The End

After a few years away from that particular couch, I started seeing a new therapist at the end of last year. It had been long enough, I sagely determined, after I was felled by a series of really nasty panic attacks—one happened while I was doing a Q&A on stage with some filmmakers. They didn't notice, nor did the audience, nor (most importantly) the publicists. But it was happening. Me contemplating running off stage, into the Soho afternoon. It was a terrible feeling, and eventually feeling terrible starts to be a drag, so I found, after a fair amount of searching, someone new.

He is in his late 50s and has a kind, open comportment. He's much more giving and lean-in-and-nod than my last therapist, a sort of prim and watchful gay guy who retired to Florida. I like this new gay guy, I think. Or, I am warming to him. At first, I thought his platitudes and constant quoting of various people were corny. But I have resisted such sentiment for so long, and lack of sentiment hasn't cured me, so maybe I should try the earnest stuff. He has me meditating for one minute a day. The panic attacks went away.

For a little while, anyway. They've been creeping back, when I least expect them, and when I most do. I am afraid of what I am afraid of, I hate what I hate, I feel increasingly indifferent to what I love. Winter hardens care. Do I like movies anymore? Do I like a play, seen on some chilly Saturday afternoon? Maybe it's just seasonal. Or it's media malaise in a time of such austerity. They're trying to lay off the best people while the worst people watch, safe as houses. They're trying to take the whole thing apart and replace it with nothing. I have worked in my business for 16 years, well over a third of my life, and for the first time it now feels truly dire and terminal and like I need to start making other plans for what to do with the rest of my time here in the waking, working world.

Something I talk about a lot with my therapist is inertia—I use the word constantly. Why can't I just, why can't I just, why can't I just. I know something's in me, latent under my lazy skin, but it never makes its way to the surface. At least not yet.

Which causes panic, this stasis. I am scared of the drugs that might help, and am resistant to other concrete life changes that might make this better. (I like a glass of wine too much; I'm a fan of my vape.) I have tried avoiding things, I have tried not avoiding things.

I guess it's not circumstance, really. I have panic attacks when I'm home at night, Andrew asleep in the other room, me watching some murder show or YouTube video (same thing) and suddenly a feeling hits me, the conviction that a blood clot or some other lurking thing is making its way up my body and that this is my sorry, lonely little nighttime end. Here it is, the moment when I'm carried off, when I disappear, when I slip away into nothing.

My parents just finished a cruise, a lifelong wish fulfilled, in South America, hooking around Cape Horn and then exploring the fjords and inlets of Chile. All the reports were good. They had the best time. I had worried about my mom itching for her work email, about my dad being newly 90 years old and maybe feeling exhausted by all the activity. But it seems they managed well. They saw Patagonian cities, they saw mountains rising out of the sea, they saw the shy, retreating edges of glaciers, so quiet and demure in their dying. My mom sent us pictures and I thought most about the glaciers, those last cracking murmurs of a time before. When I was in Alaska for a wedding, years ago now, we went to a park of some kind and the visitor's center that was once built over a glacier then stood cantilevered over dry land. The ice had crept much farther up the mountain, winking goodbye.

How awful. And yet, in the depths of my hypocrisy, I relish an unseasonably warm day. Whatever lifts me out of winter, I guess. Whatever can drag me out of the feeling that everything is indeed going to ruin—a career, a life, a liver, a future. My best friend moved out of my neighborhood recently, which is sad. But it also affords us the opportunity to explore new territory, to find backyard bars with good deals where we can huddle in forgiving late-winter winds and make uneasy escape plans, where we consider what parachutes could ever be made of.

It's not always enough, of course. I too often have nights, far too late, when I go pacing around the living room, circling the coffee table in a weird sort of marching step in my underwear, shaking my hands to get the dread to go away. My new therapist has urged me to find what centers me. To think of all that is known and steady.

I try to gather myself and remember the people I have, arrayed across the planet. Andrew, in restless sleep down the hall. My sister in her Los Angeles canyon, surrounded by trees. I walk the room, knees high and somehow defiant, chest straining with worry. And I see my parents, on a boat at the tip of the world, dreaming of lost things.

October, 2023

In the Blue Ridges, after everyone had gone to sleep, I saw the most amazing thing. Deer, so many of them, with huge autumn antlers, jumping in front of a car that was out on those roads far too late.

It was spectacular, to seem them, hopping across the street, in headlights, interrupting the night. Headed toward the river near the house, running at winter, or away from it.

On the plane home, face pressed against the window to make sure we weren't crashing, I saw a cruise ship, big and belching and gleaming, making its way out of New York. Chancing late hurricanes, stomach viruses, other unexpected deer that might streak across its path. It was spectacular, too.

In California, I saw my sister. All her autumn antlers, her adaptation, the new allowances of her evolution. Treehouse and ritual, happy car purring along, driven hard and far. She gets slimmer, more fixed, with every visit to her foreign life. There in the jungle with its faint view of a distant city.

We took the plane to New York together, she a few rows behind, machine barreling into night. She's losing her great house she'll stay with a friend she's running out in front of my car and I can see her only for a second.

From a window. From a couch upon which I awoke with a start. There it was, so clearly: life passing life, moment ceding to moment. I want to know all of it, to capture this week that we spent. But it has darted off already.

At my sister's house in the canyon the motion sensor light would sometimes flick on while I was trying to sleep. I imagined intruders, rapists and murderers, cult ghosts from fifty years ago, come wandering old routes.

But it was just an animal, we told ourselves in the mornings, over seltzers and coffee, the sun burning just behind the hills, the day in the process of being reasoned out.

It was just an animal, we said, we say, that troubled us. Nothing more serious than the nature of all things to worry about.

Anniversary

On my way home from the mountains—

the collar-bone crook of one mountain,

anyway,

a shadowy place

where a friend has disappeared—

I flew over Atlantic City.

I could almost read the sign

at the top of one of the casino towers

announcing its intent.

It all looked so innocent from above,

though Elmore Leonard, or Louis Malle,

or anyone else

would probably refute that idea

from the ground.

I thought of the wad of cash

in my nightstand drawer.

The smallest of nest eggs—

contained within it:

a bird that will never fly—

conjured up out of the carpet

by the mock-casual press

of a slot machine button.

(You can still pull the lever if you want,

for old time’s sake;

such a gracious, if small, deference

to ritual.)

I was at the Borgata,

with the first and only

love of my life so far,

new to that experience

while I flexed a few perks of my job.

A free weekend away

that turned us a profit.

Technically, it was me who won,

who dropped in the quarter and took the spin.

But we knew, without speaking it,

that it was ours.

We said it out loud anyway;

made a plan for the money,

this two hundred and something crisp dollars,

that would someday buy us more time—

dinner somewhere, a play, a sliver of rent.

I’d switched to an earlier flight,

so I had some sun to see all this.

On the edge of Halloween,

headed into winter,

toward another year

of mutual chance.

The plane dipped over Long Island,

and I got scared for a second,

as I usually do on planes.

A silly feeling, maybe,

when bumping along,

borne aloft

by so much luck.

After a screening this afternoon, I stood on the busy sidewalk of 29th street and smoked my last cigarette of Cannes (having been home for almost a month). I decided to listen to a sad song while I walked back to the subway rather than finishing the latest comedy podcast droning its way into my ears from LA.

It was windy, but the air was still humid and close. The weather felt big, and the tall, tall buildings of almost midtown were enormous. (It is still so boggling to pop back into Manhattan!) I walked the short distance imagining myself at the cinemascope ending of a movie—what a poignant, subtle conclusion it would be, a person simply making their way to the subway after so much has happened.

