Every man you've ever been

an essay inspired by boygenius' "the record"

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1.

When do enough moments accumulate until the story you’ve been telling just becomes a love story? We sit in Fort Greene Park and my friend reads “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff out loud as the sun sets. We’re drinking possibly too warm natural wine out of solo cups. Something changes in me. The moment is too full, too precious, too much like the movie I imagined in my head. If I was stupid, I’d call it perfect and ruin everything. So instead, I rewrite it with different characters to deflate the moment so I’m not as sad when it’s over. I don’t want it to end. Not that I ever do. But I have somewhere else to be, according to the time on my phone’s screen. I tear myself away. Regret it instantly. This crush on everyone, everything will cool, but I can’t help how much I want it to keep burning.

There are no songs but love songs. Or at least it’s difficult to find a song that isn’t about love. No stories that aren’t at their heart driving towards a chance meeting that changes everything. The coincidences eventually pile up, until there’s no choice but for fate to take its course. I don’t know when I’ll stop writing love stories, not until I get one right. 

2.

It’s a bad idea. We decide, after more black coffee than we need, to get our ears pierced. Mitchell says he’s spent the last four years following whimsy, assuming at some point God would lead the way. It hasn’t happened yet. 

So we do. It’s this or a haircut that will be hard to live with for a few months. Piercings can close. Less permanent, right. Walking down Metropolitan in the mist, we call shop after shop until we find one that will pierce us for $20. I’m gleeful because despite my frivolous tendencies, I do love a good deal. This price is a red flag, according to the internet. A shortcut to infection. Nihilism, hedonism, I don’t have definitions. Nothing really matters and my flights of fancy have rarely led to dire consequences. I should make better choices. Each Sunday a hard look at habits, followed by a repentant run and a wholesome meal. But today is Saturday. I’m almost broke, so I’m all about it. 

3.

How do you apologize to someone for what you didn’t do, but knows it hurts them, the way I’m apologizing to you now, for having brought you in harm’s way, even though you tell me you’re not hurt, how you were only worried that I would be hurt, how we were both sorry, I should have told you sooner, I understand if you’re angry, we don’t have to talk about it, how I didn’t know who I was enough to stand up for myself, how can I make this up to you, knowing I can’t, I won’t, I will never make it better, no matter how hard I try, no matter how much you said you’re fine, how you forgot, but I can’t, I won’t, forget this even when I am asleep? I’m sorry, I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep you from being hurt. I’m sorry I couldn’t dive in and save you from the endless, ruthless cycle of my high and low tides.  

4.

We all keep talking about summer. Where we’ll go. If we should go together. Europe, Cape Cod. Just out of the city. I pretend to love the cold, but I’m beginning to realize how much of a summer bitch I am. The temperature reaches seventy. A new friend says, it’s actually the first day of the year. I love this. It feels good to be in this newness with someone else. 

Thirteen miles over the course of ten hours. We walk around, making turns when we feel like it. From Bed-Stuy to Prospect Park, for ice cream that is far too creamy, making us a little sick. Then to Park Slope where we stand in line at a brick and mortar Haagen Dazs, mostly for the bit. Then realize what a terrible idea more ice cream on mostly empty stomachs would be. A quick pivot to Fort Greene for dinner and the last of the daylight. Colder now. Dinner is ridiculous. Tiny skewers and plates of pita we keep ordering. A ginger soda that tastes like the tea Annie makes every day in our kitchen. A ritual out in the wild. Instead of going home, we get wine. Instead of one glass, we order food because we can’t admit how hungry we still are. Instead of being tired, we’re wide awake and talking. I want to remember everything about today, my impulse to write down everything said. I jot down notes in my journal. Fragments, flashes of beautiful things encountered today. What I wish I had kept to myself instead of writing and sharing, I tell you. I don’t know you well, but I feel like I could tell you anything.

5.

On the street in Williamsburg, I see a man who looks like my high school boyfriend. I remember during our last few months together, I obsessed over moving to New York for college. Without us saying it, we knew my leaving and his staying meant a definite end. We were young, and stupid in so may ways, but not about this. He floated the idea that one day we’d both end up in the city. The thing that tore us apart would bring us back together. He didn’t really want to live here. He just wanted me. I wondered then how it would feel to run into him. I imagined it easily enough. On the subway, looking up from the crossword or a book, and see him leaning against the train door. The thought was a consolation when I realized how unlikely it was that we’d stay together. Maybe one day in the future. What I meant was in another life we had a chance.  

A few months ago at Baby’s All Right, I took the prescription you’re on. I wanted to know what it felt like to be inside your brain. It made me feel like myself. I spoke clearer, I didn’t meet the love of my life, I didn’t make an idiot of myself, met no one new, so I went home alone in my leotard and felt fine. Even though that’s probably not true.

I’m method acting. Pretending I’m cool with running into you out of the blue, that I’m cool with being a consolation prize, that we don’t need to talk about it. I need you to know I’m just happy to see how good you’re doing.

6.

Stopping dead in the street, I ask Kate, do you ever have days when you just keep fucking yourself over? 

Why suffer when it’s completely avoidable, Madeline says over the phone a few weeks ago, when you can do something better. 

7.

Sometimes I want to break the heart of everyone who’s hurt you even though you keep breaking my heart. I haven’t learned much from being hurt. When I learn, it’s from hurting others. I guess it’s because hurting someone carries consequences. Being hurt is just surviving the wreck. There’s no valor. I know to be hurt by you isn’t a privilege, and it’s not teaching me anything. Whatever value is here, it’s the fact that we’re both still around. At one point I became convinced the only reason you continued to be here was because you wanted me to write about you. My inability to believe that you could want anything else from me. Then I understood. I want everything and nothing from you. Maybe this is worse than ambivalence, the pendulum swinging back and forth between desire and absolute apathy. Maybe it’s enough. If this isn’t what I want, then I don’t know what the fuck I want. 

