Mind the Gap

            The only time I ever took biology, it was the summer before my senior year. Thirtysomething seventeen-year-olds in cutoff shorts crammed into a sweaty lecture hall, confused by the late July classroom; and on Fridays, we watched movies. One week, I sat with my feet on the desk—the room dark and forgiving—and squinted, absorbed, as a male lion stalked his way under an African tree. The male enters the pride, a British voice hushed, and assesses the task at hand. Without so much as a warning, the lion pounced on a cluster of cubs and proceeded to rip them to shreds. The male knows that in order to assert his dominance, he must first remove any trace of another male’s bloodline. A chorus of girls erupted in “OHMIGOD NOOOOOOO,” as the weight of the visual sank in and our classroom deteriorated accordingly. Eventually, our droopy teacher flipped on the lights and summoned us back with a clap of her hands. “Biology can be unforgiving,” she said, barely fazed. “When some things are viewed as unnatural. Kind of makes you think about stepdads and stepchildren, no?”

            Not venturing to think too closely about my own stepfather—who had never so much as batted an eye at my torrent of teenager, let alone grab my face with his teeth—I gave further thought to that concept: unnatural. To defy the laws of nature, to be something other than regular, to roll off the shelf of good sense for no reason; people dressing their pets up for the holidays, for example. Reality television. Christian death-metal, prepackaged sushi. Kim Kardashian’s proportions. And of course, long-distance relationships.

            That’s right. Mind you, this isn’t some sort of half-assed jab where I attempt to unpack something I never have, nor care to, understand (see: Psychological Statistics 110, and a series of term papers bearing variations on a title of “Unpacking the Blah Blah in Today’s Blah Blah Blah.”) This is something that strikes iron in the pit of my heart, and a reality that I know almost as well as the back of my hand—or the front of the trenches—or the feeling of waking up in the middle of the night to check my email; because maybe, just maybe, he finally wrote back.

            When brought up in casual dinner banter, long-distance romantic relationships have a similar effect as the prevalence of feline leukemia, or the fact that we’re long overdue for an earthquake. They’re conversation kryptonite. People sit around in stunned silence, almost as though they’re afraid it’s contagious; she looks tired, it MUST be because her boyfriend lives far away… if MY significant other lives far away, I will ALSO look tired, and probably lose my job, and collapse in a pile of despair. None of which, of course, is true. But attempting to explain the logic behind a long-distance relationship to someone who has never had one is like telling your grandfather you can’t leave the house because your clogs don’t match your pants. In other words, useless. Not to mention ignoring the fact that no logic exists to explain.

You see, no one enters a long-distance relationship on purpose. It’s not like we meet someone, tumble head over heels, and decide: “This is nice. So you wanna start seeing each other, like, NEVER and gradually lose our connection and minds as we spend all our time on the phone?” Most people, myself included, declared themselves allergic to long-distance love at one point or another; because at the end of the day, no one wants to be that person checking Facebook in the bathroom, or saving their good underwear for certain weekends and not for others. There’s no tutorial for how to navigate a bond that takes place over text message, or college class that tells you what to do the first time your boyfriend makes his shit YOUR problem from miles away—“and while we’re at it, here’s how to do taxes!” There’s no such thing as an urgent question when your significant other lives nine hours ahead, and is sleeping when you need to talk. Long-distance partnerships are unnatural in the sense that they live in the future and past, running over experiences that have or will come, when we’re otherwise trying to ground ourselves into the present. If I had a dollar for every guided meditation that I’ve done on the PERFECTION OF THIS VERY MOMENT, only to battle the voice that exclaims Three more weeks! Three more weeks! I could probably pay off my car.

At the same time, the people who claim—without hesitation—that long-distance is impossible are usually the same ones who believe—without hesitation—that relationships are always hunky-dory when both partners live in the same place. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that choosing to spend your life mirroring another human means issues ARE GOING TO come up: and whether you’re three inches or three oceans apart, the reflection is not always pretty. Yes, when you’re in the same room, you can smile and hug it all out: a huge fucking advantage in the grand scheme of Being Okay. However, when physical touch is not an option, you are left with another advantage—to let small shit go. It’s hard to maintain ego in an argument when your version of Self is contained in the small right-hand corner of Skype. And your face keeps freezing. And you’re left with a moment to stare at yourself on the screen, thinking: Really? Is that how he sees me?