It is difficult to grapple with what’s happened. Am I the only one finding that? I know that we must admit the important layers of this: we did not die, loved ones were okay, we kept working, held ourselves in the clench of our lives as so much cratered outside. Past that, though, it was tricky. It still is. More than that. Immediately post-vaccination, I felt the airy lift I was supposed to, the world not cracking open but gently re-revealing itself, a shining, outdoor Shangri La that had been hovering there, only hidden, all along.

That feeling lasted just a few weeks, though, as grim news lapped at the edges of the merriment. But it wasn’t really the news—concerning as it is—that sunk me back down. It was more the sudden weight of life, tossed into the pool and crashing down on me just as I was coming up for air. It was the realization that a year and a half—and quite likely longer—does actually change a life, that things will never go back to being the same. And the realization that I no longer really remember what that same was.

I remember parties, and a kind of cross-city ramble resembling the boozy digression of my 20s, but a bit more assured. I remember a rush, a haze, a feeling like I was living some grand existence without ever touching the ground, ever really connecting to any one thing. Of course, there were dull and dire days during all of that, but who would choose to remember those? No, in the abstraction of my mind there is just a sparkling blur, one I have found myself clumsily grasping for as real life has, allegedly, set back in.

I hope I am not alone in this feeling of mourning, this constant fear—a terror, really—that I am scrambling at something entirely irretrievable. Like I am trying to pick up an anecdote midway through, after a long and pregnant pause. Isn’t it so strange, and so sad, that so much is now definitively over, that we are on the other side of an undeniable piece of punctuation. There is no return, really. There is only carrying on, a new limp a part of the portraiture.

My sister and I took a trip in July, she meeting me in France after the Cannes film festival, and that almost felt like a before thing. Except it was charged with difference—masks and tests and all that necessary protocol, yes, but also an ineffable haunt, this little curl of a voice that whispered, “It’s not like it used to be.” I thought maybe it was France, that I’d somehow grown tired of it (spoiled me!), or it was just the weirdness of rumbling around on trains with my sister for the first time in so long, surrounded by people speaking a different language.

But it wasn’t that, not really. It was "not like it used to be" in a sharper, more persistent way, the pebble in my shoe that has me so startlingly aware of the lines and shapes and matrices of the world, all of a sudden. How could anyone, with death so persistent a topic for so long, not grow to see the frayed and finite threads binding us to everything? How are we supposed to enjoy anything fully again, when we’ve had such a regular reminder of its eventual end?

Luck, I’m aware of. Fortune, too. I know that some maudlin post about how out of step with reality I have been feeling is, well, out of step with reality. But there it is anyway, this nagging feeling like maybe we all died already, that what we're staggering through now is some after-effect, residual but fading. I find myself imagining a membrane that I might step through—back into the life I think I had, or into a future when all of this feels so peacefully settled.

A friend and I found a little tucked away space in a park by the river, a picnic table and an umbrella where we can post up to surreptitiously drink wine and watch the boats on the river. I love those fucking boats, the busy process they confirm, New York chugging along in its infinite capacity. You can see the planes from Newark, too, a view recently stolen from my building's roof by some hideous new condo building tinkering its way upwards to blot out the sky. There, in that park, the East River breezes whispering a calming song, I begin to feel re-clarified, certain again about my mind and my body and their place in—as Mary Oliver wrote—the family of things.

That feeling is fleeting, though. Then it's back into the plainness of life, the sensation that everything has flattened into some tiny fragment of what it once was. I have to trust—I hope you trust, too—that we'll get it all back. Or, rather, that a new and thorough thing will slowly bloom in the old thing's place, for those of us lucky enough to still be alive and, for all the wear of age, healthy enough.

A few years ago, I wrote a poem about a restaurant in Cannes, in which I wondered what it might be like to revisit it in the future. I found it again this year. It was still open, though I think it has a different name. And the little burbling fountain that stood next to its outdoor seating was silent and dry. So there it was, still plugging along, just a bit hobbled by circumstance, a little less pretty than it was in more ideal times.

I hope I get to wander by it again next year. I hope that the person glimpsing it then feels fuller, sturdier, more sure of the weight and consequence of his presence. That he knows he did not disappear into the couch, was not wholly lost to worry, did not irrevocably snap some tether that linked him to the great and troubled and bitterly missed past of his life.

The song I put on, walking to the subway in all that huge weather today, was this. I love its swell, its grandeur, its reminder that some stuff is not entirely reducible. It stays, small and determined and indelible as the new scar on my shin, from when I tripped on my suitcase, the night before I got back on a plane, cursing in the dark, forgetting how grateful I was to be feeling it at all.

Breath of the Wild

I can see One World Trade from Andrew’s apartment. Before the disease, I would look at it and sort of sigh proudly and say, “Hey, there’s work!” Because my office is there, but also because, there was, actually, work—Manhattan, the tall world, teeth of dreams. Now it’s this weird hazy memorial statue. At 7PM the pots and pans start banging, and thus we know it’s 7PM again. Sometimes I look at the tower and think what a metaphor it is now, this thing poking up to remind us of a past terrible, world-changing thing—I guess a monument to time both remembering and denying it—amidst another terrible, world-changing thing.

It’s nice to be with Andrew at this angle, to be on his bed, some soft part of him against me; the fuzz of his hair, the warm of his cheek. When I see 1WTC in these spare days, it’s from such a considered distance: against Andrew’s solid mass, a building in the corner of my eye. A whole past. A future, too, sure.

I started playing a Legend of Zelda game, this expansive thing that lets you wander and wander and wander. You, in the shape of this pretty elf or whatever he is, can climb and run and swim for hours and never end up anywhere in particular. It’s a gorgeous game; there’s a mission hovering around its edges, but mostly it wants you to hang and explore. Sometimes when I am on Andrew’s bed and I see the dim column of that faraway building, I feel so choked and small that I have to turn on the Nintendo and let Link go running for a while. No direction really intended. Just the freedom of his flight, across some brilliantly lit expanse. The game is terrific, enveloping. What a thrill to get lost.

You find the borders though, eventually. Some wall gradually looms up to greet you; there is a lonely moment when the game literally says, “You can’t go further.” What a familiar bump, huh? Chasing limits is a short little run these days, the quickest sprint to the end of the room, to the edge of what’s comfortable or reasonable. I finally said it to Andrew yesterday, because I finally meant it: “I’m so bored,” I whined. I wanted to go to a restaurant or sit at a bar with a big balloon glass of wine. 

We’re looking at apartments. We were supposed to move this month, but that’s obviously been delayed. It’s odd to dig into home—my creaking IKEA bed, the bad desk, all the stuff I thought I’d be so committed to, three years ago—while knowing it’s temporary. I bought an area rug and a new microphone setup because I podcast from home now—reader, I podcast!—and it feels wrong to have made even that commitment. I’m outta here so soon, any month now, and Andrew and I will have our own needs that surely won’t include this $40 rug, that surely can’t accommodate the long reach of the boom.

My sister left LA finally, decamped to Rhode Island once it was safe enough. She’s with my parents, and they are beckoning me there. I can’t imagine visiting them. What might I bring with me? I don’t want to get them sick, but also a shameful little part of me also wonders if I might miss the closeness of this experience, the tight neatness of quarantine, the order of its demand. Won’t I feel that much less clean once I’ve left the terrible bubble? I’ve been so proud of myself for doing nothing, for staying so small—I did my very best shrinking into nothing! 

