"Can't Have One Without the Other."
September 2024
No need to turn on the light, knowing my way even in the dark, I closed our bedroom door behind me. Over at the living room window, I removed its screen and stuck my head outside. Some of the trees in these backyards stand twice as high as the brownstones and the same wind I could see in their branches I felt in my hair. “Thank you, God,” I said. A couple years ago, during a brief but distressing period when our landlord wanted to sell the apartment building, I went downstairs to take out the trash and found two women sitting high up on our stoop. Their names were Millie and Georgia and they used to live here. I couldn’t let them back into their old unit—they lived on the third floor, not the second—but that’s not why they were here. With their choice of gaps in the century-old baseboards, I watched Millie and Georgia stow away these little glass vials, each one with a paper scroll inside. Letters from the present to their pasts. I swear they were angels. These two girls out in the cold who insisted I tell my landlord just how much I love living here. Reminding me I had nothing to lose. But it was more than that. A lot of great things have happened to Millie and Georgia and they said they attribute so much of that to their time living right here. “But,” Austin would always remind me, “Didn’t they say that all those great things only happened after they moved out? Once they left?” That is what they said. And now I’ll know if it’s the truth. That next day, I was moving out. But I couldn’t sleep. Leaning further out, far enough to frighten any other sleepless neighbor staring out their window, reveling in this same quiet, I left something behind. Down to the ground, I spit.
Easing the shlep by leaving the doors wide open, I could hear the teachers downstairs in the preschool. It must have been some sort of orientation because the kids weren’t here. It wasn’t the first day, not yet, but up in New Hampshire it was—and Brian Burns reported to Gilford Middle School all over again. Some seventeen years after I attended my first day of eighth grade there, my dad showed up that morning for his new part-time gig as the custodian. Life is a circle. One of those preschool teachers downstairs is this blond named Ashley whose moccasins and Northface zip-up always reminded me, startlingly, of all the girls I went to high school with. I would’ve bet money she was from some comparably barren stretch of northern New England—but, in all these years, I never asked. Austin was outside guarding the double-parked van and, from inside the living room, paralyzed by the decision of which box to bring downstairs next, I could just make out the words “conscious uncoupling” after Ashley asked him, “You guys moving?!” Turns out, she’s moving too. Or at least moving jobs, teaching this year at a school in Ridgewood. “Go figure,” I said, actively in the process of moving all my stuff to that same neighborhood. “Maybe we’ll see each other around. And have a shared common enemy of a parent over there too.” I will miss so much about this place but I will not miss those parents. The careless cruelty of all those Clinton Hill mothers and fathers—it’s not a moment too soon. After checking to see that she was gone, and quieting his voice, Austin said to me, “Connecticut. I asked that teacher where she’s from. She’s from Connecticut.” I was wrong. But that’s not what mattered.
I watched Austin fill in the space I left behind. Other than a tote bag of perishable groceries I forgot on the kitchen floor, a realization that didn’t occur to me, wrathfully, until we crossed the border into Queens, everything I owned—with Austin’s help—was now in my new apartment. But the rental van needed returning to Clinton Hill. I had to bring it back where it started. Anytime I told someone I was moving to Ridgewood, they’d talk immediately about all the food. The pupusas I needed to try, the varenyky, the Serbian meat pies. Plenty was waiting for me. And yet I asked Austin if it’d be okay for me to stick around and eat a burrito from the place on Fulton. Over at the bookshelf, taking advantage of all this newly open space just for him, he said that was fine. Those couple hours, our final few hours, went by mostly in silence. Austin, still shifting around his titles, seemed so content. And I felt like I was dying. I can’t believe I even had an appetite. But once I washed my dishes, wiping down the kitchen counter in my wake, I found Austin sitting still on the couch, looking right at me. A lot was about to be said. “You’ve given me so much to be grateful for.” “I’m going to miss you so much.” “I love you completely.” “You will always have such a special place in my heart…nobody else—nobody.” But somehow the saddest sentence of all was “Once I pack the perishables again, I’ll need to leave pretty quickly.” In a patch of woeful, wheaten sunshine burning hot through the window, we tasted each other’s tears on our lips. Stowing my face in the nook of his neck, our sobs crashing into each other, I wrapped my arms around him and felt certain there’s no such thing as enough time.