Is that how I want to be seen?

In choosing to be in a long-distance relationship (because yes, it is a choice), we are given the opportunity to examine ourselves more often than we’d like. Our insecurities come to the front of the stage, do a tap dance, and ask: “Are you happy?” And in the space between bodies, there is an answer. We are forced to check in with ourselves—questions like, “Do I know the difference between a light, compassionate touch and a Vulcan death grip? And which one am I doing TOOODAAAAY?” And as we look down at our white knuckles, strained, we are faced with the heart-wrenching, savory task of learning to be our own friend.

My first round of long-distance love was an accident. I left for college, and it was only after my then boyfriend and I spent hours talking on the phone that we turned to each other and asked: are we still together? Because the opposite felt simply impossible, and yes: it appears we still are.  Our summer lasted for four years. For such a delicate beginning, it wasn’t long before that relationship turned comical in its mess: sobbing into voicemails, laser-like obsession with email, stereotypical addiction to misunderstanding. Worst of all, mistaking that for the adrenaline of being with each other; because “See?! I broke it. Now we can fix it. We can do this thing, right here, together.” It was only recently when I came up against this scar tissue that I realized how deep it had run. In every interaction that follows an unhealthy one, there can be the temptation to bolt—it’s not your fault I’m damaged!—or go round and round on the carousel of past hurts, reenacting familiar battles until someone gives up; however, you can also get your ass off the horse. Now in my second long-distant relationship, I no longer mistake pain for depth. While this one also caught me off-guard, the decision to follow it came from a place of mutual truth: confidence, albeit surprise, at the way our love morphs as we move. Like walking down the sidewalk and seeing a single blade of grass rising up from between cracks in the cement, and feeling a tender kind of amusement at the fact that it hasn’t been smashed. The decision to stay comes easily when both people think: Life without you… no longer an option. So hey, want to grow as I grow?

Being in a healthy long-distance relationship requires a number of things: One, ditching movies. The fact that John Cusack’s character is not outside your window has less to do with the fact that you’re bicoastal, and more to do with the fact that he doesn’t exist. Two: we must forego the shameless romanticizing of other people’s relationships. It is easy to look at another long-distance pair and think, “Oh, they just write letters and gaze fondly at one another’s photograph while coordinating for surprise flower arrangements in their respective places of work, how PERFECT”—while meanwhile, you’re drinking alone and yelling at Skype when the internet blows and the call drops…again. It is difficult, but far more worthwhile, to pan for gold within the current of trust that YOU share; you and that one other person who knows that the distance is hard, but believes that you’re easy to love. No matter what way you cut it, it sucks to have a person-sized hole in the fabric of your life. It sucks to feel the absence of your loved one in the little things you do: the making coffee, brushing teeth, day-to-day perfection. On the flip side, there’s the light—the simple secret—of walking down the street with your heart blazing Yes. I am loved. Because someone out there thinks you’re swell enough to suspend their disbelief, to send you photos of the food they made, and wait for the day you’ll cook together.

Long-distance relationships afford us something we don’t often get: the opportunity to miss someone. It’s tempting to lean on technology—a lure that I believe can be neatly summarized by the time I walked around Urban Outfitters with my phone overhead, desperately searching for service so that my boyfriend and I could continue our existential argument over Facebook—however, we needn’t live there. Letting time and space dance between conversations can feel like a kiss, or it can feel like the scariest shit in the world; but at the end of the day, these relationships let us go home to ourselves. In fact, they demand it. They require a certain level of Owning Our Shit, which not everyone wants to do: I’ll wager that no one feels stellar looking at the screen and saying out loud, “I have no idea how to convey my emotions on the internet.” But getting off the computer with a load of forgiveness, and loving yourself as you are—taking your shoes off and rubbing your feet in the grass—that is the part that feels good. That, and the promise of making it better tomorrow.

