"The Finish Line."

Epilogue / January 2025

Collage by the author

Knock on wood, I thought to myself on the first day of this new year, noticing a moment too late that I was cheersing my beer with David’s canned water. Living in Los Angeles, but originally from New Jersey, David was here for the holidays. And getting together around New Year’s has become something of a tradition for us—if doing this once before, two years ago, can qualify as such. I could’ve taken the bus from my apartment but instead I walked the four miles from Ridgewood to Bed-Stuy, beating David to The Coyote Club by a couple minutes, where I seemed to be the very first customer of the day. It smelled like disinfectant and the fanning traces of mop water on the floor looked like little bedsheet ghosts. As I swallowed my superstitions with a happy hour pilsner, David told me, “I was actually here last night too, this is where we were for midnight.” It’s a small town, Brooklyn. Asking me how I spent my New Year’s Eve, I told him I saw Babygirl in theaters but was already back home when the clock struck twelve. “So, yeah, I watched an erotic thriller—solo!” I laughed but, more importantly, so did he. I was so afraid of this New Year’s. A holiday so inherently fraught with melancholy, I was worried what I’d do if plans didn’t come together—and only slightly less worried if they did. That if I accepted a last minute invitation to a house party, and joined in on that countdown from “...10!...,” when the aching strains of that old sentimental song of mine began to play—what then? Instead, in my bedroom at 11:59, I kneeled down at the closest thing I have to an altar. At my window, with its ledge all but concealed by hostas leaves, and my Mary statuette tucked in the corner—gifts, both of them, from people I love—I could hardly believe what I was saying, even though every word was true. “Thank you for this year,” I prayed. When the fireworks began, I knew it was over.

Knowing we’d see each other, David told me he purposely didn’t read about the goings-on of my December. “I’m going to try and tell this as quickly as I can,” I said, before the horse’s mouth began its half-hour monologue. Telling him about the Hinge revelation and being the subject of gossip, about my late night phone call to Austin and the immense comfort it brought me, and how that comfort was made all the more devastating by his surprise Christmas present on the heels of that failed attempt to let myself into the old apartment. But a day removed from sharing all this with the public, David could also be privy to the reaction. All year long, I worried about this. That in writing about my life, and the people in my life, in putting quotations around their words despite my imperfect memory, I was risking danger, and embarrassment. The mere thought of a friend saying, Oh, Brian, I wish you hadn’t written that, can you take it out? was—believe me or not—mortifying. But other than my mother taking issue with a comparison to Patti LuPone, I somehow managed to avoid this. Nobody else coming forward to say I’d compromised their trust, or misinterpreted their meaning, or cast them in a false light. And I’m sure I did, in fact I’m certain of it, but evidently the people I hurt just kept it to themselves. I wouldn’t know a thing about that. But not a moment too soon, the old year had its last laugh. I hurt feelings. I was called staggeringly cruel by one subject of my writing and I wasn’t hearing anything at all from another. Criticism I could deal with, but not silence. Good intentions are a good thing but interpretation wins the day. And after listening to all this, David just doubled down on his generosity and asked for my hopes for the year ahead. Insisting he go first, I told him, “I’ve already said too much.”

David was gainfully employed for 10 of the last 12 months which, for a writer in Hollywood, is a big deal. He also spent half the year in a long-distance relationship with his longtime boyfriend. Take a guess which accomplishment I cared about more. Especially given the fact that, almost two years ago, he and his boyfriend broke up. David wrote about it when it first happened, that’s how I found out, and after going through our old texts, I found the message I sent him. “I’m thinking of you during what’s gotta be a very upsetting time. Having never been through a breakup myself, I so recognize the (heartbroken) novelty of finally getting a window into that, like, entire chapter of the human condition. Not that it makes things easier.” Most everyone in my life beat me to a broken heart. My friends, my family, Austin—they all knew this pain long before I got around to it. And I’ve worried about this, worried if I was as good to them as they needed me to be. If I was as good as they deserved. There was a night in Allston, shortly after we all moved into that apartment, when Juliette called me to ask if I was home. I remember her standing in my bedroom doorway, crying, just absolutely heartsick. But I do not remember hugging her. I was 22 years old but that is no excuse. I just didn’t know. And maybe David felt the same way. I’d call him a fellow “late bloomer” but perhaps my words have already caused enough damage lately. It’s just that we’ve gone about love at a remarkably comparable pace. This was his first relationship, too. Wanting demonstrativeness, and a desire to live together one day, and an ease of presence that proved too tall an order for the boyfriend, they broke up—for seven weeks. But when the boyfriend reached out in hopes of a reunion, David said he felt unsure, uneasy even. Baffled, I asked, “You don’t enjoy having the upper hand?” They’ve been back together ever since and when I asked if the work’s been done to change the old habits, and if David has found what he needed all along—he said yes. Understanding his every word, I said, “That could put tears in my eyes.”