Austin sat with me on the stoop as a little car on my little screen inched closer and closer. But like sentries guarding some vacant ruin, he looked up the block and I looked down, silently. I don’t think we could bear it, any other way. We always went in two different directions. Whenever I spent the night at his apartment, back when we were first dating, come morning it was the J that got me home and the L that took him to work. He’d walk one way on Jefferson and I’d walk the other. But in the growing distance, whipping around like little kids, we’d turn back our heads to look at each other, over and over until we were gone. Sometimes, from all the way down the block, I could hear his laugh. But as the car pulled away from our home of the last four years, and I put my arm out the open window to wave goodbye, I didn’t think to look back. To stick out my head and see Austin for as long as I possibly could. Maybe some part of me, the wisest part, small as he may be, knew better. That if I did, I’d be doomed to the underworld, or turn into a pillar of salt, or just weep harder than I wanted to in front of this stranger driving me to Queens. Olajide was his name. I looked at his eyes, fixed on the road but reflected back at me, and wondered how many times he’s said goodbye to someone he loves.
It was a dead end most everywhere I turned. It was my first full day living in Ridgewood and I was trying to figure out a route for my walk. Back in brownstone Brooklyn, I’d just loop up and down all the tree-lined blocks that got me to Fort Greene Park and repeat the same trek on my way home. Eight nonstop miles, simple as that. Here, there are cemeteries, streets that might as well be highways, and a railroad that cuts the neighborhood right in half. Just when I thought I was getting somewhere, I wouldn’t. But even then, a most pleasant surprise, I liked what I was seeing. Given how many young people I know who live in Ridgewood, I guess I was expecting this neighborhood to mirror my experience of Bushwick where there’s three hordes of hyper-affected ketaministas for every one regular family. It’s grotesque. But this wasn’t. The Ridgewood I witnessed felt almost wholesome, like something out of the past, lovely even in the moments when I thought, Why do I feel like I’m suddenly living in New Jersey? Because it is pretty residential, with its little gated yards and driveways and, strangest of all, American flags. But when it’s adorning the homes of, presumably, immigrant families, who am I to look that in the face? I saw old men sweeping their sidewalks and this one old lady, on a lawn chair in the sun, with five tight curls on her otherwise bald head. And eavesdropping on every possible conversation, oh, the voices. Other than a small handful of my older coworkers and the occasional Lawn Guyland visitors, it’s not often that I hear a strong New York accent. That cot-caught distinction, that variability on brother and father, those rimshot t’s and d’s—it’s an all too rare embrace. But it was everywhere. Of course, my father grew up in Queens. Sharing a bedroom with his four brothers in a Kew Gardens NYCHA building. He’s still got it, even after all these years, but when I listen to him speak, I barely notice. It’s not the accent I hear—it’s my dad.
Starting it on a Thursday night, but finishing it on Friday morning, Sadie McKee was the first film I watched in my new place. It’s a Joan Crawford movie from 1933 with a rags-to-riches working gal kind of story that would become her signature. As I tweeted, plagiarizing the Criterion Channel’s film synopsis in the process, “Much like Joan Crawford, I endure personal trials and heartbreak with the chic sophistication that makes for a Depression-era icon.” High and dry in New York City after getting two-timed by the striving Lothario of her salad days, Sadie eventually marries a loathsome tycoon but ends up, right in the nick of time, with the goodhearted lawyer who loved her all along. The film ends on his birthday. Presented with a cake all aflame, the lawyer looks at Sadie looking at him, a fire all her own burning in those weary, vampish eyes, and as someone says, “You have to blow them all out or your wish won’t come true,” a song begins to play. It was “Auld Lang Syne.” I would’ve expected tears but, instead, I laughed. How couldn’t I? Time and time again, over and over, there it’s been—that song, following me around. A prophecy, a curse, a prayer. I suppose this really is a new year.
