skylight for how wet our bodies are where they rub together.

When I finish, I realize that he’s on his knees on the ground.  I stand, still holding a fistful of sticky mohawk.  My other hand rises to meet his face.  It’s a realization in stages - my mouth going wider and his gaze remaining unfaltered despite periodic shakes going down his spine.  He takes two of my fingers in his mouth.  I push them down his throat.  The world no longer sits perfectly on its axis.

When we return to the main cabin, there’s no chance of fooling anyone.  Mark gives me the least subtle possible set of facial expressions and Joe asks to swap beds with me tonight to sleep with A.  I can only imagine what kinds of conversations have happened in our absence.  I sit and attempt to start my book, marveling that he’s able to read a paper.

We are insatiable.  It’s him kissing me the moment I get into bed, it’s going out to my car as a level of desperation, it’s him whispering “would it be okay if I went down on you or is that too much?” while we know full well s can hear us on the landing, it’s fucking again in the morning as the sun rises.  He comes over the night after we get home.  The house hears us scream and my friends hear me rave.  I like to imagine that our friends glean some enjoyment from watching the supernova of two super sluts finally crashing together.  For my own part, I could be stardust.

[but-on-that-other-side]

A hard wind blows over Leipzig

The mildest February wind tosses my hair into my face, along with a cologne that I can now identify. J told me of their ex boyfriend and how he gave them his cologne when they went to college to remind them of him.  At first they would smell it, but then they started to wear it.  They wear it, like it, and rarely think of him, the same way in which we all still have the bits of our past lovers, brought into ourselves.

Part of the depersonalization is forgetting that I have a body. I do remember that I have a body, but mostly only when it demands to be charged or watered. Sometimes I’ll remember at non-critical times though, like when I’m drinking water out of the sink on the Deutchbahn to wash down the vitamins I’m having instead of breakfast or lunch. I’ll catch a whiff of my hair then, which holds the smell of the conditioner I used and you used. I’ll remember the hickeys still dark beneath my nipples. I’ll drink pork soda with tangled legs. I’ll remember telling you of this feeling of the mind, but not of the body.

A hard wind blows over Leipzig, over the blank fields and across grey skies.  Bo is slightly less likely to yell at me for asking a question, so I ask him on the kilometers-long drive across the terminals if storms are like this are common, and he says this happens every day.  A hard wind blows over Leipzig on the first day, and I can’t imagine how to live in an environment so harsh - where every social move seems to require intense precision and my toes grind against the steel in my boots. I lose a necklace with an engraving about changing the world. I hold onto the chargers for the dev laptops and to the piece of paper that says I can bring my phone airside like lifelines.

I panicked a little when I turned the page of HOTES 2018-2019 and realized that I’m making plans for April 2019. When I designed the layout for April 2019 - with x’s beautiful hair and trying to make the dildo.io shirt positioned to make a too-young J’s fresh knife play scars look sexy - I somehow thought the month would never come.  Like I could be dead by then.  Or at least that it wouldn’t matter to current me.  Now I’m making plans for April 2019.  It strikes me that I’ve been sleeping with J longer than I’ve ever slept with anyone.

The wind outside the Leipzig passenger airport is perpetually still, too still for somewhere meant to facilitate movement. Then again, it seems as though no one ever comes or goes.  Living next to the airport leaves me in a regular state of feeling like I’m going to go home soon.  I’m not.

A hard wind blows over Leipzig, and I see the German sun for the first time.  It lights the cell of the hotel room, the saturated colors Mondrion-esque against the bars of white.  I’m too exhausted to not yell at K over the phone or to motivate myself to do something other than watch hours of Grey’s Anatomy during the day.  I go to Florence where the wind never seems to blow, but it takes me a long time to internalize the lessons I learned there.

A hard wind blows over Leipzig, and I want to sit outside the airport an reflect on my time here, but I never want to reflect on something once it’s done.  It’s the next thing that has my attention, not the last thing.  I am a zombie strapped to a jet pack.  I eat the meatless half of my dinner and floor it on the autobahn to Berlin.  I am required to continue.  

[but-on-that-other-side]

Wasted and Useful Lives

The Thames is low this year, shrunk off it’s banks and revealing rocks and mud. I walk along it, with the parks and the joggers and the sky that reminds me how close to the ocean we are.  The ground feels too close to my feet through my shoes, and my stops to sit on chilly park benches become more frequent. 