Waiting for the M train at Delancey-Essex on a Friday night, I wrote a message to Austin. He was back in New York. Per my online sleuthing, he saw Queer that afternoon at the very same theater where, just a couple hours later, I had a ticket for Nosferatu. A film Austin had already seen, per some earlier online sleuthing of mine. So while that spared me the magical thinking of making my way to C6 in hopes of finding him already seated in C5, still I wondered where he was, or really—where his head was at. For two people who aren’t talking, we’d communicated a lot to each other over the last month. Of course, there were those heavensent two hours on the phone where, at last, we sounded like ourselves again. But then there was also the Christmas gift for me, the surprise present that Austin tucked away with the mail that had me sobbing before I even opened it. It was a t-shirt of the album art for The Roches but the wrapping itself proved an even greater gift. Written by hand on one corner of the brown paper, Austin quoted some lyrics from “Hammond Song” and the words he chose—they thrilled me, and they devastated me. I heard from him again on Christmas, when he told me that everyday he’s been home, he has wished that I was there too. Saying that back in 2019, when we spent the holiday apart from each other with our own families, he remembered telling me, “This sucks. We are never doing this again.” And finally, not five minutes into 2025, he wished me a happy new year—albeit with a heavy heart. One, two, three: a magic number. “Three,” as he once said, “Is better than two.” And so, I felt like it was my turn. That if I was looking through a window of opportunity right now, I wouldn’t dare let it close before sticking my neck out to say, “I’m thinking of you.”

I had never felt so human. That’s something I heard first from Camila. Working at the museum just as long as I have, she’s in a full-time position now. And on a morning back in September when I showed up in tears before a long day of tours had even begun, I asked Camila if someone could be on deck to take over for me. That I wasn’t sure I’d have what it takes to stand in front of 12 strangers and answer their questions, or give them their money’s worth, or smile. Sitting across from her down in the office, I began to cry. But in the months to come, I’d return many times to something Camila told me that morning, when she was recalling her own devastation in the wake of a breakup. “I had never felt so human.” Everything was still so fresh at that point, and I was only just beginning to get acquainted with my own breadth, and depth, of feeling. Feelings I thought I knew in and out. The much-examined life I’d made worth living. And yet. The sorrow I’d feel, the anger, the resentment and the bitterness, the longing and the fantasizing, it has been unlike anything I’ve ever known. And I am more human because of it. The love in my life hasn’t diminished, it has multiplied. I feel a hundred times closer to a hundred more people. New friends and old. Passersby on the street and couples on the train. Season two of Sex and the City and “Rain” by Madonna, I understand them now. When I said “thank you” in my New Year’s Eve prayer, this was why. But it seems that I spoke too soon.

Getting back to me a couple hours later, Austin was fair in his response, and as gentle as can be, or as close as anyone can get to the impossible gentleness I so badly desire. But it wasn’t at all what I wanted to hear. Reminding me that we made this decision together and that he doesn’t think either of us have yet experienced what we really wanted. For me, he said, that was experiencing other people. To try and answer the question, “Do I want my first relationship to be my only relationship?” But for him, he’s realized, it’s been about experiencing life on his own again. “I miss you too,” he said. “But I have enjoyed the freedom and productivity I’ve gained from solitude.” He was so sorry that I’m hurting, promising he knows exactly how I feel, and I don’t doubt that. But I felt, more than ever, deeper than ever, so alone in my sorrow, so lopsided in this anguish. Like the grief was only mine to bear, and that more was on the way. “A window isn’t closing because there is no window,” he said. “If we are supposed to get together, whether it be in six months or six years, we will be together.” If. If if if if if. I’d never hated a word so much, not in all my life. I asked if I could call and when he said that might not be a good idea and I called anyway, I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear sincere irritation in his voice when he answered, “Hello?” He remained fair, albeit less gently, and when I begged for an explanation of how his sentiment on Christmas could look and sound so different by the third of January, Austin reminded me of something I myself said at the beginning of the call—“You can feel multiple things at once.” In less than fifteen minutes, it was over. We said goodbye and I hung up. Staring at my bedroom ceiling, I screamed without making a sound. Stretching open my mouth to release a carbon ton of woe, silently. If my roommate was out in the hall, and happened to hear this, she might’ve mistaken me for steam from the radiator. This human body of mine, and its human heart, was suffering the worst pain it’s known so far. Excruciating and foreign, this was something new, something different. For the first time, I was hopeless.

