I once bought a book called Coming and Crying, a collection of essays ruminating on sex and connection. It must have been 2010 or 2011, because I had it with me on my last trip to New York (and second last trip to the States) to read in the big white bed of the modest sun drenched yellow master bedroom of my Park Slope sublet.
I don’t know if I have any diary entries from that time, but I think I was still using the dark green Icelandic horse skin bound journal, so physically I should. Many of my digital records have been lost over time in carelessness between new laptops, and in one instance, at gunpoint.
I never finished reading the essays then, but I marvelled that a couple of them mentioned the very neighbourhood I was in at that time, of Prospect Park which was only minutes away. I didn’t spend nearly enough time venturing anywhere on my own and I regret that. I do remember reading the book and thinking to myself, I could be doing this back home, in my bed back home. “Wherever you go, there you are.” I knew it then even as I wasted the days away in my head.
Nevertheless, that trip did have its moments of drama and adventure. I reunited with someone I thought I had loved, for the span of a couple of days. We had met a few years previously at my friend’s lake in New Jersey. I had been naked with the rest of my friends, swimming in the oblivion of Everclear and Fuze mixers. He had arrived with his girlfriend, a talented artist I knew of peripherally through mutual friends, and we’d laughed through our introductions. I have no clear image of meeting them, just the laughter in the dark between the water and the dock.
I reunited with him in Brooklyn and we spent a night together but only sleeping. He told me later in a handwritten letter, making amends, that he was trying to kick opiates at the time, in his letter he said he was in withdrawal during our time together and relapsed on arriving home to find his dealer in the driveway. I don't know if it's a trait innate in him or something some addicts acquire, but he was and remains to be a very natural liar, something I observe now with neutrality rather than cruelty. He could lie about anything like he breathed. I was probably using him too in my own way.
After our little reunion, he turned cagey and evasive and I never saw him again, though during the trip I kept trying to make plans and lure him back to me. He got angry that I wouldn’t take the train to come see him, “you’re acting like I’m some dangerous dirtbag,” or something to that effect. In hindsight, at that time, I think he was, and I think I knew it.
Through the days of making plans that would fizzle at the last second, I would sit on the stoop of my apartment smoking and pretending to read a French translation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, probably hoping I looked cool, definitely feeling rejected.
One day a handsome man with shoulder length blonde hair tied back, a natural tan and aquiline profile, sat casually close by to roll his own cigarette. As he got up to leave, he spoke to me, said some now forgotten compliment and asked me out. I was embarrassed and off guard, and said thank you but I’m seeing someone, and he was smilingly respectful and left.
A day or two later, I wrote a missed connection on Craigslist and he responded, and we tried again, and I found my quiet little romance for that summer. We took trips to my rooftop, to the Natural History museum and his apartment on Ditmas Ave where I met his cat and weathered a hurricane. He was a sociology professor and showed me the funny reviews his students left about him on an ethically questionable website that rated the hotness of professors, his reviews usually adorned with five out of five red chillies. He bought me a shiny black jacketed hardcover copy of H.P. Lovecraft's Tales that I still haven’t read. I cried in his courtyard, smoking together, knowing we wouldn’t see each other again after that night. We kept up friendly contact via Facebook across the seas until sometime when he quietly and diplomatically removed me from his friends list and I didn’t notice or mind. I am grateful for that little found connection at a time I felt so small and forgotten.
I am halfway through my now second attempt reading Coming and Crying, this time in the modest sun drenched master bedroom of the home I bought two years ago, in a neighbourhood you don't read about in published essays. Towering gum trees out the window and winter air are a welcome contrast to that summer on the other side of the world with its blinding hot streets and so much cigarette smoke.
I have experienced many more connections since my first read of that book. I hesitate writing sometimes at the idea of someone I loved seeing it and feeling forgotten. I’m trying to find the best ways to express myself without fear because I believe we get to own our own stories and I have spent a lot of my life hiding.
Right now I am in love, and the sweetness and freedom I feel is a gift. He says, “hello, gorgeous,” as though it’s my name, he says, “I love you,” with sparkling eyes, he says, “I love this,” as we hold each other tight in a pretzel of limbs on my big white couch, in my big white bed.
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