Eventually my body demands some sort of sustenance to keep going, so I pop into the only familiar face around, a Caffe Nero, and take a meal with less nutrition than I need.  I scroll through tumblr as it’s too early for East Coast friends to talk to me.  Cities are less fun without friends to share them with.  Tumblr gives me that same human feel - with gifsets with text like the gods have fashioned us for love and blogs titled motivationsforlife and of course boys kissing.

I find good reason to continue wandering in the British Museum and then the British Library. The library is tucked into a quiet, older residential area - a mother and father walk their skipping sun along an empty sidewalk in the same direction as I do.  I intend to scurry into the stacks and curl my body in the hard perpendicular between heavy ground and wooden shelves, but I’m drawn into a dark room away from the crowds.

It turns out one needn’t go to the British Museum to remember how much they have stolen.  The first thing my eyes light upon in the backlit glass cases is an original da Vinci sketch.  It’s wonderful.  At first, I can’t believe anyone in this room is looking at anything else.  Across from it, I can make out sections of the Italian in a Michaelangelo letter.  Further inside the low-voiced room, it’s the place to sit that first catches my interest.  From a long sit, I look around.  See what can be seen while also giving my knees some relief.   Across the aisle is an enormous, illustrated bible.  

I see the book, but what I imagine is the author.  Thinking back to what I learned in a humanities lecture in a similarly reverent room many years ago, I picture their lives.  He touched this book.  Was it cold and dark in the monastary where they lived?  Did they wake up every morning and write in script and place gold leaf until it was time to sleep again?  

I wonder if it was just a job to them, or if it was really a devotion.  Even if it wasn’t a devotion, it must have been a sacrifice.  For what?  He made this beautiful book that lays open in one of the most famous libraries in the world, but what is a molding page inside glass to him now?  Would sun and skin and sex have not done him better than burnt fingers on candles and stone and Old English? What is an old book compared to a wife to hold in the night and children to give his name to?  Wind and words, wind and words.

It’s months later and rej and I are going out to get a sandwich at 11am on a work-from-home Monday.  On these days, we go out to eat cafe food we haven’t earned and drink coffees we don’t need, and he teaches me about the enjoyment of simple things like food and home and the presence of existing in the same space as familiar faces.  Later, he’ll remind me of things I’d forgotten about desire.  I think about the work I’m not doing, and he wonders aloud at how his aspirations have changed.  He says he wants to be a punk now.  In a past life he was a SpaceX intern.  He considers a next career move as a barista.  The sunlight streams through the windows of Caffe Nero but I’m in the dark-walled and soft-floored room of the British Library.  An illuminated bible rests open in a glass case.  Wasted and useful lives.

[but-on-that-other-side]

They say that I’m the only thing they’ve ever liked from Chicago, and that keeps me holding on for a long time.  Longer even, than the sex that I come back from Greensboro for, the sex that stays with me for days afterwards.

I’ve been very open about my sadness this evening and in the dark and the late in their bed it’s hard not to cry as I reflect.  There are a million moving parts that are causing me to hurt and blunt fingers touch my cheeks as I talk about a few of the many I’ve never spoken of before.  In lieu of truly explaining myself, I ask them if they’ll wake me up if they think they need to go to the ER.  I spoon them and we agree that we would each rather have our own pain.  I know it’s a million years from the right time, but I find that there are two things I can’t fall asleep without saying:

One: I just want to feel less sad.

Two:

“I think I need to take a step back from the relationship I’m pursuing in which the other person/people obviously don’t want the same things I do.”

“To put a finer point on it, I think I should take a step back from this,” And I squeeze where my arm is wrapped around their chest.

“Unless you disagree, I think what I want isn’t what’s really going on here.”

They turn over and take my hand and it takes them long enough to answer that it gives me hope.  

“I agree with you.”

It’s sadness but also relief as minute by minute I take parts of my body from them until I can roll over and fall asleep.

When I wake up sweaty and into the space between dreams, the P&D locations I need to tune next week in Pennsylvania seem so much more real than any relationship we might have had, so I leave in the low light without a goodbye squeeze or a worry as to whether I can help them wake up in time.  I’m careful to retrieve all my clothes and my breath appears in the sunny air as I sing Let’s Not Shit Ourselves aloud on the walk to the train.

I shower in my own home and the plans we made drip off me.  The bath they asked to take in this tub.  Vague ideas of staying the weekend in Maryland.  When they told me that they’d cry when the tanlines faded from my back.  Drip, drip, drip.

[but-on-that-other-side]

It’s been seven days since I slept in my own bed.  I woke up early after the night spent with J to catch my flight, the feeling of pulling their hips back onto my vicious fingers still clawing lines down my spine.

