“Let’s make music.” Or is it magic that he spat, my head sat hard across his lap, the pink fluff of carpeted living like fairies of my eyes. Among the heat of Indian summer, sidling up to a childhood hardly lived, on that brink of adolescent laughing, he was my doll. I knew it wouldn’t be a love story, or one broken by the bells of passion, or one cried through the corded tears that only cold canteens contain; but still, in the weaving in and out of fingertips, in the morbid bellows of his eyes, I knew my own mortality. It was in fear, then, that I murmured my mistakes, that I lived longingly and largely, still forced to uncurl in the fat bubbles that always remain at the end. I saw clearly through, from the beginning, but still unfolded evenly like a grinning gambler’s hand of cards, a straight, perhaps, or a flush the color of park tulips, churned underneath our toes.
And still he played. With both me and in nightclubs, in city diners, in mall hallways, no places of his dreams. The raw reality could sit against our own, in its iced eternity, our promise, not hot but heavy as our pasts. I began to see that all love, like moons, like murmurs, like the cries of animals in vengeance or vein: all love is music, is caught in candy tunes. All love is martyred, is given in or given to or given up for other, bigger wants. As children do, I kicked my legs against this; I shattered things with hands and words; but I wished in the drying streams of my insides, in my veins aroused with air not blood, for our love, so far from embryonic, so fat and full of pasts, to kick back.
It had been years, I would yawn, decades almost and we were still like tickled twins. Sometimes, his voice would echo in my head as my own, or he would interrupt my sentences, a hurried guessing of robotic thoughts. Love, love, love I would sing to myself, safe inside our cotton cocoon, unknowing or unable, perhaps, to pick at the strings.
On Saturdays and Sundays, I worked in a downtown restaurant with a blue balcony and brandished name. By balancing plates and placating, by making mostly friends, I found distraction to help the hours pass; I found a velvet place of my own. I would think of him then too, but somehow separate, even when he would visit and extend small offerings that, gold and glass, glimmered back; I would accept the pink bags—brought back to that carpet we purchased on 171st street in a frantic fit of domesticity—and extend to him a kiss of the cheek. Always left with wet wonder, with the type of tears that rest restlessly in the outer corners of our eyes. It was the hours upon hours of standing, simulating, at times, the dancing of my mother’s toes; the red wine stains on diner mugs; a melting into the city I had previously, unrighteously, claimed mine. I found it healing, or more honestly, hallowing; it allowed me not to feel too hard, to paint my lips a purple-red and grin at the ghouls that inhibited our urbanity at night.
It was falling out of love. I remembered all the articles, the stories, the novels I read on falling in, not tripping but melting quicker than our city snows. I found it hurt more, however, to pull away; it involved bending backwards, tripping so many times that my knees resembled those of toddlers, cut from the mere storm of walking. I could not crawl even, in those winter months, when my inside beat harder than my brawn. When all smelled of him and the heat of wood, his silk skins a stolen sweater I had worn.