You can buy a house, as Link, in the video game. You spend some money and then spend some more to make the place nice. It’s a whole complicated thing in the game, that then kicks off a whole other complicated thing that has nothing to do with the main narrative, nothing to do with beating the bad guy. I did it all with relish, spending and spending and spending until my little Link—I like to dress him in short-shorts and a topknot—had a place where he could store his unwanted shields and swords, where he could sleep. It’s become important to me, that he can sleep. My charge, who couldn’t possibly ever care.

I got bored and complained about it this weekend. No one listened, as they shouldn’t have. Who wants to hear about Cannes! Who do I know, all of a sudden, who really cares about all the busy bullshit of my life now that it means nothing? I’ve sat on a friend’s roof a few times recently, and from there you can see the LIRR rattling east. It’s nice to see some motion. I want to hop on the roof of the train, like in an action movie. Grip its edges, have it take me all the way out to the end of the island. When Andrew and I went to Montauk last fall, my first time there, it was so underwhelming. There was a whole thick town with a street fair, when all I’d expected was a lonely lighthouse with one troubling nightclub thumping at its feet. There was no Surf Lodge to be found in October, so we just wandered, my shoulder happily against his as we walked. 

I can’t wait to explore like that again. Sometimes, as Link, I stand and make the camera twirl around him, my right thumb pressing on the joystick to make a lazy circle. He’s so beautiful! I feel a shudder of silliness, of sadness, of a kind of longing it’s too embarrassing to explain, looking at him in all his possibility. Sometimes I warp him to somewhere else, just to shake off that clenching feeling. And sometimes I turn the game off and join Andrew in the living room, where a little more life is happening. His roommates alert about something on the TV, me stumbling in from the imagined world, still so shocked to find us all here. 

Little Winter

I was walking somewhere in Brooklyn on Saturday, braced against the bitter cold, trying to find something nice to look at that might rescue the day from feeling impossible. I found myself on the same block that a guy I dated years ago used to live on, an unremarkable stretch of brownstone-ish buildings interrupted by a dip in the road, a rare New York hill, made so cars can pass safely under the track of an elevated shuttle train. Near the end of the block, I saw a faded blue building, paint chipping, one edge against an empty lot, that sudden break into a view distinguishing this house from all its tightly tucked neighbors. 

There was something lovely about its pale color, there in that particular mid-late winter afternoon light; the sun holding for a longer linger than it had just a few weeks before, something almost conciliatory, apologetic about its last glow before giving the day away. I noticed something about the building, or rather recognized something about myself in it, a memory of being a teenager, taking a weekend photography class at the Art Institute of Boston. They’d send us out, then a little further into spring, still cold but thawing, to capture interesting things we saw around town. For me, it was so often buildings like these. When my parents moved, we unearthed so many black and white photos, all badly developed by me, showing the artless cracks, the mundane wear of things, in a way I thought, back then, was really quite artful. 

I liked that little moment of connection, between the ardency of past me—trying so hard to see something; to show it, too—and the fleeting attention of my current self. It probably was a pretty building on that block in Brooklyn, maybe was a meaningful second that I spent rushing past, west toward what was left of the light, and to the place awaiting me, warm and populated by a few friends, fixed for a few hours as anything ever can be. 

Later that night, I went to Andrew’s. He’s working all weekend on a new experiment, up there in the mysterious lab in Washington Heights that I’ve still not seen. He was waiting all day for mice to poop, so he could study and submit the samples, to see what passed through them and how, if maybe something can be gleaned from all that, something that could—in some iteration, some development, years from now—save someone’s life. Those brave mice will be cut open on Wednesday, for further study. I told a friend in LA about that gruesome part of Andrew’s work and she, an animal rights activist, flinched. I explained that there was a greater good being served by all those inspected turds, those sad, tiny piles of guts. She grimaced and at least agreed to pretend to agree with me, so dinner could continue and we could talk more about what was going to win best picture. 

Andrew was tired, and grumpy, from a day sort of wasted on waste. I tried to make him feel better by offering an enveloping kind of cuddle, wrapping myself around him as we sat on the couch and watched part of a James Bond movie. He eased a bit, falling back into the sofa until we both started to nod off. I shook myself awake and said goodnight, back to my apartment down the street, so he could get some good rest and face the mice again tomorrow in a fresher mood. It was even colder outside than I remembered from just an hour or two before, the kind that numbs your legs through your jeans, makes you pity yourself in some vast, Russian way.

I thought I’d brought the cold to Los Angeles when I went last week, as it dipped down into the high 40s most nights I was there. It seemed so strange, to be shivering on Santa Monica Boulevard. Surely, it was my fault. I’d carried it with me in my tightly packed suitcase, stuffed with a suit and otherwise all the wrong clothes. But another friend told me, “No, we do have a little winter here.” Then the next day it was in the mid 70s, gloriously sunny, the sky clean and smog-free so you could actually see the mountains ringing the basin like forbidding walls. I see them as forbidding, but I know many people who live there see a kind of protective promise in them. That you can drive up into them and see all they contain and then, past them! Past them a great expanse of desert and more. Or you can stay in their wide embrace and just go to the beach, unbothered by the rest of America. Me, I feel penned in. But they were still nice to see, to quietly acknowledge their presence on that warm day, as my sister and I crossed over the foothills, into the Valley, in search of breakfast. 

Andrew and I are going to move in together in the spring, at the end of May. It’s an exciting prospect, one that will perhaps give a gentler, less urgent framing to grumpy nights, to days when I am sad and searching for something life can’t provide on any one afternoon. The routine of it, the comfort of knowing—Protection! Possibility!—sounds to us like a good thing. I believe it will be. Walking on that street in Brooklyn, with the peeling blue house and the forlornly forgiving light, I thought, Maybe we’ll look on this block. Maybe we’ll find some home here. I imagined myself suddenly zooming into the future, taking a hard turn off the sidewalk and up toward one of the buildings. Finding new keys in my pocket somehow and letting myself in to my new life. The rest of this season skipped entirely, in favor of yet another something else.

September

I saw a sailing class in Venice crisp white boats with numbers on their sails coursing in a gentle circle on the lagoon.

I was on the vaporetto heading to some movie, and it was funny to be there, all the way there, in this postcard city, and thinking about Martha’s Vineyard. Where I also saw a sailing class, on a pond below James Taylor’s house, when I was on the island with Andrew. It was early August then, now seeming so summery, so faraway, only a month later.

I had this strange realization, while rumbling in our island car to a little fishing town, that just a year ago, not even a year, I didn’t know any of these people. But then there I was, headed somewhere with them, feeling some sense of belonging. At least with Andrew, smiling fellow, face soft with the contentment of being where one wants to be.

It’s something, the swiftness of learning. To so passively maneuver time’s invisible turns. A year from now, what will be surprising? What will be the bumpy little amazement, when I suddenly come to, and find the constant of myself, that eternal always-me, for a brief second again?

Surely between now and then it will mostly seem the present, bobbing along. I won’t take many moments to note where I am, how I got there, to feel the steadying, startling grip of context. One just takes the boat to the place without thinking. Steps off, feels the day’s particular sun, and trusts its warmth.