I take some of the comforts of home with me on the road - a kind note, a candle to burn.  Other comforts are reserved purely for business travel.  Getting in between pure white sheets with my shoes on.  Starbucks frappuccinos around the clock to put more calories in my body to work longer hours.

Then Green Street Grill and Nat’s arms and being curled around J to sleep while they work and I’ve worked too much myself.  In the cabin they try to get me up early again and I wonder if I’ll ever get a full night’s sleep again.

On Saturday night, an evening fast becoming my only night of rest, I summit the stairs to my attic room, my pack cantilevered off on shoulder.  It feels like home now.

[but-on-that-other-side]

Fall didn’t used to mean anything to me, but this year, I find myself savoring the the chilling winds and browning leaves and the settling.  I feel the tendrils of last fall reaching up to wind into my thoughts, memories of spiderwebs in cold stone cracks.  The look of golden leaves across Hammond Pond.  Shivering and doing things that scared me with little regard for the consequences.  As I get older, I find that the seasons are more powerful in their nostalgia than their experiences.  I think they always were.

I don’t remember loving Al very well.  I don’t remember why I fell for her or why we fit together or why we meant so much to each other, but I still hate the woman she slept with after me.  When seeing her makes me want to scream I wonder why do I remember the hurting so much sharper than I remember the loving?

F and I go for a walk in the woods, to think and to write and to paint.  Dark roots submerge themselves into darker water.  Fungi reek of things we don’t understand.  In the colorful sunshine I think of the kinds of flat, northern forests where the legends of the wendingo were born.

Fall is taking a pint-sized bit of your trepidation off of it’s shelf in your mind and turning it over, examining it, feeling it. Letting it scare you.  Letting it thrill you.  Knowing that it, like all fears, is fleeting.

Fall is a recognition that you enjoy things that don’t feel good.  You like the cold, and the rain, and the smell of detritus on the ground.  There’s a part of you that likes being scared.

[but-on-that-other-side]

M says “let’s do something fun” and the next thing I know, we’re pulling up to Revere Beach and laying out some towels as if we could bathe in the disappearing sun.

Running into the surf and trying to drag t with me, I find it warm enough to submerge myself in.  I’d never believed it before when people told me that September was still summer.  We hold each other in the waves and look out onto the islands on the harbor and occasionally I’ll try to catch M off his guard and dunk him in the ocean.

M and r can run faster in the sand than I can, and they find the millions of mussels washed up and the tide pools on the beach before I do.  I hang back, catching my breath, letting them bond, and enjoying my time back in the outdoors.

Later, we’re eating well at a restaurant I can’t afford, laughing and talking and planning more adventures and I’m shivering in the never-drying salt water clinging to my clothes.  I ask everyone what they’re excited for this week, and r says it’s what we just planned.  The lights are shining off our wine glasses and M looks at me and he says, “Did you know that every day is your real life?”

When we wake up in the mornings and I can see the way in which a life at the generosity and whims and relationships with others is wearing on him.  I understand why he has to go home, but until he does I ask him if he wants a cup of chai whenever I make one, in the boob mug reserved for special guests.

We’re walking past city hall, hand in hand and depending on each other for stability more than we should.  Our pupils are like saucers and we’re laughing and talking loudly and aimlessly.  After dinner in the twilight we walk to my house and I cry over all the feelings that exist so bright and large in my body.  We don’t sober up until late in the night and stay up talking about how if we hadn’t done this together we’d be judging each other fiercely.

It’s the day he’s leaving and I’m too sick-hungover-tired to have much of an emotional reaction to that.  Yesterday I half-jokingly begged him not to go back to LA, and I was worried that the feeling of needing each other was one-sided.

He’s getting in an Uber and I say that I’m going to make myself a cup of tea, and his face crumples when I don’t ask him if he wants a cup.  

[but-on-that-other-side]

Inconsistent gusts of rain hit the roof and S pants to the sliding of P’s tongue, the two of them as engrossed in each other as we were a few minutes ago.  Now, we lay together, content in our bodies and the places where they’re connected, observing at some times and drifting at others.  Occasionally the touches we place on each other’s bodies lean more purposeful and the walls of muscle at my core become more insistent than sated.  Mostly though, it’s the deep intimacy of J’s dove-soft hair and the flutter of eyelashes against my chest.

I think about how happiness is not an achievement, or a good that can be acquired or saved up to tide you through.  Happiness has been hard to come by this month, and I know that I can’t bring this joy with me.  Like love or care or life, ‘happy’ is not a state but an action, one to practiced into existence.  One to keep setting yourself up to experience, day in and day out.