On a Saturday night in Greenwich Village, we celebrated Ashleigh and John Michael’s engagement. Three days earlier, I got a text from Nick that read, nervously, “Have you been made aware of this?” I had. Honora first told me about the party last month, while we were together for Juliette’s wedding, sharing as many details as possible before Ashleigh walked back out of those CVS automatic doors. But that was it. Surely there were tasks to delegate in the meantime, organizing to be done but, in the end, all I did was show up. Maybe my friends understood this was a fraught time and kept a wide berth. Or maybe they just know me. Honora, Kyla, and Sarah all came to town for the occasion and everyone looked fabulous. “We really are just getting hotter and hotter” is something we tell each other a lot, like every other aging friend group. Ashleigh wore this long red lace dress purchased that same morning and, after something was said about her being sample size, I exerted my gay privilege and scoffed, “Bitch.” And apparently I looked good too. Going straight to the party from the museum, I’d been showered in praise all day long. Over and over, from people I least expected, I heard, “Brian, I love your shirt.” I did too. It’s my very favorite. It just isn’t mine. When I was still in the throes of packing all my stuff, Austin offered to take care of my clothes in the closet. Slipping a dozen shirts at a time, still on their hangers, into trash bags with a hole cut in the bottom. A white trash garment bag. And hanging them back up that night, in my new bedroom’s closet, I lost my breath. There, amidst all of mine, was something of his. A baby blue short-sleeved button-up with these big polka dots all over. I’ve never known Austin without this shirt and he always looked so cute in it. It’s my favorite thing he wears and he knows that. And all day long, going about my life in Austin’s image, all I heard was how great I look. It’s possible Austin tucked away that polka dot shirt on purpose, leaving me, quietly, with something I adore. How beautiful if that’s the case. But even if it isn’t, even if it was nothing more than a mistake—oh my goodness, how beautiful is that.
Taking off her sneakers after her daily game of pickleball, my mother—who has two jobs but, very much of her own volition, still only works part-time—said, “I’m tired of being the poorest friend.” After telling Shannon I was going up to New Hampshire for a week and a half, she asked what I had planned and I replied, “Haha.” The whole point of visiting New Hampshire, for me, is to do nothing. Or my idea of nothing. Waking up at seven so I could write for a couple hours and still make it to Lake Winnipesaukee for peak UV before clocking all nine miles of my walk just as the sun began to set over the mountains. Easier said than done, however, when all this me!-me!-me! time has to operate around my parents’ schedules. Sitting down to write as soon as my dad left for his job at the middle school only for my mom to come home from pickleball fifteen minutes later. From behind my computer, I watched my mother grab a yogurt from out of the fridge, riding high on endorphins and vitamin D as she said, “Obviously, it’s nice, cheering each other on, but do we need to say ‘good one!’ or ‘awesome!’ after every hit? Every hit? Really?”—and somehow I felt like the working mom. Inconvenienced, albeit fondly, by this beloved intruder. But I can’t complain. My parents, expressing just enough guilt to keep themselves off the hook, were about to leave for a weekend-long music festival in New Jersey. I’d have the house all to myself, something I somberly figured was a thing of the past once my dad retired. For four days straight, I could do whatever I pleased. I could walk around the house naked, dance like an idiot, sing from the topmost reaches of my lungs and let dishes pile up in the sink. And there was some of that. But mostly there was mourning. I cried every day. Licking wounds that, to my surprise, were only just beginning to bleed.