Like most things, long-distance relationships are what we make them: long, short, painful, lusty, beautiful, complex, fun. Building a life far away from your partner-in-crime IS unnatural (the lion cub enters the savanna, seemingly unaware of what waits in the brush), but so is assuming there’s only one way to build life. Stone by stone, bird by bird; unnatural does not mean impossible. Impossible is lazy. And anyone who has spent seven hours on a train, or cut out individual hearts to glue on an envelope, paying ten dollars to send it Express Mail to make sure that it gets there on time—anyone who has ever known love that is lazy knows this kind is anything but.

Retrograde

            There was a time before. There was a time before she started teaching at a yoga studio, when “mercury” was nothing more than a thing of thermometers, forgotten planet, distant origin to the word mercurial—which to this day, she’s not sure she understands. “She’s so mercurial,” they’d say, the speaker dropping the word like a soft bit of candy; something that should slip out of the mouth unnoticed, but doesn’t. “It’s okay because she’s young.” Changeable, lively. Impulsive and brilliant. Here, but illusory.

            Young.

            Now there is only one way she encounters the word: in the context of Mercury retrograde. That dreaded fat uncle who drinks at Thanksgiving, sloshing his way past your mom. The backwards advance of one planet that brings every man to his knees— provided, of course, he is aware of it. If not, no harm done. Like a tropical disease; before Web MD, it was only a rash. But now everyone has the bird flu.

            She enters the studio holding a crumpled plastic bottle, making no effort to hide the pink veins in her eyes. She fidgets with her shirt, which looks like it was bathed in a dumpster— but she hasn’t had time to wash it, not when she’ll be leaving again. There is movement inside her. The weight of it all wakes her up in the night, and she stores snotty Kleenex in an empty cereal box. She feels no remorse not recycling. She thinks about people who starve during breakups: emerging all birdlike and flushed at the end of a month, watching people watch them dissolve. They are not the same people who eat cookie dough with a fork.

They are the same people who breathe a “How ARE you?” as soon as she walks in the door, their eyes milky-blue and unfocused. I’m fine, she replies, wordlessly gauging whether to unpack her suitcase of grief. In four or five minutes, the milky-blue people can’t help her: they reach for a planet and let it explain, and rake their small hands through her hair. “Oh girl, this Mercury retrograde is so powerful. It’s the worst one in years. Remember the economic crash of 2008? Same deal.

            “Just breathe, honey, breathe. No one likes to feel like they’re regressing.” And they wrap her half-smile in their bones.

(She takes scalding showers at night, and sometimes forgets she is humming.)

            She takes shifts at a restaurant to fill in the gaps: the same place she worked years before, but left so long ago that it smells like a past life. The same excruciatingly smooth jazz plays out of muffled speakers, and the soup tastes like summers gone by— but her hair was shorter then, like a boy’s, and she hadn’t yet found the right jeans. “You tall and skinny!” the busser says, banging his way through the kitchen’s double doors. My hair is longer, she replies, not taking her eyes from the fridge. “Oh…maybe that’s it,” he shrugs, and bangs his way back out again. She rocks to and fro on her heels, lightly touching the end of her braid and the split-hairs of time that have stored in each strand. Plates burn her palms as she delivers food, watching people: on dates with their cell phones, burying into iced tea. People who order three-times the amount they can eat, and leave sixty cents for a tip. People killing time until their first kiss; people drinking so much Diet Coke that their knees move independently from their bodies; bachelorette parties adjusting bra straps, unconsciously tilting the cheek that looks best in a photo, distractedly ordering wine. Her nights are a chorus of “Where is the bathroom?” and children who snap crayons in half, and the same homeless man who rolls by with his sign down, occasionally asking for bread. Another man walks in like a ghost every Friday, eyes vacant, always expecting a matchbook. He occasionally shows her pages of scribbly-lined drawings, and she touches each one with her hands. They all look the same, like a broken kaleidoscope, like her view as she stands at the door.