8.

We shared big slices of brie and too-slimy carrots dipped in globs of hummus. The most impractical car picnic imaginable. Flying down dusty highways. My turquoise one-piece bathing suit that I basically lived in for that month. I spent that month swimming. Jumping into pools, natural sources of water, anything to cool off. Leah’s hands on the wheel, my fingers leaving traces of cheese and chickpea on my phone screen as I checked the map. Watermelon juice spilled over our bare thighs. We were driving in the desert to find a waterfall on the fourth of July in New Mexico. We were twenty-two and Didion was speaking to me from the pages of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Was anyone ever so young?

I’ve been thinking about Leah most mornings when I make oatmeal with too much peanut butter and bananas like she made me that summer. Our morning ritual. Eating outside because there were too many ants marching down the kitchen counter. Earlier this week, as if I conjured it, she texts me that she will be visiting the city this weekend. I feel spoiled because we see each other more than once over the weekend. Anyone who lives in New York knows how hard it is to coordinate with a visiting friend. You often fail to meet up—or at least I do. Filled with regret over so many things, the five years lapsed between our last summer, and the sudden absolution to realize we made it here. 

I didn’t know how good it was, Leah tells me as we sit at a bar in Cobble Hill, my life when I was living in the desert, twenty-two and knowing absolutely nothing. 

I knew this: I loved you, dearly, endlessly, across time and gorges we sped over, the ones I imagined plummeting into, the light getting in through the shattered glass of your old Toyota Corolla, the suicide pay phones dangling above us and sending their apologies for not even anticipating how they could have saved us from ourselves. 

9.

Will you be a boy with me, I sometimes feel like asking my boy [space] friends when they treat me like I’m one of them. Gender is fake, duh, yet I never feel so boyish than when I’m roughhousing with them. Ben calls me a scamp. I kind of like it. I joke to one of them that they’re giving me gender dysphoria. I’m half-serious. Neither good or bad, it’s just true. Another joke: Boy best friends forever has become a common text I send to women friends after hours spent pretending to not be myself with boys who forget that I’m a woman. 

Here’s a story Sam tells: there’s a boat that he owns with three other people all the way across the country. A sailboat. Easy to picture it on the bay—rocking back and forth in the current like looking between subway cars and watching the passengers sway. There’s something about the sails being difficult, one third of the owners dropping out. I guess the details don’t matter. What matters is the way he tells it. I would be a sailor if I could, Sam says. The sun sets and Sam only wants more of it. That’s how I know we’re friends. There’s never enough time to spend, when you say that you miss hanging out, I know you actually mean it. 

10.

Outside on the patio after the poetry reading someone vomits. I would make a joke that the cause of illness was from the poetry itself, but I can’t because every single poet who read inside was so good. I hate to be this effusive. I am. Christian read second. I was bowled over. Over the next few days, when I talk about the reading, I tell people I wish I could capture just for a second how much of a genius he is. How the poems changed from two years ago, became something new altogether. And Christian, a real poet in the making, or already made, right there in front of everyone. I feel proud, selfish that I feel proud, elated to know someone whose talent the crowd recognizes in whispers to each other.

There’s a line of his I bring up to him after the reading. One about how the failure of love is death. I tell Christian how afraid I am that love is the real failure. Or maybe that I’m afraid that love won’t be what I have built it up to be in my mind. The thing that saves me, or anyone for that matter. He says that he's afraid it will be. And maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that’s the point. I hope it is. I want it to be the end of everything. 

11.

There’s a cat in the neighborhood who looks like my dead cat. The second morning I lived here, I spotted her. Gray, a cloud on the ground. A tail that is double the length of her body. I spent a good ten minutes talking to her like an idiot. When Leah comes over for breakfast, she’s also greeted by the gray cat. Auspicious, she says, I thought I was dead from the bike ride maybe, it was Shabby who met me at the pearly gates.

At a low point earlier in the week, I have dinner with a friend and tell them I feel ruined. I don’t use the word cursed but in some ways, I’ve believed I’m doomed to be in bad situations mostly of my own making. That I carry some mark that makes me untouchable, unlovable. They tell me I’m crazy. Don’t make it bad. You’re stronger now than you were before. What I’ve been doing is looking for a sign that I’m not my worst accusations. But I haven’t found one. At least, no signs exist, just people. I repeat to myself a Rilke line, incantatory, for here there is no place that does not see you. All the times I thought there were not angels in every corner of the world, I’ve been proven wrong again. A blessing that’s not even in disguise. 

12.

That night you didn’t go with me up to the roof even though I wanted to feel the wind with you beside me. The moon was brighter than I’d seen it since moving to the city. It was cold, I was underdressed as usual. Left my coat on the floor once I saw the moon from the big window. Raced up the stairs. Two at a time. Could hear the wind through the poorly insulated windows. If I was crying, the elements kept me from feeling anything. We hadn’t talked, spent the night dancing separately. Our moods so mismatched and for some reason I felt responsible. I left you alone because I didn’t want to be miserable for just a few minutes. As if I could have that temporary escape. How many times have I stayed when I should have gone? I don’t know why I do. I told a friend of mine how I hoped that you would be happy because you were so good. But they aren’t, my friend responded. I haven’t forgotten that. 

I want to be happy. To stop looking down when I should look up. I want to hear these old songs and realize how wrong I was to believe they were all written about me. I don’t want to be sorry for the ways I broke my own heart. I needed to do it. Not because I needed to learn, but because I needed to feel something again. I’m waiting.