The MTV Video Music Awards were torturing me and I wasn’t even watching. Even as a teenager, actually constituting its intended audience, I rarely ever tuned in. But once I was with Austin, we always would. For him, it was just fun, a way of keeping tabs on the newest stars even if he already knew all their names. For me—not so much. Amounting instead to this reminder, grimmer every year, that I chose being world-weary back when I should’ve just been young. Of course, it wasn’t really the VMAs that had me feeling so tortured. How could it be? Everything’s rooted in something. What tortured me was Twitter. During our first week apart, Austin hardly posted anything. But we were in touch, still regularly texting each other, and I was grateful for that—even if it did already feel different. Then he started tweeting. Granting me this casual access to an interior world where I no longer lived. It was just little asides, pithy observations, nothing substantial, let alone emotional. He seemed perfectly fine. That was the problem. And when I refreshed my feed and found the latest tweet from Austin about Benson Boone being hot—I saw red. Loathing this mustached 22-year-old singer who, ten seconds earlier, I didn’t know existed. That I could be so rattled by this isn’t just ridiculous, it’s dysfunctional. It is insane. But past midnight and already in bed, ignoring my better judgment after typing and deleting this message more than once, I said to Austin, “Currently in a very stressed and angry place. And I’m wondering how you’ve been feeling.” Within seconds, he responded, “I’m okay. Sad. But not stressed or angry.” That was not what I wanted to hear. Maybe no answer would ever be good enough, that there’s nothing he possibly could’ve said to make me feel even a little less alone. I understand that. But I cannot accept it.
That next night, Austin and I talked on the phone. All through the summer, during this grand experiment in unraveling, we were commended for our maturity. A constant chorus of praise from most everyone in our lives. Some more baffled than others but nevertheless admiring our staying on good terms and living under one roof. For managing to survive the sweetness of staying together while nevertheless drifting apart. Bravo. But pacing in circles around my parents’ house, as my woe turned to pleading turned to fury, I listened to Austin speak so rationally to me, so coolly, and I felt like a child. I needed to know he hurt like I hurt, I needed to feel that, to hear some requisite tone of voice that just might prove our guts were stuck in the same vice. Because, yes, he did tell me he couldn’t sleep, that he was tossing and turning every night only to wake up at six. That he hadn’t watched a single movie, or finished a book, or worked up the energy to go into the office let alone meet up with friends. That he felt sad, immobile, lazy, and depressed. But he was also trying to stay positive—and I could not make sense of that. Desperate for some impossibly perfect answer that could land squarely in my heart, I pushed and I pushed and I pushed—and he exploded. Howling at me through the phone, I felt his anguish and his sorrow but, more than anything, I felt his anger. There was no catharsis for him in that explosion, no relief. There was only resentment. I tried to explain that if we’re staying in each other’s lives, I’d need honesty from him, a window into how he’s really feeling, like how things were, all those years ago, when we were just friends. And it was then, still seething, that Austin said, “That is impossible! That’s over!” Oh. Oh, oh, oh. What a fool I’ve been. Before we hung up, Austin said he made a decision. That until I was back in New York, when we could reassess the possibility of friendship, we had to stop talking. If I really needed him, he said, I could call—and it took all I had not to ask, “But why don’t you need me badly enough to call?” I suppose a break-up is a break-up—and Austin’s done this before. He will survive, he needs to, and he knows that. I have no idea.