Night Moves

My parents sold their house. The house they bought before my sister and I were born, in that weird slip of time I’m told was the late 1970s. They’re moving to Providence, city of my father’s birth, and a place where a modest condo can be bought, for two people facing next and (yes, we all must admit) maybe final chapters. Over the 4th of July holiday, I spent a teary two nights in the house, going wandering in Boston with a friend and then, just as it was time to leave for the train, taking last passes through the small expanse of the place. I cried. I made myself cry? I don’t know if the tears were real or forced or if forced tears aren’t actually real. But I did. Almost wept. My mom pulled the car out of the driveway and there was my dad, good old Dad, walking the dog up the hill, the last time I’d ever see that. I blubbed, discretely, until my mom asked me a question and then it was hard to hide. “It’s just a building,” she said, which is what I’d told myself, what my therapist had told me. It’s just a building. Just a thing that teemed with all the stuff of our lives for 40 years. And now it’s not.

The day before this goodbye, my family and I went to a wedding. My cousin’s kid got married, an assemblage of people I’d not seen in at least 20 years. It was held at a country club south of the city, and was full of that kind of straight wedding swagger I hate so much—is there no worse sight in the world than groomsmen in suits clutching bottles of beer? That effortful commitment to male casualness amidst the formalness? It speaks to such an ease, the way these men move through the world, that my sister and I were repulsed by it. During the wedding, a long and violent thunderstorm rolled in. But just before that, my family and I wandered the grounds of the country club, walked along the ridge of a hill that offered a view of the city, the whole of Boston laid out there in the hazy, humid distance. The four of us there, lined up and regarding it. It felt like a maudlin farewell. To this city we’ve all been so tethered to, just then rendered so small, so faraway. 

I traveled a lot this summer, more than I had planned. I went to Provincetown for a few nights, my new favorite place, and felt the mid-June thrill of all that. I went to Los Angeles, mostly for work—a grinding reporting assignment that has yet to bear fruit but still could be something good, I hope—but also to see my sister. She’s so good at day trips, feeling so blessed with a car, and we drove up to Ojai, spent a late morning and early afternoon in its clenching, clean heat. We hiked a short distance to a waterfall, where barefoot kids were laughing and dogs were shuffling around. We went into town, roaming an outdoor used bookstore where I searched for my own book and, as ever, came up short. I’d heard so much about Ojai and, while finding it beautiful, was surprised by how little it offered. “You have to be rich to enjoy it,” I said to my sister as we got back in her car and, sealed up in the air conditioning, drove back to the city. 

In Los Angeles, I spent a lot of time holed up in my hotel, a once-trendy place on the Sunset Strip that has a thumping pool club and is just the right amount of uncomfortable to feel cool. It’s a full-service place, so I could take my meals there, do drinks on the patio, barely leave the confines of it. I went a little crazy, swaddled up in the gray blanket of that place—its easy, healthy-ish, sour food, its lukewarm sauvignon blanc mood. I felt like I was there for a whole long Shining winter, growing a beard and going insane and locating some truer kernel of myself than I’d ever known existed. I let myself skitter out into the night on occasion, to see friends and revel, just a bit, in the riot of a city I hate. (I’m sorry, L.A. friends. I have tried so hard to like Los Angeles, but it makes me so stressed and unhappy and full of constant Sunday Scaries that I have to hate it. That said, I can’t wait to visit again.) But mostly I was alone, conducting halting interviews on the phone, pacing around in my cold room while tall trees fluttered in the balcony window. One uneasy afternoon, I watched a bug crawl around the enormous beanbag chair the hotel provided and figured it knew what to do with this lump of furniture more than I did. 

I just got back from Fire Island, another place I have tried to love and—unlike L.A.—might finally be done with. What a dream of an idea that place is, and yet in execution, or at least in my admittedly narrow experience of it, what a drab and horny and exhausting thing it actually is. I don’t fit in there at all, which is a strange sensation for someone who has prided himself on being able to adapt, to quickly recover, to renegotiate physical and social spaces as needed. Fire Island, the Pines in particular, is a bridge past a bridge too far, I’m afraid. Not because I don’t admire its moxie, its Speedo tan-ness, its louche, buggy reverie. I love that people love it. I just feel sad that Fire Island is something like Paris—a beautiful dream I’ll never be able to actually step into, that I’ll never feel filling me like air, like smoke. (I Juul now—another life update.) But it’s good to have that conclusion—to know, because of increasing adulthood and experience, that it, hey, just isn’t for me. I wish it the best. I wanted to blow a kiss to the island as the ferry puttered away back toward Sayville. Goodbye, place! Goodbye, dream! Goodbye all you wonderful people who partied and yearned and grieved and fucked and fell in love there. See you in Ptown, maybe. All you lively ghosts, living and dead.

Fall trips loom. Film festivals, which are so much fun. I’m going to Venice for the first time, next week, and I am so stressed and excited and curious. I booked an Airbnb that’s not near the movies, that’s on the main island with all the canals and handsome gondoliers and luring, leering pasta. (My Fire Island diet nearly killed me, readers.) I chose holistic life experience over festival ease in booking that place and I hope I don’t regret it. And then it’s straight on to Toronto, a festival I love, a town I am growing to like, with people I know and with whom I’m so ready to pretend it’s summer camp again. Fall camp. Autumn camp. What a good time that will be.

But it will keep me away. I’ve been away so much this year, which has been exhilarating—I gave an award out on stage at a loud gay discotheque in Guadalajara, Mexico!—but also lonely, and denying. The thing I’ve sort of stylistically held for the end here is that I fell in love this year, and while it’s a new-ish, only nine-month relationship (“We have a baby,” I said to Andrew tonight), it’s still a totalizing thing. It’s impossible to look at all of this—parents moving, cities roiling, islands churning—not through the lens of that. How terrifically grounded I have felt this year, to something good and happy and intimate and huge in its smallness. This is the first time I’ve really written about him—a scientist, a smiler, a kind and gentle person who calms me and encourages me—and it feels a little scary to type it out. But there he is, suddenly a center. 

When I was home over the 4th, my mom told my sister and me a story about our cousin, the one whose kid got married at the country club. I guess when this cousin was little, a toddler maybe, she would often say, “I need something.” Just that. That quiet little unspecific thing. “I need something,” she’d say in a small voice, tugging at pant legs and looking up at the adults hoping they’d understand and satisfy whatever it was she was asking for. I’ve thought about that a lot since my mom told us about it, there in the backyard I’ll never see again. I need something. I need something! I NEED SOMETHING! 

Of course we all do. Need something. Need so many things. I get corny, thinking about it. I want to say what a mad and blissful and terrible adventure it is, to go chasing after that need. It is. But, again, that’s hokey. So I guess I’ll just end this ramble with a little moment, from Fire Island. I went to bed early one night, and was half asleep when some of the boys of tea came home. I heard them rumbling around upstairs in the living room, muffled laughter and bottles opening. It reminded me of being a kid in the house I grew up in, that will now be lived in by a nice family from Framingham who wrote a heartening letter to my parents about how much they loved the house. That feeling of life happening just beyond the light under the door. And maybe it is. But in that room on Fire Island that night, there was also the beautiful dark, also the hum of the air conditioner, the whine of the mosquito, and there was me, breathing and blinking and alive. That was so much, too. 

Flight delay

On my way home from a party, stuck at a sandy little airport in California, I thought I saw an old friend. Her ghost, there in a row of seats, head bent toward her phone, like the rest of us.

I was tired, delirious with a small sadness. From having to leave the sun, having to say goodbye to so much warm adventure. For just less than a second, I actually thought it might be her. Found, after all these years, out traveling, on her way to Phoenix, or Chicago. It once felt like we were all headed to Chicago, so maybe it would only make sense, for her to be finally going there now.

