I don't know how to write this one. I was in New York for a few days this August. I had spent a week in Denmark visiting my family. My grandmother has Alzheimer's disease and my grandfather died last winter so we had to put her into a nursing home. I spent a week in Denmark helping to clean out my grandparent's house to get it ready for sale. On the way back, I stopped in New York to visit my friend P, who I've known since high school and now lives somewhere south of midtown in a neighborhood that vaguely resembles a mall.
This was the first time I had been to New York since I was sixteen. I used to think I would move to New York after high school when I still had ambitions of becoming a rockstar/teenage novelist. I decided to go to college in LA instead, and wound up working in the movies for a few years before going to Peace Corps, and suddenly it had been ten years since the last time I ever seriously thought about moving to New York.
I spent the four days walking around the city randomly. P had to work during the day so I would find a subway station and take it in some direction and get off when I started to lose track of where I was. Then I would walk back to P's apartment. When I was in Peace Corps I began to realize one of my favorite things in life is to wake up in a foreign place and have no real understanding of where I am. Every experience can be improvised, remaining perpetually new and challenging.
I don't know where the compulsion to be in long-term relationships comes from. I can't remember a time in my life when I didn't picture myself in one at the butt-end of an idealized fantasy of how my life would unspool. It was assumed, like a birthright or some compulsive act of infantile mimicry, aping the shape of my parents' lives. I've fallen in love five times in my life. When I was younger I wondered what the point of sticking with a person long-term could possibly be since things all seemed to end in the same way: age, defeat, and regression.
I was always completely serious about the possibility of a shared life with each of the women I was variously in love with. Still, there was a murmur of compromise running underneath each one. I would have taken a blind leap of faith because the love was real and I was young and jumping was instinctual. What else can you do when you're 24 and in love? There's something impossibly erotic and thrilling about picking up the weight of your entire life and flinging it over the edge of a metaphysical promise to some young tender thing with smooth skin and a smile in slow motion. Looking back, part of what made the prospect so exciting then was the subconscious understanding that none of it was right.
I could sense the reasons why things would never work out in the long-term with each woman, but the adrenaline and the hubris of the moment, following in the wake of my parents and their parents, was irresistible. Falling in love was like picking a major in college. It was an untethered experimentation based on some intense feelings without any knowledge of how durable and seaworthy they would remain after a few semesters of tough pre-requisites.
I've never been in love in the way I was the last time. She's the love of my life. It's scary writing that in black and white, assigning specific words to something so totally ineffable. When I was younger I remember hearing a aphorism about falling in love on a sit-com rerun. There are three loves in a person's life: your first love, your true love, and the one you wind up with. I've had to let go of lots of love, but it always made sense underneath it all. It was never right. I've never had to let go of something that was right, that was like a discovery of a part of myself I didn't know was there. And then it was there. For a little while.
So I was lost in Brooklyn somewhere. I had taken a series of wrong turns from the subway station and wound up in Bed Stuy and then Fort Greene. After a while I made it to Williamsburg, though it was some wide-laned industrial area that didn't seem like the orgiastic hipster hive I'd thought it would be. My phone rang when I was at the corner of 14th and Wythe. I sat down and leaned against the red brick workshop building, staring at a man in cut-off shorts and a fedora trying to fix an old minivan across the street. It was August, humid and hot. I had a backpack and had been sweating. I could feel the plastic heat of the phone against my cheek.
Twenty minutes later, I hung up the phone. Across the street I saw a rusty old door had the word "faile" painted on it in a soft pastel shade of purple with a small heart dotting the "i." Two men biked by, with giant messenger bags on their backs. The man across the street worked on his minivan. I was crying.
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Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much
Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop
Love Machine: Your Mom Will Do
Date Machine: Scary Movies or I Peed My Pants
Date Machine: Rate My Ethics
Love Machine: Let's Just Be Friends
Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met
Sex Machine: Why Women Are Great In Bed
Sex Machine: Why Women Suck in Bed
Date Night: All By Myself on a Saturday Night
Sex Machine: Spank My Ass
Love Machine: Infidelity or How Long Can You Go Without Cheating?
Date Night: The 45-Minute Walkout
Date Night Redux: H's Version of Our Night Out
Celebrity Confession: Who is Lauren Cohan and Why is She Hitting on Me?
Sex Machine: My First Muff Dive
Crying in Public: Remember the Cheerleaders
Sex Machine: Masturbating Upside Down
Date Night: Two Women in One Night
Hooksexup Confessions: Rate My Penis Size
Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train
Love machine: How I Date On The Internet
Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs
Crying in Public: My Cubicle