Warning her of my general state of mind, gracing Lindsay with an “out” if she so desired, I drove my dad’s car down to Concord and met up with my sister for dinner. We’d get together a couple more times that weekend, and with Vincent too, spending Saturday afternoon on the beach and Sunday night at her place. Vacationing in Lake George the week prior, after Lindsay and her husband told Vincent they were headed to New York, he asked if they were going to see “Uncle Bub.” And after explaining state versus city to him, my three-year-old nephew responded, “Oh right—he lives in Brooklyn. I forgot!” A sharp and funny baby who already has dinosaur names and entire story books committed to memory, I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true—he’s brilliant. “And when he is that smart, when he really seems to know exactly what he’s doing,” said Lindsay, at dinner that night, “How could I not take it personally? Even just a little? When my son is looking me in the eye and saying, ‘I don’t love you.’” At 35 years old, there’s a lot on Lindsay’s mind. Misgivings aplenty about choices made and decisions yet to come while parenting a whip smart toddler and remembering a lost baby. And all the time, she’s angry. Nodding, I said to her, “I am so angry.” We are Kristine’s children, of course. We talked about that. How we feel doomed by all that fury, by all her rage. And then I was reminded of something our mother told me. Her father was a horrible man, an abusive and violent person who stoked constant fear in his wife and children. I don’t always see them as a family—Nana and my mom, her one little brother and three older sisters—but as individuals, alone, who were doing everything they could just to survive that house. And sometimes I worry they’re stuck there. That they never learned how to leave. But I brought all this up with Lindsay to share something specific, telling my sister how our mother told me, in the oral history of her life, “Hopefully, Nana met someone that we weren’t aware of and was able to have some fun years. I mean, she was a waitress and attractive and, you know, after work sometimes, you have a drink with your coworkers and maybe there was some flirting going on. I hope there was. For her sake. But…I don’t know.” If I understand this correctly, what became us was already inside our mother when she was inside of hers. Nana carried Kristine carrying us. And looking at Lindsay from across the table, as the same tears fell down both our faces, I hoped we had less to bear.
Finally managing to pull her truck into a tight spot at this lakeside bar, as I looked on painfully all the while, I hugged my high school French teacher hello and said, “That’s exactly what being pee shy at the urinal is like.” Louise looked gorgeous. Breezy and youthful and just a little bit of a mess. Like tousled hair. A perfect storm. And she smelled just the same, a fragrance, whatever it is, that brought me right back to her classroom. Long enrolled in Spanish, I started taking classes with her as a junior because of my crush on a boy who was treasurer of the French Club. Boys may come and boys may go but—qu’il est bon, le bon Dieu—Madame Louise lasted. Over martinis, “pornographically” dirty per her request, we caught each other up. The last time we saw one another, when her son was nearing puberty and she was nearing retirement, much was in the air. As a mother, as a teacher—and as a partner. For a long time, she was in a relationship with a man named John. But no sooner did we eat the first of our vodka-soaked olives than I heard her reference someone named Roy. Boyfriend-girlfriend in the eighth grade, their paths didn’t cross again until a recent (and strangely specific) forty-first high school reunion. Never married, he’s never had to consider meeting anyone halfway, if such a thing is even possible. They’ve got differences to negotiate but it seems like work Louise is happy to do. As she said, “With John—I lost my voice.” And there was possibly a lot up in the air for me too, that last time we saw one another. Back then, Austin and I were fighting so much—fighting over something, all told, I never really learned to get over—and I didn’t know if we’d last. But we did. Until, of course, we didn’t. I told Louise we broke up. A lifelong educator, committed and gifted at that, she said all the right things. But what struck me deepest that night wasn’t anything I heard, not really. It was something I could see, there, in the swelling of her chest, the corner of her lips, and in the glisten of her eyes, stony blue and brimming over. Listening to me, she looked so proud. And she should be. I’m her student.
Hardly a week since Ashleigh’s engagement party, I looked through Kyla’s snapshots of our cradled drinks and kissed cheeks. There’s nothing like a film photo. Endlessly flattering in its smoothing of the bad stuff and enriching of the good, it’s also got that crucial, aching ingredient of time’s passage. The best pictures ever taken of me took months, years, to see the light of day. It’s a rule. But Kyla must have sent off her photos the moment she got back to New Orleans. And while she insisted they’re “still cute tho,” in almost every photo of me, I’m cut off at the neck. I have lost my head—but not the shirt.