I shook that off, of course. Instead spent just a couple beats more, marveling at how similar this girl’s features were: the same forehead at feline tilt; rosy bulbs of cheekbones; shoulders solid with purpose; sitting still as knowing.

I was wrapped in the lull of airport-bar white wine, that expensive, lukewarm blanket, and plodded past the ghost— or, the idea of the ghost— and over to where I needed to be.

She followed me into the air, shaking me awake once, the plane bumping over a state where she’d never been. I almost murmured to her, under the drone of the plane. I wanted to, half asleep, assure her. That I’d seen her. Saw her glint drifting through that girl in Burbank. Which isn’t so sandy, really, or so small an airport. That just sounded like a nicer place to see my friend.

It was cold when I got home, and late. I felt scared of my neighborhood, dark and frigid in the slip of a new day. It was windy, and there was some insistent noise. Something industrial. Half a churn, half a moan. There are a million things in Brooklyn that it could have been. But I’d never heard its particular sound, at least not then, at three in the morning, the only one awake for what felt like miles.

Even the cats, new to the house but already proudly settled, didn’t stir. One of them, big orange rooster, was folded up on the kitchen rug, still as answers. I thought of him when I was back in my room, willing sleep, the wary sensastion of the noise still persisting. I felt a sudden jolt, an impulse to creep to the kitchen and watch him sleep. To lean in the doorway, that sturdiest of spots, and, just in a whisper, say “Boo!”

Wrote this about Pittsburgh years ago, about a friend who is now gone

We found the time machine Just over the farthest bridge Beyond it the hills bent their way Toward Ohio, and, somewhere, The ocean. It was metal rusted over, With a pushbutton top. You knew how to get in, Had been in it before, Folded yourself into the chamber Waved your hand to me. Just enough room for both of us. And when we turned it on, With whispers and levers, It wasn’t a whir, or a flash of light. Just a paper bag uncrinkling A few of our laughs in reverse. When it was done, when we were ready, We stepped out, limb by limb. Spiders out of the shower drain. And the whole world Was young again. There were the first flecks of beards. The giddy porch knees. The thump of music Humming in golden rooms, deep inside houses. We threw our heads back And spoke our language. We put on plays, Were swept up into snowy nights. We felt drunk and dumb again, Our shoes newly resoled, Our insides less tape and glue. “We’re plums, or bumblebees,” we thought. “We’re airplanes. Calm, blooming hearts.” We found every old corner Only they were full of people now. The long lost Sarahs, The forgotten Jons. We could see each and every hand That built the applause When we bowed And everyone thanked us For bringing them back. When I woke up, Winter dripping away outside, You’d gone off again Down the bare-limbed street. My clothes were in piles, Messy ziggurats, On a small patch of your new floor. I rose up and away, The cheering, dirty city Standing softly. The rivers stumbling and rolling Into each other. The bridges crisscrossing them forever. Like the cargo boats I saw while landing. I imagined they’d come From exotic ports, faraway. Tangiers, or Sydney. But none quite so knowing, The way places are, As Pittsburgh. Noises and light disappearing Over its steep hills. Gray like gray has ever been. Green like green will ever be, In our little giftbox future. Your hands still moving through its air. Making a point, Celebrating some grand or silly idea That had suddenly struck you, Had just risen up between us, While walking.

Flying Lessons

I. I decided maybe I’d stop being scared of flying. I rode more planes in the last six weeks than I ever have in such a concentrated amount of time. There was a wedding in Alaska, rain and late light and an expansiveness that I was surprisingly happy to push an old friend off into. A true beginning on the edge of the unknown. And then there were, now strangely familiar, the annual work trips, a film festival in the mountains of Colorado and one in the downtown canyons of high-rise Toronto. It was a lot of planes almost at once, and I, gripping the armrests tightly each and every way, got exhausted by the constant tension and brace of it. I thought maybe I just don’t want to be scared of this anymore.

A woman next to me on the small-plane portion of my trip to Telluride could tell that I was nervous, so she sighed kindly and removed her reading glasses and closed her book and engaged me, so I wouldn’t be a flinching, jumping mess for the next two hours. She was excited to learn where I work, a loyal subscriber, and I was intrigued to learn that she was a neuroscientist from a wealthy corner of the city where I grew up, whose adult daughters had bought passes for the whole family to see a bunch of movies together over Labor Day Weekend. (Her adult daughters had spent thousands of dollars.) She talked to me about fear and aversion therapy, things she knows about through her work, but also about a reality show she and her daughter watch, each episode detailing some air disaster. “It’s not one thing going wrong,” she said. “It’s about three. And it’s so rare that three things would ever go wrong.”

I was comforted, and happy to impress this friendly stranger with the details of my fabulously untenable line of work. Soon enough, me still sweaty of palm, we’d landed on the flat land of Montrose, the mountains there in the gray distance, hazy with promise and the vaguest of threats. She wished me a good trip. “See you in line!” I said, which is what you say to someone else bound for this exclusive-est of exclusive film festivals, this pretense that you’re in for a weekend of weary line-waiting and work, when in fact it’s just a party of high-altitude luck. 

When I was waiting for my shuttle van outside the airport, she found me again, introduced me to one of her daughters. I told the daughter, maybe 26, that her mother had been a great comfort during the bumps. “I kept thinking about that show!” the daughter said, turning to her mother. “Every time the engine noise changed.”

The engines change noise all the time. But—I’m assured, over and over again—the difference in whine and roar is just part of the intricate process of flying, of planes doing their calm and churning function. Since then, I haven’t watched the reality show that my seatmate so loves, but I have watched myriad YouTube videos, computer simulations of flights that went wrong. They’re harrowing, but they’re also soothing in their complex pathology. It’s not even three things that need to go wrong; it’s a whole collection of faults and mistakes and acts of the divine that will rip a plane from the sky and send it twirling toward the ground.

So I guess there’s cautious relief in that. Maybe enough that I find myself thinking that, with enough honest assessment, I might be able to beat this fear for good. Aiding in that is the steady drone of planes flying low-ish over my apartment, all day. I’m positioned under a flight path toward (I think?) LaGuardia, and there they all are! Plane after plane after plane, safely making their way home. How could I ever be so scared of something so regular? Of something so done, by so many people, every day?

I’m back on a plane around Halloween, so we’ll see how I do then, hurtling toward Savannah for an exciting few days. I hope I can enjoy the chance that brought me there, that I can listen to the bells and boops and groans and know it’s just the noise of things working. 

II. There is this guy, who I am trying to be less afraid of too. Or rather, the idea of him, this now months-long series of sporadic dates, never quite enough to get traction, but enough to think that there might be something finally gaining under our feet, now that fall’s arrived and here we are with a little more free time on our hands. How funny to pine for this for so long, and then, when it maybe arrives in all its sweet imperfection, to feel so wary of it, so guarded against it. It’s such a nice idea, isn’t it, to give in to another person and have them offer up what they might give you in return. But what a big thing that actually is, that gift, that reliance, that work. I feel a bit silly, to have wanted something all this time without ever really knowing what it might actually mean.

I don’t want to poison it with personal essay. So I’ll shut up about it soon. But some nice things, to remind myself: A hand on a knee at a candlelit bar on a Saturday night, the casual closeness of that, the quiet confirmation. The fuzz of hair and puffy faces the morning after, the lingering of the spell before the world intervenes and common stresses and new doubts fade their way in. The laugh you get, out of generosity more than anything else, from a bad joke that will only ever be funny in that one intimate second. The little dollop of a text message, the ping of a thought he had about you, a mile away in his apartment.