I had to take a Xanax to fall asleep only to wake up the next morning a half hour before my alarm with an already racing heart. Force feeding myself breakfast, every spoonful of oatmeal taking what felt like minutes to chew, let alone swallow, I was beside myself and I needed someone to talk to. Calling me as soon as she saw my message, I could still hear the sleep in my mother’s voice but, in no time, she was crying right along with me. Not just shouldering my pain but understanding it. I don’t go to my mother when I want to feel better, I go to her because I know she’ll hurt just as keenly as I do. That’s really all I ever want, from anybody, but no one does it better than her. And yet it still took me completely by surprise when my mother said, with a lump in her throat, “You need to go to him. Tonight. Go see him! Go see him tonight and tell him how you feel!” It took my breath away. When she started that sentence, I was expecting her to say I needed to stop talking to him, that I needed to get him off my mind, that I needed to move on anyway I possibly could. Only for the words that actually came out her mouth to prove so ardent, and guileless, so real despite feeling like something you’d only ever hear in a movie. The final fist-shaking encouragement from a Carrie Fisher Type that spurs the leading man to run across town and declare his love to the leading lady. “It’s about old friends,” happily ever after, as easy as that. I had no intention of going to Austin’s apartment that night and knocking on his door. He had made himself clear on the phone and I knew there was no changing his mind. But that suddenly didn’t matter as much. Not when I had this person in my life, the person who gave me life, encouraging me to do everything I can to reclaim a lost love, to fight for it while I still can, reaching out for a person’s heart before it has the chance to fly away. Perhaps most other moms would have had something very different to say, something more enlightened, something healthier. But I wouldn’t want to hear it. Because nothing else, nothing else on the face of the earth, would have sounded quite so real as my mother.

“I have a million questions I’ve wanted to ask you for so long now,” I said to Sara, dodging puddles of dog piss as we walked in loops around a convention center in New Jersey. When Grace and Erica first asked if I wanted to join them to a “Super Pet Expo” in Edison, my answer was “no.” Sophie also turned down the invitation, but once she heard Sara was going, and that I was considering it, she didn’t want to miss out. And suddenly, neither did I. We all met up at Erica’s apartment, eating samosas she got for us from Diversity Plaza before Grace pulled up in her dad’s car to shuttle us off to the Garden State. All told, our time in the car was the best part. Sara, of course, was cueing up the music. She played Kitty Craft and the Lijadu Sisters while Erica introduced me to Anita Mui, the Chinese Madonna, and Sophie suggested a song called “El Invento” that sounded exactly like what this was—riding in a car with friends on a Sunday afternoon under the pale, milky glare of January sunshine. It was more or less what I envisioned, this expo. Specifically what I was envisioning when I first said “no.” Booth after booth of Shark Tank aspirants trying to sell their wares, a $10 photo opp with “The World’s Smallest Dog (Unofficial),” a seminar on how to make your dog “pawsitively” famous, and racks on racks of graphic tees that all basically read, Does it look like me and my Cane Corso give a shit? But just when it started feeling too depressing to bear, I would share a knowing smirk with Sophie, or watch Erica freak out at the sight of a kinkajou propped on the shoulder of a bleach blond meathead, and it was all right. We’d already been there for a while when Sara and I found ourselves a little removed from the group. I asked her how the holidays went and, after she asked me the same question, I exhaled heavily. And a smile, this cheeky, consoling smile, immediately crossed her face. Sara knows. This pain, this longing, my craziness, I know Sara knows everything about it. They’ve been back together for a while now but, for a year, she and her boyfriend were broken up. I’ve always known this was something that happened in their relationship but not with any specific detail. And maybe it’s precisely because of this mystery that I’ve been able to project so much onto them. Happiness for her, and hope for myself. More than once, I’ve sought out the posts they made for each other on their anniversary, looking through the select images that best captured their fondness for each other, the images that most clearly showed the love. Sara knows I’ve done this, I’ve told her before—not that it makes it any less pathetic. But for months now, I’ve been thinking about everything else I want to tell Sara, or really everything else I wanted to ask. And it was there, finally, soundtracked by a barking chorus, that Sara said, “Dude, talk to me.”