Down in Asbury Park for that music festival, within walking distance of Jillian’s apartment all weekend long, my parents saw my oldest sister one time. Dropping off some odds and ends at her place, Jillian only had five minutes to spare before taking a work call. I don’t think they even went inside. Efforts were made to see each other again but nothing came of it. Back home in New Hampshire, listening to my mom talk about this, I hated what I was hearing. Not the details, per se, but her tone. There wasn’t just pain in her voice, there were callouses. Jillian was already in college when we moved to New Hampshire. Suddenly 400 miles away from us, she spent her breaks from school living first with our Aunt Patti and later with her boyfriend and his family. At 20 years old, there was not a home she could go back to—not easily, at least. Sometimes, in the heat of the occasional argument, Jillian will say we left her behind. And my parents, this night more than usual, cannot grasp that. Arguing that kids go away for college all the time, that leaving home is a normal thing to do, a common choice. I wanted them to understand how New Hampshire was never really an option for her, even if they did offer it. To understand why Jillian, all these years later, might still feel so alone. It was useless and I knew that. But still, I couldn’t help saying, “Considering I threatened to kill myself before we moved and never got brought to a therapist, perhaps the two of you could’ve been paying closer attention.” My dad went a different kind of speechless while my mother looked at me, cold as dawn, and said, “Well, the hospital doesn’t send you home with a manual when you have a baby.” The room went silent and it stayed that way. But then, when she was ready, my mom asked how things have been with Austin. Sitting down beside me on the couch, our bodies in perfect contact with each other, she rubbed my leg and joined me in my tears. If we were any closer, I’d be sitting in my mother’s lap. And tanning in the backyard that next day, but coming back inside sooner than he must have expected, I found my dad watching a live performance of Bruce Springsteen on his phone. And with the plastic water bottle in his hand, he hid his face from me. I asked why he was upset and, in time, my father said, “It’s just…music…it’s so powerful.” With all his heart, and with all of mine, we know it is.
On my last day in New Hampshire, for the first time all summer, I went in the water. Technically closed for the season, it was me and a dozen other diehards on Gilford Beach, trying to enjoy what was left of summer as all around us—solemn as a loon’s call—we listened to the heaving sounds of destruction. Downwind from the demolition, breathing in God knows what, I watched an excavator truck tear apart the old shack that housed the bathrooms and concession stand. With its red cedar shake and ancient porcelain toilets, all splinters and chipped paint, it fit right in. I thought about its replacement and how ugly it’s going to be. Lake Winnipesaukee was as warm as it ever gets but still—it was cold to me. Never one to dive in, I walked steadily further out until I had no other choice but sink under the water. It really is a holy thing. Waist deep, with my feet touching the bottom, I cupped my hands and brought a palm full of water up to my heart. Once…twice…and then, the last time, I heard the truck start gnawing at the metal roof of the shack. Up until then, the roof had been cast to the side, something to deal with later, for good reason. All that crunching and scraping of metal on metal, it was painful. Violent, even. A new sound that made so much noise.
As one test at a time was added to my patient portal, I looked at the results of my blood work and wondered how soon I’ll drop dead. My first day back in New York, I had my physical. Showing up to my 8:30 appointment after a terrible night’s sleep, waking up from a bad dream at three only for racing thoughts to keep me up past five, the timing was less than ideal for an evaluation of body and mind. There’s this quote from Joni Mitchell, talking about what it was like recording her album Blue, where she says, “At that period in my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.” That much is clear. I lost five pounds in a month without trying, I’m still struggling to breathe, my bad cholesterol is through the roof, and—with an optimal count of zero—my nucleated red blood cells are “usually a sign of a life threatening condition.” But before I knew any of this, while my blood was still hot in its vials and I headed straight from the doctors to work, I couldn’t help it. Right there on the sidewalk, I sobbed. How badly I wanted a stranger on Broome Street to reach out and touch my arm, to ask if I was okay, to care for me. And how badly I wanted to disappear. Waiting for the light to change, I felt completely alone in the world. A couple days later, my doctor called me and said, “We’ll take these labs seriously, of course, but honestly? Looking at your results? I’m confident it’s mostly just a stress response.”