It’s all good stuff. Amateur stuff, maybe, but my stuff nonetheless. Something to sift through and process and also think nothing about. It’s hard to navigate this with focused intensity that has to outwardly present itself as cool and evenhanded and, for now, ambivalent. Maybe it needn’t be any of that. The truth is, I really don’t know.

III. My mom told me over the phone this weekend that she and my dad might be relocating, leaving the only house I’ve ever known them to live in to try something else out. A retirement-friendly place in Providence—goodbye, Boston!—that will be good for my dad now, and for my mom in 20 years. I greeted the news of this potential massive change with a surprising flatness, standing in the hallway of my apartment, not sure whether to sit on the living room couch and stare out the window as she said it, or to lie on my bed and let the curtains flutter with the wind of everything moving. I creaked the floorboards with my shifting weight and asked my mom to send me a link to the place, later looking at its windowless kitchen and wide swaths of carpeting, imagining what life might be like then, after they’d leapt into something we’d never known before.

Love Island

How do you climb out of the worst winter of your life? Worst not in event, but certainly in feeling, a long and cold catalogue of despair and anxiety so acute as to feel just shy, by a gracious and fortuitous couple of millimeters, of hopeless? I addressed my main practical antagonizer by getting a prescription for hair pills, tiny little once-daily dots I have sent to me from India via Canada, a ludicrously involved process that may yield nothing but the calming effects of placebo. But still, they help.

Depression isn’t so easily answered, though. And I say “depression” knowing it’s a big word, that there are medical implications to it, clinical ones. I’ve not got that sort of depression, I suppose. But still it was there, so heavy on me from November to May that, for the first time in many years, the membrane between the living world and the supposed peace that lies beyond it was thin enough to see through. I wasn’t suicidal, but there, at least, was that word, suddenly returned on the shelf. Toward the back, dusty and deeply unloved, but known. 

Getting out of that is hard. You do therapy, if you can afford to. I’ve been with the same guy for a boggling nearly seven years, and I’m not sure how to quantify how much he’s helped, except to say that things in my life have improved in tangible and yet also immeasurable ways since I started seeing him. My life has gotten worse, too, but that’s probably just because I’ve gotten older, and in getting older we start to see the weights ticking up far faster than the escapes. But yes. You go to Eric every Wednesday afternoon (”I’ve got my doctor’s appointment,” you say to editors to explain why you’re leaving the office at 3:30) and he helpfully points you toward how much you’ve built. The necessary surgery you got. The work you’ve done on your confidence. (Ha!) The dating you’ve tried, so hard sometimes, to fling yourself into. 

You definitely do go on dates. One week in May, before I got to disappear into Cannes and pretend I was happy and fabulous for a bit, I went on seven dates in six days. Exhilarating in terms of sheer numbers—look at me, meeting all these men! Who want to meet me!—but exhausting in all the repetition. To introduce yourself again and again and again, all the anecdote of yourself becoming a game of Telephone until you don’t recognize yourself anymore. Did I really feel that way at 29? Did I really say that when I went to San Francisco? It’s illuminating, I guess, to so constantly fumble for the right contextualizing, the right explanation for how you wandered into yourself. It’s so tiring, too, dispiriting if only for a few successful moments, a kiss or a fuck that connects you to the jet stream of gay life, the one that for so many years zoomed above your head, fast and elusive.

And then one of the dates is really good, and you repeat, and repeat, and repeat, and maybe oh gosh maybe you are seeing someone. But then no, wait, he is very busy, and though you are still working things out, nothing is dead yet, you are left still with many nights of unease. So much room to doubt. That’s nothing new, but suddenly there is the little glimmer of a life past that uncertainty, and while you’re happy to glimpse it, it’s also such a tease. Such a mean little maybe. 

You can also make your way out of the worst winter of your life by doing some unexpected travel. I went to Provincetown, my first time there, under the aegis of a film festival, and what a happy weekend that was. To be somewhere free of onus, a true accidental tourist, enjoying the weather and the company of colleagues. What fun to be with people you don’t know that well, but like. I wonder how many coupled-up adults get to do that, or how often. But here I was, a beneficiary of my aloneness, on the wind, with no one to answer to, utterly free. I went to tea every day and I went out as late as you can in Massachusetts and I felt expansive in a way that seemed impossible in February, or in the nasty drip of March. Fuck all that looming death, all that coming baldness, all that fatness and failure and regretted tweets. I was on the tip of America and having a blast, brought there by my own success. How worthy I felt! For the first time in a long while.

I also stood in a river in the Blue Ridge mountains, in a little corner of North Carolina, waist-deep in brown water, cigarette and beer in hand, sun beaming and breezes fluttering. I was with three old friends, primal friends, one of whom had fled New York and all its busy stress. Well, two, actually. Anther one decamped for Miami in May, where he’ll wait it out until the floods come for him first. (Better to greet it head-on, maybe! Whenever I would express fears about nuclear war to my dad as a kid, he would say “I hope the bomb drops right on top of us!” I would get upset, but now I know what he meant.)  

We did nothing during our country weekend, but it was so good to wriggle out of New York’s insistent grasp, to feel the possibility of the rural life, of things slowed and pared away. Smoking cigarettes (I’m quitting soon, I tell myself, for real this time) seemed almost a calling there. It rained in the afternoons and the trees got heavy and greener. At night it was so dark you could see past the immediate stars and look at the worlds beyond it, the thin veil of infinity.

Back home, the immediate antidote is Love Island, an engrossing and ludicrously time-consuming reality show that seems tailor made for a new, dear friend and me. It’s designed for bingeing and joking and me doing my bad Northern British accent while screaming at the TV and forgetting the complexity of being alive. Watched in bulk, the show gets a bit sad, all this hetero scheming and aching and doubt, like romance is this impossible and forever unsatisfying negotiation between enemies. But then again, I’m gay, and dating men (I am dating men!), so the terms are a bit different. I’m finding that, anyway. 

There have been a few mornings recently when I’ve woken up at a boy’s place and had to walk home, to start a weekday with a new secret tingling in my heart. No pressure on that boy, if he’s reading this, or anyone reading this, but what little wonders emerge: the stately gleam of the Brooklyn Museum. The earthy funk of the Botanical Gardens. The joggers, so sweaty and enviable. The mothers and their twirling children, mad with summer. The weary traffic guard who waves me across Empire Boulevard with a comforting hand. Though I don’t have the walk signal, she says it’s OK to cross, to pass by and see my way home. 

I hated this winter, and am still reeling from its aftershocks. But I’ve moments now, finally in the deep grip of summer, when it begins to feel like the past. When I’m able to see the world for its rivers and beaches and boys, all there to remind me how much is left. 

Hashtag Resist

While everything collapsed around me, the walls of my own heart and the bigger wish we had for ourselves, I read something about Miki Endo, who was 25. She was 25 when, seven sad years ago, she stayed at her station at the Crisis Management Department in Minamisanriku, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, and warned those around her that a great wave was coming.

She implored them to seek higher ground, and they did. She’s credited now with saving thousands of people. But we won’t really know, don’t really know, What she actually did. She’s dead now, was taken away by the wave, this 25-year-old, standing athwart the looming ruin.

How nice to think of our rescuers. The Mr. Rogers heroes, the helpers. That anyone could be so decent, so brave and solid, seems like such a lost comfort. An art, really, the impossibly limber act of caring.

