I'm moving to New York next week. I quit my job at the end of February. I've been saving money since last Fall. I've got a couch to sleep on when I land, a laptop to chase jobs with, and not much else. I'm doing it for a woman.
I've never thought about moving for someone else before. I've been in love four other times. During my most desperate throes the idea of giving up vocation and place for any of those women was an abstraction at best. I fantasized about diving in front of stray gunfire in slow motion to protect them; I pictured myself warding off packs of armed muggers in dark alleyways absorbing macho bruises to keep them from danger. But I never contemplated risking anything real.
I met N a year ago. A mutual friend had an Easter brunch at his apartment. He and N were matched against each other in a pancake-off. He was making chocolate buckwheat pancakes and she was making a banana walnut recipe.
I had been in San Francisco a little over three months. My new job was transitioning from a surreal delight into a time-consuming challenge. By Sunday morning I was feeling tired and selfish. I remember thinking I looked like shit. I had just conditioned my hair and it was puffy and frizzy.
I was wearing a pair of beige corduroy pants and a white knit polo shirt with thin horizontal stripes that was too small for me. It was short and too tight in the arms but the midsection shot out in an angular waddle that I didn't like. The pants were a little too short and I was wearing black ankle socks that were uncomfortably apparent when I sat down.
When I arrived, my friend led me through his shotgun apartment to the kitchen where everybody else was waiting. That was where I saw N for the first time. Her back was to me. She was wearing a pink thrift store sundress and a white apron. I saw the pale skin of her calves, blotchy in the cold March air. I saw her black and wavy hair coming down over her shoulders. The air rippled. I knew who she was before she turned around, before I saw her face.
Two months later she moved to New York. I fell apart.
I remember the day she left. I invented some reason to take the morning off from work so I could stay with her right up until the moment she had to leave. We spent the night at my apartment, woke up to a bright and sunny day and walked back to her old place. I remember walking that path many times over those two months. I was always getting off work late, but I would walk those dirty sidewalks as fast as I could to meet her almost every night of the week.
We were quiet that morning. I smoked one of her cigarettes on the way. We held hands. I teased her, wanting to pretend that this was another normal day. Half an hour later we got to her apartment. It was getting close to noon. We stopped at the threshold to her front door. I didn't know what to say. I had known that she was leaving from the beginning. We weren't going to be able to stay together.
I knew that moment was coming, but I had ignored it. We faced each other and held both hands. I kissed her and held on for a few seconds. "It's going to be hard to let you go," I told her.
She was quiet. If she said anything, I don't remember it.
We kissed one last time and I started walking back down the sidewalk. I turned around and watched her. She looked at me and then started putting the key in the lock of the front gate. I turned around again at the corner of the block, but she had gone inside already. The threshold in front of her building was empty.
When I started writing for Hooksexup she asked me never to write about her. "If I wind up on there, you're a dead man," she told me.
She's been in every post I've written. Sometimes it's been literal, other times she's been in the blank spaces between words, the invisible center around which all these little black letters orbit.
I know it's stupid to think about someone in those terms. People aren't centers of gravity. She's just a woman. At the end of all these strung out words, like loose strands of thread, there's just a woman waiting. She has cuticles and calluses and plaque and eye boogers and dirty fingernails. She watches CSI and owns a Jack Johnson record, She's just another person, in a world of other people.
And here I am, with my bags packed and a one-way ticket to New York City. I have no idea what will happen when I get there. It's tempting to think of relationships as an answer to something. It's so easy to imagine that I'm reaching a finish line. After thirty-one years of living I'm finally ready to confront the metaphysical truth with my metaphysical doppleganger. This is what everyone wants, isn't it? The one. To find that person you're willing to put it all on the line for, the albino unicorn galloping into the sea.
No matter what happens, this is just another beginning. Life doesn't get easier and simpler. It expands, becomes more complicated. I'm scared. I've got a lot of good rhetorical reasons for moving. There are plenty of new and interesting prospects for my career in New York, I've wanted to move there since I was a teenager. I have a lot of lovely friends in the city and while I'll be broke and couch surfing there will be a bounty of new opportunities to chase after.
But that's not why I'm going. I'm moving because I'm in love. I'm moving for N. Whatever happens between us, I don't want to have felt what I feel for her and not stood up for it.
I don't know what the weight of my life is worth. I don't know why I exist or what benefit can come out of it. But I do know who I love. I knew before I saw her face, and I know it now. She has brown wavy hair, calluses, dirty fingernails, a Jack Johnson record, and some questionable taste in television programming.
A few days ago I wrote about getting text messages from her being inevitable while she was in San Francisco, like watching a wave building out on the ocean before slowly coming to shore. I had nothing to lose then. I was the stationary one, sitting passively on the shore, feeling the wet rush from each swell crashing against the sand.
Now I'm the wave out at sea. I feel myself rushing and swelling towards her, a stationary figure waiting on the shore, watching me come apart in a foamy haze as gravity pulls me closer.
For a few wet seconds it's like I'm levitating.
Previous Posts:
Sex Machine: Checking my Oil, or the HIV Test
Date Machine: How To Pick Up a Bartender
Date Machine: Are You My Girlfriend Now?
PDA Machine: Making Out in a Bar
Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?
Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof
Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman
Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On
Sex Machine: Monogamy is for Losers
Sex Machine: I'm Not That Kind of Girl
Date Machine: Civil War and Sex on a Toliet
Date Machine: Living Like a Bachelor
Sex Machine: Chest Hair, or the Shaved Eunuch
Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men
Date Machine: Sex in the Office
Sex Machine: Lying Lovers; or the Padded Bra
Sex Machine: Premature Ejaculation