At Roberta’s, I ate pizza with Roberta. She and her husband were in town from Chicago, visiting Cara, younger sister to my friend Keely, the whole reason I’m so close with this family. At Keely’s suggestion, before my move to New York, I lived in Chicago for a summer with her Swedish grandmother. “My halcyon days on the porch,” I said, faux-wistfully, hugging everybody hello amidst the immediate allusions to my time spent, indeed, on the enclosed back porch of Mormor’s Lincoln Square walk-up. With a five month old baby at home, Keely couldn’t join her parents on the trip. Putting her phone’s speaker right against my ear so I could listen to these special little coos the baby makes anytime she hears someone sing, I asked Roberta what it’s like seeing her daughter be a mother. Limitlessly generous in every way, quick to laugh and quicker to solace, Roberta was crowned the beer chugging champion at a college party and, as of a couple years ago, became a certified doula. I got a call from her one night this summer, out of nowhere, just to ask how I was doing. “Alright, you two, throw ‘em back,” said Eric from down the table, only kind of kidding. Everyone else was long finished with their food and drink while me and Roberta still had full glasses of wine. Letting the pain be painful, and the hope hopeful, offering me so much with every heavy exhale, she asked if I felt any regret about the decision and I told her—in many, many words—no. At some point, Roberta said, “So, Eric and I dated when we were young but…you do know he wasn’t my first husband, right?” It took time and a lot of effort to become the kind of person who could show up for the relationship she has now. To have the feelings without the feelings having her, as the saying goes. It’s meditation that brought her there. What it’ll be for me, I don’t know, but there has to be something. There has to be. Because if Eric had been her first husband, if they kept dating and got married before she ever got to start all this hard work, when she thinks about the possibility of that—Roberta said it breaks her heart.
“You can keep it,” said Austin, feet off the ground on the bed he helped me assemble, a favor he offered without my asking, saying it’d be too difficult to manage alone. This was our second time seeing each other since my return to New York. On my first day back, he asked if I’d like to go see The Substance with him. Washing my hands in the movie theater bathroom, unsure if Austin was here yet, I looked in the mirror and there he was, stopping short and reflected back at me. We hugged and, with all the instinct of an inhale, I went to kiss him. But he turned his cheek. Seeing the look on my face, Austin laughed, burdened with contrition, and said, “Sorry.” Before the movie began, he asked me if I took his blue polka dot shirt. I hadn’t brought it up, I wouldn’t dare, too comforted in not knowing—but he saw Kyla’s pictures. It was just a mistake. I wanted so badly to touch him but I kept my hands to myself and, as soon as we got down to the platform, his train was already pulling into the station. Our commutes home are different now. “My ex-boyfriend just got here to help me with my bed frame,” I said to Rachel and Hannah, my new roommates, as they poured each other wine in the kitchen. “If either of you needed a reason to feel better about yourselves.” Opening the door to him, Austin greeted me with a kiss on the lips. He apologized but, this time, it was his inhale. We’ve put together a lot of stuff, Austin and I. Bookshelves, desks, bar carts and television mounts. He has the brains while I’ve got the brawn and so we made it. It really would’ve been such a pain setting up this bed on my own but, together, it took no time. We laid down. And gently, with such care in his voice, warm as can be, Austin asked, “How have you been?” We weren’t supposed to ask each other that kind of question anymore, that was the new rule. That if we had any hope of being friends, there could be no discussion of our feelings, not yet, not while mine are still so raw. And, I have to believe, his too. But here it was, exactly what I wanted, a chance for a conversation about loss with the person I’m losing. And it was perfect. He told me to keep his blue polka dot shirt, that it was mine if I wanted it, but his offer was the greater gift so I gave it back. That night, I felt the first sticky dabs of salve smearing all my heartburns.