I listened to Miki Endo. You can hear her forever disembodied voice on YouTube videos. There’s such a calmness, daggered through with worry. You don’t want to valorize that she was swallowed up. Make something elegant of the accident. But there is something big and roaring there, beyond the wave. That she knew a particular, primal need. Chose to live inside it, during the last moments of her life. “Seek higher ground,” the translated videos I watched repeat.

A lot of people in her town are now orphans, kids at schools up on hills who watched their parents washed away. I wonder what they think of her, or of that long and surging hour.

I watched the baseball game when the 1989 San Francisco earthquake hit. I watched (again) the Boxing Day wave. And I thought how strange it is that just to the left or right of these grainy frames it’s a sunny, normal day. That calamity makes no room for itself, doesn’t set a scene. It only rushes in, carries itself across us.

It doesn’t know who is yelling against it. Disaster has no need. All that’s to be done, then, or weakly hoped for, at least, is that echoing voice. Miki Endo, 25 and just married, so concerned with what was coming.

She was right, of course. Terribly so. You can find images of the gutted building where she was just before the water crashed in and took her away.

I’m thinking of her now, 25 and such a distant artifact already. And I want to lift her above the surge. I want to show her to the indifferent sun and, past that, to whatever other power beams down on us. I want to say to it, here’s one who knew. The tide receded and she knew. And here’s how much flooded land so quickly lay behind her.

Two Nights

I. I had a weird night last night. It started with a pleasant warm-weather charge, a friend and I sitting outside and having drinks before a party, finally feeling the late flutter of spring, all those flowering trees and the sense that we’d beaten something. It was a long and difficult winter for me, and in the early parts of last night it was like a kind of cold fever had broken. I felt freed a bit, there with my friend on Greenwich Avenue, the city murmuring around us, reminding us of its charm and goodness and ever-teasing possibility.

The party was lame. I guess we’d sort of known it would be, but there had been hope that it might be on a hotel’s roof instead of in a hotel’s random event space on its first floor, no view but a sea of other disappointed people. I ran into a guy I’m supposed to go on a first Tinder date with on Sunday, and he was young and excited to be there, and I felt sour and old for complaining as much as I had been. Still, the night remained alive and exciting, like I was maybe shaking off whatever damp thing has been weighing me down for the past few months. There was something witty about it, everything a sparkling little joke, the air fresh with beginning. It was nice to be out.

Afterward, we took a long subway ride back to Brooklyn, something I’m finally getting used to now that I’m nearly a year away from Manhattan. It was late but not quite late enough when we got off the train, and we decided to have a nightcap at a bar equidistant to our two apartments. My friend is a really good friend, new but intense, and he’s one of my few single ones. So we like to spend time griping about bad dates and scuttled romances—a favorite, consistent topic. This being a night of springy hope (and because we’d had more than a few drinks), my friend found a guy on an app eager to meet up for a drink (he sent him a picture of me, and this stranger approved) and we waited for him to swing by. I was nervous, knew it was a weird idea that would likely lead nowhere. 

When he showed up, he was, of course, not as cute as he looked in his photo, and he had an odd energy about him, haughty and rigid and a little mean. The more we talked to him—me taking the lead—it became clear that there was definitely something off. He started talking about Louis C.K. and how unfairly he’d been treated, how it was his accusers’ fault for going to the hotel room or whatever, how they should have known better. How they should have, in a way, expected it. He went on to say the same about Harvey Weinstein and others. I tried to keep my composure while still pushing back, but he wasn’t interested in listening, trampling through with his disgusting bullshit.

After maybe too long, I stood up (my friend just getting back from the bathroom) and said that he was saying disgusting bullshit and I didn’t want to listen to it anymore and that I was leaving. My friend said he was too, and we walked out, me feeling the rattling shock of actually getting mad at someone to their face, something I rarely do. I didn’t have any time to process that feeling, though, because the guy came following us out of the bar, yelling at us about how we’d been abusive and unfair, holding his phone up and saying he was recording us for reasons that weren’t clear then and are even less clear now. It was alarming, a small bit scary, and my friend and I fled, at first going in separate directions (instinct?) but then meeting back up across the street and walking, wired and disbelieving, back to his apartment, where I called a car. I went home, not sure what to make of the mess, but feeling like the night had sort of perverted itself, starting off with such hopeful, almost sexy exuberance and ending with the world crashing its darkness into our laps and chasing us out of our happy moods.

I woke up this morning and felt gloomy and disappointed and a little guilty. Guilt about what I’m not quite sure, but still that small seed, that worry that maybe I had invited in this bad energy because I had dared to let myself feel, for the first time in a while, open to the idea that something might be good, that there was a chance, that out there was some fuzzy version of a life where that springtime feeling carried on forever.

II. I had a lovely night tonight, meeting up with two friends early at Marie’s Crisis and enjoying the friendly intimacy of it, sitting at the piano (something I have never done before, or at least did long enough ago that I don’t remember it), singing along to songs we did and didn’t know. I was in such a strange headspace, feeling stressed and nostalgic and a little out-of-body, but the place and the music insistently washed over me until the city—or at least that little underground room—once again felt like the magical thing I’ve always wanted it to be, and once maybe was. The best kind of musical theater songs make you ache, wanting to be there live in the room when they first came into being, remembering the youthful (or not) circumstances of when you first heard them. It’s a great, bittersweet sensation that Marie’s can conjure up on a rare perfect evening.

Sitting there, mulling over weird last night and many other recent bad nights, people around me warbling out The Last 5 Years, all my insistent anxiety and loneliness felt leavened. Not erased, not smuggled off to somewhere else. They were still there. But for a fleeting second, in that crowded room, all that pain felt sort of beautiful. There was the grace of it, existing in me like a song, such a full and familiar part of me that I wanted to hum it. I wanted to light up and lift out all the sadness that’s been churning in me throughout this really hard year, because it suddenly felt possible, in the lively cheer of that bar, caught in the swirl of old memories, two good friends solid and warm next to me.

III. I had this thought the other day, riding the train somewhere, that it is so strange that parents don’t remember every day with their kids. That Tuesdays get lost, whole weeks, the better parts of years. Surely if anyone can hold onto everything, it would be devoted parents. But even they can’t. It made me feel sort of glum, but also a little comforted. I fear what I’ve forgotten of life, and will forget. But I guess I also am happy that I remember enough of it.

The catch of Tony’s voice on the scratchy old record of West Side Story I had as a kid in Rhode Island. He would get stuck on “Something’s Coming” unless we picked up the needle and moved him ahead. I remember the heat and heaviness of the summer I fell in love with that musical, pouring in through the screen windows, the world outside green and limitless.

I remember a boy’s hand down my pants in a cab on the way to his place from Marie’s Crisis one hazy night probably ten years ago, the thrilling fumble of it, the panicky feeling of not remembering his name the next morning. I remember that subway ride home, back to Brooklyn, an early Sunday morning gray and streaky.

I remember the first time I met my friend, the one from last night, on a beach in France, both of us wary, neither knowing that our lives would soon run tandem, mad and fun, at least for a little while. I’m glad he was with me last night, that I had someone to be rattled with. 

I feel alone a lot of the time, and nights like last night, when hoped-for romance goes so haywire, cause me to worry that I’ll be alone for a lot more time. But I suppose there is always the night after, when a certain closeness can rush back in. When you can—dreamy and raggedly hopeful once more, stupid you—fall in love with an old place, with a memory of yourself. I was young at that bar once, belted out songs, bright and loud and sure. It wasn’t so long ago. It isn’t so far away. It’s not so impossible, is it.