(She can’t shake the feeling of backwards. Like déjà vu that has snagged on a nail and spun round.)

           

            She comes home to a place she used to live, and is occupying again with the dull gratitude of a child being led through a zoo. She is aware of the person she left there before, one who let boundaries peel back like blue paint used to peel from the walls. They are white now, painted over and clean. She fell in love in that house, in that room; and she aches for that tenderness now, for the definitive longing of knowing her life was in two-part harmony. At some point, the note had turned sour; and with it, she shut off her inner voice. She told it to stop, and it did. Now as she lies in the dark, staring up at the posters delicately taped to the wall—so they’ll leave no mark when she’s gone—she asks it, so sweetly, for guidance.

            Who, me? The voice inquires. Go. You have to move forward.

            Go.

            But before she can move, she hits pause.

(Imagine a slingshot: in the split second after pulling back, before shooting forward, she savors the space in-between.)

            We’ve all had it—or wanted it, one of the two. Sometimes both simultaneously, as the world rushes past outside someone’s small window, and you’re eating cold pancakes for dinner. She lies on his bed, propped up on her elbows, hovering in the suspension created by love. Mercury retrograde makes you move backward, they told her, but first you turn inward. You stop. The night before, she stopped at the curb by his house, looking up at the sky—out of routine, not counsel—and folded herself out of time. For 6 days they swim in this glorious interim: their world is the moment of morning before senses kick in, where you forget what you need to do before work, or the sadness you felt before sleeping. They are movies, soft kisses, wet hair. They are grocery stores, midday fog, salt. She tucks into that space, and under his arm, with the silkiness of one being held in the light: a child resting in motion. It’s like falling asleep with your head on a shoulder, trusting that legs will walk you to the car and drive home.

            But somehow, that home is not here. They’re a tiny house in the middle of nowhere, or the elderly couple tucked into bed as the freezing waters of a sinking Titanic swirl all around their cold feet. She banishes this thought from her head, drunk on the weight of the drama; a weight that she throws back and forth out of habit, and occasionally holds to feel real. I love you, she tells him. Even when I don’t love myself.

            “Then take me out of the grey,” he tells her.

I’m yours.

“Til you leave,” and his eyes become cold. “Go away.”

He is real. 

“Let me go.”

            So she sits in her car in the dark. She thinks of a friend who didn’t cry when he left his relationship, waiting around to feel pain; longing, like a boy anticipating puberty, for a shadow to fall on his face. She crawls into her small bed, looking up at the posters—their flat, fraying edges—and waits for the limbo to break. Surely there must be some value in keeping motionless, pocketing morsels of truth?

            “My wheels are spinning,” he says. “I need to move forward—one way or another.”

(But One Way ends up being circles, and Another turns out to be gone.)

            There are many ways to let go of love, so that a different type may come in. It requires trust—not that the person will repel back into place, but that love will float back on its own, like an umbrella released from a roof.

After he tells her to leave, she flicks herself into motion and surrenders to something like peace: but one day later, the stillness unfurls with a crack. Momentum slams into her gut. Everything feels like regret—every move is a question; each thought is a moment to doubt what is real. Was it irresponsible to begin when they knew it was dangling in space? Can it ever be wrong to give love? The memory of him, still wet paint, corners her in moments of silence. Their days of pretending had never felt fake, and she knows the real teacher is rhythm; but one-two-three one-two-three nothing had changed, and their feet weren’t moving together. Their beautiful stillness, “We’ll give it the weekend,” had always been seeking the earth; his heels were dug, but she’s floating. She’s waiting, just wanting the floor to feel near.

He burrows downward and she tiptoes on air. A feeling of panic escapes through her body whenever she picks up the phone, afraid of the script of her past—but as they slop through technology buzz, the low hum of no one moving, she realizes their bodies have left. She’s gone, he stood up, they’re not spinning; at some point they changed, and they learned.

            But it never feels wrong to give love.