Or so I thought. We saw each other again just a couple days later, having already purchased tickets to see Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow in a Broadway play. Meeting up with him beforehand for dinner, on the corner of 51st and 9th, Austin turned his cheek. He had plenty to say, much more than I did, telling me about the books he’s read, his 90-year-old Nana’s second baptism, and how he and Kiera have rearranged the furniture in their apartment. But the care in his voice from Saturday night, by Tuesday, had cooled back down to careful. Talking to me from such a distance, cordial and clipped, I watched his eyes shoot toward the door every time a new person walked in the restaurant. He seemed totally invulnerable. If I didn’t know any better, that’s what I’d think. His youngest sister also got baptized that weekend and when I asked if the decision had remained the same, to avoid telling her about the breakup in hopes that, one day, she’ll stop asking where I am, Austin looked at me and said, “Did you tell Vincent about it?” If she can be spared confusion, if the sadness of goodbye and the pang of false promises can be avoided, that’s what needs to happen and I respect that. His family knows best. But when Austin insisted he was only kidding, that obviously there’s no comparing the third grader in his life with the toddler in mine, that it was only a joke, I wondered how long it will take before I can find any of this funny. Partially obstructed but front row nevertheless, Austin and I took our seats, trembling in anticipation of sitting so near the raging velocity of LuPone. She reminds me so much of my mother. And of course, Austin knows that. After almost every line that came out of her mouth, he’d look at me. Sharing in the laugh, gauging my response, paying me his attention. Only occasionally did I look back at him. But I know that in every turn of his head, every last one, there were a thousand words. Earlier that night, arriving at the restaurant a couple minutes before he did, I waited for Austin out front, looking up and down the block until finally I saw him. And I smiled. Closer every second to this street corner we’d agreed upon, of all the clothes in his closet, of all the shirts he possibly could have worn that night, buttoned-up and baby blue, Austin was in polka dots.
It took me eighteen stops on the M train, from Fresh Pond to Bryant Park, to choose what I wanted to see. On my way to meet up with Sophie for an afternoon at the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection, I combed through its 476-page list of every single subject heading. “This gives an overview of the richness of the collection,” it reads. “However, the subject headings assigned to pictures are often different from what you would expect.” Every Wednesday, her day off, Sophie spends some time here. With a different folder for every subject heading, each of them bursting at the seams with hundreds of photographs, Sophie said we’re allowed to look through four at a time. And for the next several hours, other than the occasional nudge toward an image we knew the other would like, we hardly spoke. With gentle fingers and prying eyes, I looked through the photos in “payday” and “reflections” and “hair washing.” “Symbols (good luck)” and “writing (action)” and “Bible (Virgin Mary).” Pointedly clearing my throat, I set my latest folders down on the table, making sure that Sophie noticed my “love” and my “sorrow.” And her laughter was all the sweeter for its faint creak of sympathy. “Can’t have one,” Sophie said, “Without the other.” After saying our goodbyes, I decided to take a different way home. From 42nd Street all the way down to 14th, I walked along Park Avenue. It was cloudy, with a cool gloom in the air, and while I wasn’t sad, not explicitly, I did feel strange. Like a right shoe on the left foot. Starting it over the second it finished, I listened to the same song over and over, singing the lyrics right out loud. If somebody heard me, I didn’t care. And if no one was listening, I’d be all right. “...you plant the seed and I’ll watch it grow, I wonder when I’ll start to show, I wonder if I’ll ever know, where my place is, where my face is, I know it’s in here somewhere, I just wish I knew the color of my hair…” The seed of bitterness is in her mouth and she’s deciding whether or not to swallow. Past five o’clock by then, amidst the first wave of dinner reservations and commutes home, the streets were busy, crammed with people—and I looked them all in the eye. These strangers, these endless passersby. Headings of many subjects. I don’t think I missed a single one. And I wondered if everybody knew this already, if all these people already understood what I’d just learned. That there was a lot to see in “sorrow” but there was so much more in “love.”