All the Feels

There’s a sadness I can’t quite locate. Sometimes I think it’s buried with my friend, almost six years dead now, and I know I can’t chase after it, that it’s interred and gone. That’s still boggling, this whole yawning thing I cannot retrieve. 

But that’s not really where the sadness is. I thought, have thought recently, that it’s in the hair I keep losing, the distressing bald spot I noticed in a video of myself from when I was in Toronto and feeling foolishly confident. Maybe that’s a big part of it, this idea that I will slowly get uglier, this knowledge that I will slowly get older. I’m on some over-the-counter medication for that now, rubbing my scalp and taking a pill with twice-daily diligence, hoping against hope that time will somehow forget me, leave me be. Because haven’t I earned it? Isn’t 34 late enough to find yourself that you should not then be near immediately subjected to all the regular pains inflicted on other men my age who’ve presumably had a decade-plus of what life seems truly, fully to be—all that love, all that sex, all those moments of pure, triumphant knowing that I’m just now, finally, running after. 

That’s where the sadness is, maybe. In that. But I know, in this sinking and sticky humidity, that it’s not quite it. There’s something more, thawing in the permafrost, that has nothing to do with a dead friend or dying hair. It’s instead, I worry, the slow descent of what life will be now that I’m not exactly young. Not old yet, but certainly on my way to unmoored middle-age, sans partner, sans children, sans anything that might otherwise tether me to the earth. It’s a broad and opening sadness, like looking at some wide Western vista and seeing all the foreign, lonely possibility in it. Here is all this space, not quite meant for me, but still there.

I met a new friend who spent the past few months traveling across America. He’s from Australia, and young, and listening to him tell his stories from the road, I was filled with dual pangs. Jealousy, yes, that he could do all this, take all this time, find all this stuff. Wouldn’t it be nice to have that again, that unbridled search. I asked him about what it was like to be alone for so long—a whole month of seeing no one he knew—and he talked about losing the context of himself, of feeling almost blank, without idea or identity. I knew what he meant, and wanted to dive into it, to abandon myself and maybe never come back. To do a Ladder of Years-type thing and just disappear because everything now is so inadequate. 

But the second pang I felt, listening to this really charming young guy, was the one that told me I couldn’t do that now. That I have a bit too much holding me in place, and for good reason. That I am often overcome with incredible loneliness not because I’m supposed to be somewhere else, but because I need to fix whatever this is that I live in. There’s nothing for me in Utah but a whole lot of impenetrable land—heather and scrub, dingy purple and green rustling under threatening skies, ones I once looked at worriedly, years ago. 

It’s such a nice idea, that I might find this small, hard, insistent sad thing in me somewhere else. That I could almost pluck it up, hold it in my hand, and then throw it away. But I know it’s dimmer and more distant than that, whatever it is that’s gnawing at night. And I know that what I should be glad for are those graceful and wonderful things—meeting a new friend, watching a good movie with an old one—that can flood your life on a Wednesday. When you are still alive, when you will go to sleep, when all happiness is is just a corner not yet turned. 

Fire Island III

There’s an insistent ache at this point of summer, isn’t there? A lingering, urgent itch about the time still left, yes. But mostly, now, a looking back, assessing what you did with the warm weather, if it was as full and as fun as you once hoped it would be, back when it was dreary and cold. 

I think I’ve had a good summer. I traveled more than planned, to places I didn’t think I would. I saw my family in Rhode Island, I went out to Long Island (OK, just say it, Richard, I went to the Hamptons) to see a friend. Same old. But I also went to Texas, to the hot sprawl of Fort Worth and Dallas, to see a nice and surprising guy who lives too far away. That trip is probably a whole post unto itself—all the moments I felt so blissfully foreign there, amongst the big trucks and gaping sky, how heartening it was to watch the lights swirl on an empty gay bar dance floor in Fort Worth, as a bartender sprinkled it with salt so that no future people would slip. 

But that strange and stolen trip feels like a million years ago, or almost like it never happened. All I remember acutely right now is a few bug-bitten nights spent recently back on Fire Island, scene of so many emotional crimes, where I headed off to again, despite everything, last weekend. Again with a needling hope in my heart, that this would be the time it cracked open, revealed itself to me—or, rather, revealed me to myself. Because that place surely has that power, doesn’t it? To clarify a gay man’s life, to confer upon it all the blessings and certainty and fantastical graces we maybe feel owed, or denied, or both. 

Riding the ferry over from Sayville suggests that. A windy trip ending at a dock, little flags beating, the sigh of happy and horny and bitterly sad history all teeming there on that jetty. And then on the boardwalks, and then by the pools, and then at the teas, and the drag shows. It’s all so rippled with haunted possibility, this ritual rite performed so the dead will be remembered, and forgotten, and allowed to live on. 

Or, at least, it can feel that way. But, if you go with the intention of having some life-affirming, sex-positive adventure, and then you instead clam back up into yourself, as always, the island can seem pretty forbidding, casually dismissive of you for failing to tap into its sexy, full-bodied magic. Which is to say, I didn’t. Not this time. Not the last two times, either. But maybe next time? I’d like to go again, because as much as each trip out there is its own kind of wondrous masochism—to gaze at these perfect gay men, who know so much more than I do, who have solved life to such a toned and pleased degree—I still want to chase after whatever it is I think I’ll find out there. 

I told myself that this would be the year I went and really looked for my uncle’s house, the one he had in the Pines, a lost generation ago. But I got lazy, or drunk, or too busy smoking cigarettes and gazing at the boys at the pool, languid in their swimsuits, seemingly so unaware of how much time was rushing by them just then. The idea of trekking alone to find this house that I only went to once or twice when I was a baby, and that is now probably full of so many ghosts, if it wasn’t torn down years ago . . . That was less appealing than I thought it might be. 

As I said, though, I’m gonna go again. Next summer. Hope against hope. Screw up something like courage. Smile through the whatever. I have to keep believing that it’s out there, don’t I? Because it’s so close. You can see it from Long Island. That hazy idea. That I might pass through something, grab something else, and disappear. 

Film Festival

In the middle of my last day in Cannes, with easy time to kill, to waste, I sat at a cafe, cigarette and seltzer and crossword, and watched the Italian staff, one older, two young and limber, argue, hands awhirl, over something. They went from outside to in, and then back out again, away from the tables to a bench in this quiet square I found, far from the thump and stress of the beach.

I tried to call up from the past some of the Italian I learned and forgot a long time ago. But they were going fast and probably spoke some dialect I’ll never know. I could only guess, then, what might cause a fight on a day like this; its buttery sun, its soft wind, its busy hush. Maybe business had been slow, despite the festival. Maybe the food had gotten bad, from laziness or disregard. Or maybe it was something less obvious than that. Someone’s girlfriend, someone’s boyfriend. Some money, some plan, some pain.

I watched them and thought about flying home, my plane rumbling me back to Brooklyn. About life resuming, life returning. And how I soon might not remember this. But how, if I did, and I found them, next year, they might not remember it themselves. “I do not know,” they might say with a laugh when I asked them what it had all been about.

Or maybe they would. Maybe it was the day when everything changed. When something broke, took a turn. And I just happened to be there, peering across the shaded square, glad that there are so many of us alive together. That we are movies and we are not. That, a science class told me I think, we reflect light the same as anything else. You could say, to make a messy little metaphor, that we project it. That’s why their shirts were white, their hair deep brown and glowing. And why, when they pressed their hands together, trying to make some important or unimportant point, their fingers and palms flushed pink. That was all light too, somehow.