            That’s right, it tells her: that voice in her gut. She is eating fried eggs at the table, Cyndi Lauper coming out of warped laptop speakers as afternoon sinks to the ground. She’s making an effort to chew her food slowly, to taste every bit of the thing she has made. It’s been two weeks since she sat in his bedroom, deep inside her best Ugly Cry. There is so much she wants to ask him: What did you eat for breakfast? Are you okay? Does Walt die on Breaking Bad? Do you miss me? Do you know how fiercely you’re loved? Are you okay? The woman she lives with walks through the kitchen, taking her pants off on the way to do laundry, words barreling out like a brakeless car. And just like that, she knows: she doesn’t fit here anymore. She falls in love with the fact that she’s shifting. It is silent, this change in her heart, but it happens, and only she knows that it does.

As she walks by herself in the morning, she doesn’t find someone to call. She still writes imaginary questions to ask him—are you sure glasses make your eyes weak? —but eventually stops looking for every car to be his. She notices the way the street smells, senses piercing the air like any person who’s walked through their fire. She sees Mormons with pocket protectors, hears synth-rock pour out of a restaurant as someone pulls the stools down, wiping the counters, allowing the day to begin. She skims the back of her neck with her hair in her hands, and drinks boiling tea made of flowers; and she feels, she feels. She feels herself bleed to a singular point, like a James Blake song that makes music move forward and backwards; like a planet that’s finally unstuck.

(“It’s okay to move backwards,” her friend whispers to her. “As long as you don’t turn around.”)

      So she walks with her hands in her pockets; discovering the tenderness to refer to herself as a She at the same time she comes to the bravery required to finally start being an I. Not a Them, not a You…maybe someday, an Us. But right now, just a girl. Just a Me.

~

            People ask her why she’s leaving town, and she asks if they’d like freshly ground pepper on their spaghetti bolognese. I dunno, she lies. I just have to? They nod, terrified. “Well what are you up to right now?” they chuckle. In her head, she answers:

I’M WORKING ON MY SELF-ESTEEM, DAMNIT! IT’S A FULL-TIME JOB!

AND BESIDES THAT, I’M GROWING OUT MY HAIR!

            But instead, she blinks softly, and smiles at her future: her past, and the voice in her head. To be free, she replies, when they ask what she wants.

           

            And she laughs, and she already is.

             

Breakdown

            You avert your eyes when the waitress walks by, seeking, quietly anxious in her search for the right place to drop her plate of food. You do it without even thinking; a subconscious slide from the place where she might recognize you, thinking it’s you who ordered this rapidly cooling grilled cheese. Or mistake you for who she’s been looking for.

3 days before

            It’s simple, really. We’ve been on the road for ten minutes: the truck is gassed up and the highway is empty, I’m picking the chocolaty bits from our trail mix, and one of his hands is still free. I grab it. We’ve come to that place in our knowing each other where it’s okay for me to do things like this without asking—but not so far that I’ve adjusted to the ripple of pleasure each time that I do. I find myself stopping more often with him, accidentally finding constellations as I close the small gate to his backyard—as if pulling myself from the moment suspends it somehow, and will allow me to access it later when beauty feels lost. They’re unassuming, these moments: so modest in their perfection. Like folding his hand back and forth as the ocean whips past, depositing sugary almonds inside of his lips as he smiles.

            It’s my turn to pick a song. “I’ll go alphabetically,” I say, ticking through a laundry list of A and B names, not wanting to pick the wrong song. What is the wrong song? I settle on Ace of Base and immediately regret it, but his palm is right there, and he hasn’t pulled it away. I answer the phone with my free hand, use my voice to ask questions about mileage and rotors to a man who is selling his car; and the man to my left flickers slightly, but stays with his eyes on the road. The song ends, and we lurch in spontaneous bursts of gridlock, the road as effortlessly congested as it was clear only moments before. He dips his head down to the steering wheel, winces, and brakes. “Fucking traffic,” he growls, slipping his hand from my grip. “Did you find a new song?”

            “Working on it,” I say, encouraging each toe to unclench as I hoist my boots onto the dashboard. We can do things like this, him and I; because I know the way he drinks coffee, and he lets me leave shirts at his house. The periphery ebbs as we flow. “What do you want to hear?” I ask, lingering over Nirvana.