Walking shoulder to shoulder around the convention center, I told Sara about all the latest happenings, about the hopes I’d begun to harbor before the rug got pulled out from under me. There were puppies and kittens all around us, pythons and geckos, lip-linered broads talking to Hasidic fathers and children, but we might as well have been the only two people there. But once she started telling me about that year in her life, that year of the breakup, we were face to face and standing still. “Whatever you’ve said, whatever you've done, whatever you’ve wanted to do, the craziest thing you can possibly imagine,” she said, “Don’t worry because—I did it!” During their year apart, they saw each other three total times. I think Austin and I saw each other three times in one week back in September. Though of course that’s changed. I haven’t seen him now for three months, and I don’t know when I might ever see him again. Sara would open Spotify and look at all the songs her then-ex-boyfriend listened to lately, searching for a coded message, parsing out some indisputable truth. Trying, desperately, to read his mind. If Sara is anything like me, and I think she is, surely this satisfied something for her, even if it hurt, especially when it hurt, knowing all the while what she really wanted. But then, after that year apart, “or really a little less than that, 11 months,” Sara heard from him. They met up that same night and they talked for eight hours straight. They live together now and the background on her phone is a picture of him as a little kid. Grabbing me at the shoulders, and smiling that same cheeky smile, Sara said, “I’m rooting for you.” Maybe this was the last thing I needed, this second encouragement in as many days to keep holding out hope. But to know there are people in my life who are making my same wish—it is a saving grace. I just pray I’m not alone here. I pray that it’s not just my people in my life who are hoping for this.

“What?” said Sara after Sophie found us in the crowd and asked if we saw the jumping dog. A Border Collie just spent the last half hour navigating an agility course, shimmying into tunnels and leaping over hurdles and jumping through hoops—or so I’d imagine. Because while we were standing right on the fringes of a gathered crowd all that time, close enough to the action that Sara, consciously or not, would clap right along every time they burst into applause, we hadn’t seen a thing. Never once turning our heads to face the spectacle. That’s how closely she was paying her attention to me. It’s just that Sara came to this pet expo with the specific intent to see a dog jump through hoops. That was why she came here. If there was a reason I didn’t have this conversation with Sara any sooner, it’s because she finds herself in this situation a lot. A lot of people share their problems with her. And I can think of about a million reasons why. She’s this wonderful listener, so soulful and so spirited, so cool and artful and beautiful without any compromise of welcome. Who wouldn’t want to talk to her? Sara doesn’t resent this inclination that people have with her, not really, but she’s talked about it enough for me to know it takes a toll. And as Sophie, dumbfounded but laughing, showed us the videos on her phone of the jumping wonder dog, I suddenly wanted to crawl on hands and knees all the way back to New York. “I am so sorry,” I said, racked with guilt for holding Sara as my captive audience. But she didn’t want to hear it, insisting she was happy she could be there for me. Of course, I was happy about it too. That in recognizing my misery, and remembering it, she gave me the hope I so hungrily desired. But I’m not sure I gave her any other choice.

No less steady than a ticking clock, or less ominous, I woke up before my alarm to the repeated clink of metal pipe on metal pipe. With a parking lot that directly faces our apartment’s backyard, there’s a plumbing supply store nearby that occasionally starts the work day around six in the morning by throwing a bunch of metal pipes into these wooden crates. If it lasts two minutes, it lasts a lifetime, and more often than not—that’s just how it feels. Usually, I fall back asleep as soon as they’re done but not this morning. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was Sara’s grip on my shoulders, maybe it was my mother’s quavering command over the phone, or maybe it was just Austin’s recent return to social media after two months offline that, selfishly, made so many things so much easier for me. All I know is my feet hadn’t yet touched the floor when I reached out to Austin, expressing my confusion, yet again, about his apparent change of heart. Asking if there was something I did, something I said, or something I wrote that made him go from feeling one thing to suddenly quite another. When I sent this message, this latest variation on the same old theme—begging to be wanted as badly as I want, to be missed as sorely as I miss—it was with a familiar anguish. This keening of a still-broken hearted boy, completely out of control. It was his response, however, that felt different. When Austin got back to me later that morning, I think I felt the final shard, the strongest, most mulish one of them all, chip right off my heart. Because while he assured me I hadn’t done anything to change his mind, Austin remained resolute in the uncertainty of it all. It wasn’t “if” this time, it was “maybe,” that maybe one day we will end up together but that I still have so much to learn about myself with a lot of hard work ahead—as I myself wrote, Austin reminded me, somewhere in that six page letter I left on his doorstep. “I have done everything I can to guard your feelings and support you during this time,” said Austin, “But I need to be honest and blunt.” As prescriptive as a physician, but with the same aim to heal, he told me what I needed to do if I intend on feeling better. He has done so much to take care of me, long after he was obliged, and as honest and blunt as his suggestions may have been, I knew that it was, as always, with my best interest at heart. That very same morning, perhaps after realizing the potential dangers of her go-get-him!, my mom messaged me and said, “It seems like you’re thinking Austin doesn’t care as much as you do. But actually, he’s making the biggest sacrifice by letting you see what else is out there. He’s doing this for you, you realize that, right? You sometimes say he doesn’t care as much as you do but it’s the opposite. He loves you.” My choice of response wound up being the very same. What I said to my mom, I also said to Austin. “I know.”