            He laughs. “Pick a song,” he says, and finally moves to fourth gear.

2 days before

            “I just can’t accept that kind of favor from you,” I tell him, jabbing at my plate of fish tacos. In my hurry to eat, I’d forgotten to ask for no dairy, and a mound of fried snapper stares up as I pick out each tendril of cheese.

            “Why not?” He asks, swiveling on his stool.

            “Because,” I whisper, aware that—even in my hesitation to answer his question, and the eerie warmth of California winter nights, and the overly-sterile smell of the diner countertop—that a small part of me is elated to be important, important enough to offer money to. “I’ve heard you talk about how you’ve helped people out…but always at the expense of yourself. And I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want you to grow to resent me.”

            “This is nothing like that,” he answers, voice gentle, but body bending away as he shakes his head down at his plate. “This is taking advantage of something in the moment. You need a car, right? And a man in this city wants to sell you a car. You can pay me as soon as the loan goes through… so whether you take me up on it or not, this is nothing like that.

            “I could never resent you.”

            I squeeze his hand and imagine what we look like to others, painlessly losing all track of the time. We clear our tray and walk to the drug store, halfheartedly browsing through candy. I realize I’m still nervous, that a part of me must sense the water between us, and still wants to want what he wants: even though he has told me his secrets, even though we eat off the same plate. “Gummies or chocolate?” he asks, looking at me from across the Good & Plenty’s. I narrow it down by category and price, spinning off on ingredients, waiting to hear him say yes. But he doesn’t.

1 day before

            We walk on the beach with our backs against the sun, watching shirtless men and spandex-ed women in various states of exercise, exhaling each time that they pass. I loop under his arm and chatter about something or other, feeling the air crisp my skin. “I had no idea people still rollerblade,” he says lightly, crinkling his nose; and right then, if I’d never kissed him, I would have. I did.

            “I’m not good at this,” he tells me later, spitting a thin stream of smoke at the sky. I’m sitting on the porch, robe falling off my right arm like a film that’s come loose. “This is new for me.

            “When I say I don’t care, it’s not that I don’t care about you. I just don’t care about arguments, picking apart the relationship. You’re… you’re beautiful.”

            With that, he sits down at my side.

            “But you’re a lot of car.”

            I wiggle my nose at his shoulder, feeling for humor, for ease. I string words together; rearranging sentences like furniture, watching the pillows take shape. I wait for him to notice, sit down; to put his boots up, take my hand back to where we’d begun. But the weight of our bodies knows better. “The car I’m buying is pretty,” I say finally. “I like the color. But the aesthetic is only a bonus.”

            “Like YOU!” he laughs, mushing my face with his thumb.

            “That’s the same way I feel about you.”

Before

            “I’ll meet you there,” I mutter. “You’ve done so much already. I don’t want you to get back on the freeway and sit in traffic. I’ll pick up our stuff and just meet you there.”

            The key is in my hand, the key to a car that’s been sold by a man with red spots on his face, from a house that makes fungus seem ritzy. I’m staring across at the other man, the one I love, whose face betrays nothing but space. I watch our words trail out in front of our mouths, tangling in the air and then reordering into a handful of movement and sounds. His eyebrows knot, and I get in my car; watching us watch one another in mirrors, waiting for something to crack.

            I pick up our bags from the house on the corner, lopsidedly shuffling down stairs. I wonder if cities have baggage, like people—if our romance was dropped in a vat of bad karma, essentially fried from the start. The car starts by coughing, so I sit for a moment; praying that I heard it wrong, perhaps misunderstood it. If I keep moving forward, give motion, just breathe, this will all be some sort of mistake.

             Last night, when I lay down beside him, he flipped himself over and snored.

            I ease onto the freeway, pleading to the radio buttons—to the steering wheel, the chipped vent, anything—to keep me safe, just this once. Please, just this once, let it stop.

            And it does. It stops. At the place where the freeways combine, on a bridge overlooking the city—that damned vat of oil, the place where we burned—my car becomes quiet and dies. “No,” I say aloud. “No, no, no.” I search for the hazards as cars swarm around me, droning their horns as the sun trickles down. Trembling fingers press every button, then open the door—I watch headlights slam, bug-eyed, toward me. Halfway out, the car starts to roll, and I clamber back in for the brake. Then, without thinking, I run for the side—never stopping to panic, or think. That’s the thing about living: you don’t question it until you turn back and look. With my hands on the rail, as the road rushed behind me, I didn’t have time to “survive.” I just did. But as soon as I stared into traffic—the thick stream of trucks, careening out of the way of my dark, lonely car—my legs said it’s over, and failed. 

            I remember waking up with his head on my cheek, the tangle of hair at my neck. His eyes opened slowly and we burrowed together, not committed to consciousness yet. An inhale of breath as he hovered to see me, corners of his mouth still crusted with sleep as he touched his lips to my nose. “You’re something special,” he whispered, cupping my jaw in his hand. The spaces between us were small.

            By the time the ambulance arrives, my phone is dead, and the mirror has been clipped off my car. They drive me to a church parking lot, are you okay, are you okay, and tell my boyfriend—is there someone we can call? —where to find me. He pulls up and walks over, all handshakes and smiles, but his legs give away what’s inside. They shake as he tugs me, one-handed, toward him: defying the length of his arms as they wrap and keep wrapping around.

“Do you have any idea?” He whispers, crumpling into my spine. Any idea of what? Of how frightened he felt when he thought he might lose me? Of how glad he was to see me whole? Of the simple perfection of brushing our teeth, making toothpasty grins at each other? Or the fact that I never know what he is thinking, or how to make words he can hear?   

“Do you have any idea?”

“Do you have any idea?”

I do, but he’s already gone.

After

            We sit across the table from one another, a small expanse of linoleum and about a thousand miles between us. A woman behind the counter shuffles cups back and forth, expertly snapping small pastries into plastic cases with a press of her thumb.

“God, is this even coffee?”

I look up and notice the lines on his face, running like rivers—some deeper, some new—inward, seeking a source or the pool of his eyes, or the thumbprint of tiredness beneath them.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, turning my attention to the deck of cards on the bookshelf beside us. They’re tarot cards, worn at the edges, with pastel flowers spiraling over each surface. I remember the woman who gave me a tarot reading, and the milky sound that her words seemed to make as she spoke.

There’s a tower, she said. And a gift. The tower needs to fall away, though, before the opening can occur. For true change to take place, the illusions you’re holding must die. It’s only once the foundation crumbles, breaks down, that you’ll find your true power. It’s there that the healing occurs.

 I drop the deck onto the table, waving my hands and rolling my face to the sky, pulling three cards with an exaggerated flick of my wrist. “Your future,” I tell him, lowering my voice to a hiss. “Is in the cards.”

He flips them over: Forgiveness. Guidance. Growth.

He asks me which one we should read about, and I look in his eyes. His words, barely audible, flash like a small match of life in his eyes; but just as I reach them, they’re gone. “I don’t know,” I tell him. “Which one do you want?”

“Just make a decision,” he answers, cold. “For once.”

A pause. “Are we done here?”

I remember the way that I felt in the car, looking out at the freeway, my life as delicate as a coil of truth. I want to stand up and scream at his forehead, boil the muscle memory of fear—our shared horror—to the surface. “I almost DIED!” I want to tell him. “If you can’t look at me now, then when? WHEN?” But I don’t, because speech is too wobbly. And sometimes, one word is enough. “Yes,” I tell him. We’re done here.

We stand up.

We move.

Now

            When the waitress passes, depositing her plate, you lower your eyes to your hands. They’ve clenched fists, they’ve lived, and they’ll probably melt as you’re aging. They’ve skimmed the soft craters atop babies’ heads. They’ve closed doors and scabbed up and latched onto branches; they’ve opened and clapped loud and traced every groove in a face. They’ve listened, they’ve lingered, they’ve given you something to hold.

And when the time comes to leave, they’ll let go.