And yet I was wrecked. All the tears I surprisingly didn’t shed that morning were waiting for me during my walk to the museum from Delancey-Essex. I would pull it together in time, steeling myself for the day of tours still ahead of me, but I wasn’t finished. On the train that evening, and during my walk from the M, and back home again in my apartment, I cried. Sitting on the bamboo chair in my bedroom, I could almost see it. Everything I was crying for, it appeared to me suddenly as this black metal box lodged inside my chest, smashing its pointed corners against my ribs on every sob. Fitting there inside of me, just barely, and only because everything else seemed to be gone. And I cried at work, too. At first on my own but then, twice more, with others. Jarod had, more or less, stopped talking to me. I had given him good reason to hope, only to take it all away in writing. I’m sure he was mad but that’s not what prompted his silence. It was instead the far more bitter pill of sadness, of disappointment, and a hopelessness all his own. He was so upset and I was the cause of it. To hold a person’s heart in your hands—it is an immense responsibility. “But that’s not really the right word, responsibility, that’s not what I mean,” I said to Jarod, sitting across from him in the break room that day for our first proper conversation about all this. “I just mean that I don’t want to be the reason for any more pain. I want to protect you. From myself.” His mouth was quivering and the suggestion of tears was in his eyes. Distraught, Jarod said, “That is the saddest possible thing you could’ve said.” But Jarod loves the truth, that’s what he always says. For him, there is no greater virtue. Choosing to believe that, I told him what’s keeping me from happiness. Sharing with him the fear, my ultimate fear, that makes the abject misery of these last four months somehow preferable to a brighter future. For the first time, I cried in front of Jarod. I might as well have been totally naked, I was so exposed. And while most people would have recoiled at such a sight, at such stark vulnerability, he didn’t turn away. If anything, Jarod seemed to be looking at me closer than ever. “But really,” I said, finally, “These are all things I should be telling a therapist.”

It’s like he knows, sometimes. Before I’ve even had the chance to wish him a good morning, or ask what albums soundtracked his Sunday afternoon, before he’s even heard my voice, Daryl will turn to me and say, “You okay, brother?” Talking to him, listening to him, being heard by him, it is nothing short of a miracle. I hope I know him forever. Just like me, Daryl works every Monday and rounding the corner into the break room kitchen that morning, right beside the window, sitting in his chair and reading his book, as always, I found him. Taking a seat right across from him, I told Daryl what was going on. Coworkers came and went through the kitchen to fill up their water bottles or top off their coffee and, with one hand, I was shielding my face, concealing my tears from them as best I could. But with the other, and with finer clarity than the fallible human eye could ever grant, I was being seen. Reaching out for me across the table to wrap his fingers around my own, and not letting go until I seemed ready, Daryl held my hand. There is safety in the dark, Daryl said. In the uncertainty, in the unknowing, in all my fumbling and free falling, despite how it feels, there is still safety there. Who I was a year ago, six months ago, six weeks ago is not who I am anymore. I am becoming a different person and that is painful, and it will remain painful, in ways I can’t yet comprehend or imagine. “You don’t know that,” Daryl said, when I suggested I was as low as could be. “You don’t. But your hopelessness? That hopelessness you feel, Brian, you know what I think that means? You’re close to the finish line.” I still can’t imagine it, and a greater part of me doesn’t even want to. How it will feel on that first fateful morning when I wake up with a restful heart. The first Saturday night I can spend contentedly at home, let alone a Saturday night joyfully among the living. The meals I’ll have the stomach for. The pictures I’ll hang on my wall. When I can watch Casablanca again, or The Wizard of Oz. When the sound of his name becomes as sweet as an old favorite song playing overhead in the supermarket and, up and down the aisles, I can sing right along. When, at last, I reach the end of this race and I cross that finish line and throw myself, spent, right onto the ground. Until then, I can’t know. Until then, I am still running. But once I get there, in the time it takes me to catch my breath, I will try and find the words.