Last night, it rained. I laid on the futon bed in a strange room, awake, unable to fall back to sleep. The wind was picking up and I could hear the wind tunnel passing through the corridor, in an unfamiliar Airbnb apartment, I laid next to you, you were sound asleep. I tried but I couldn’t fall asleep. So I counted the reasons why I loved you.
You saved all of your ex girlfriends photos, and you had many. This was a familiar neighborhood to you. Ten years ago, you frequented here, you dated a woman who was the roommate of a local celebrity. He had become famous not by being a band member but the bar he ran, not successfully, and he was one of the cultural makers, who made Burning Man a mandatory exercise of cool in the 90s. It was a good part of your life too, for ten years, you dated women, hung out at his bar and then drank until you were drunk, then you had sex. Lots of sex, with lots of women. You were part of the cultural maker army. I was, if I remembered the years correctly, busy trying to get over my quarter life crisis, Your 30s and my 20s were different. I was to marry a Harvard man, to produce two genetically superior children, amass real estate empire, build financial wealth and then create a foundation to a career path that I could be proud of. And I succeeded in all that. You were playing at the city. An objectively good looking man, a graduate of an elite school back east, you had the entire city and the country by your hand. You also had the tools. You were good with women. You took them out, paid their bills, said flattering things, and had sexual adventures better than most men your age. And you worked hard and built a company you could be proud of. For a period of ten years, a significant number of nights, you’ve spent it in this neighborhood.
It had been sometime since our last get together. It’s been five and half years since we were together. Every time you saw me, you were so excited, you’d smile, you’d stare at me so intensely, in a way no one else had ever done. I was uncomfortable under your gaze. You acted like that you had just met me for the first time and you’d already fallen in love with me. I couldn’t return those feelings because I knew deep down I couldn’t believe that I was lovable. A notion that I struggled all my life and I’ve been seeing a therapist for exactly that. Yet, I knew you loved me like you’ve never been in love before, you couldn’t understand why either. “I like you, and I can count so many ways why I like you, yet for some reason, I also love you. I’m in love with you and I love every inch of you. I’ve never felt this way before.” You’d confess each time you saw me, more often than the beginning, and sometimes you were overwhelmed by the notion of loving me that you would choke up as you uttered those words to my ears. “I love you so much.” You couldn’t figure out why you loved me. But I knew why. Because my disposition was that I could not be loved, I was always surprised by your love declarations. My reluctance in hearing those words made you love me more. In some ways you knew that already. You knew that I loved you, and you loved someone who’s so shell shocked that she couldn’t understand why she would be loved back and consequently, you, the person who had never loved anyone, became in love with someone who was incapable of receiving love.
You sat outside the Front Porch, a restaurant that you thought you’d like to go initially. But by the time I arrived, you had changed your mind. So I wondered if you had read my review and decided that you’d rather take me somewhere else instead, so that in case I were to write a food review, it’s somewhere else I’d write about as I would not write a review again for the same restaurant. And I wondered, briefly, if the minutes you waited for me to arrive, that you’d already looked it up on Yelp to see if I’d already been to this restaurant. You suggested for us to go elsewhere the moment I came up to you. Off we went to the Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack. You had been there, at least 20 or so times over the years, you said, before it moved, and before you had your children and stopped going out. Those were good times. You took your then girlfriend there, often. You liked the food and the atmosphere, a little funky, like the bar you liked to go to, everything about this area breathed cool in an understated way. I had seen this restaurant from outside before, coming out from another newer restaurant, I had been told this was a local favorite. Though I’d never been. We ate at the booth, and we caught up with one another from a month long separation. Was it too long for me? Yes. But for you, nothing had changed. I, on the other hand, had to warm up. I often put that version of me on ice, and it always takes a while for me to be thawed out.
It was the RSA conference week. No hotel rooms. So you booked an Airbnb near your office. You didn’t want to return to the room so soon, so after dinner, you went to the bar, Knockout to hang out. It’s a bit of a dive bar, I’d never be caught dead in it, but it’s your kind of place. You looked around and found memorabilia that had not been removed since the last owner owned it, the cultural maker man you liked so much. I still remembered that you talked about him the very first night we re-met up in 2011, and the roommate of the man, was the woman you had dated. It seemed that you enjoyed that part of your life the most, the life before your oldest child was born. I sat there and sipped cheap house red wine, and tried to picture you as you were 30 something, or 40 something, before the birth of your son. You were dating, chatting away, and wasting away evenings in bars like this. There were always women who threw themselves at you, women you’d upset a few months down the road, for you had cheated on them while you were dating them, for you had dumped them, because you had lost interest in them. Somewhere else, that 20 something and 30 something version of me had become a model citizen and an envy of my girlfriends, and old boyfriends. A mother, a wife, a rising star in her professional life, she had it all, except for love.
I asked you to tell what you remembered about this bar, and what you’d be doing in this bar, and who you were with. I was never a jealous person, I used to want to be a journalist, because I liked hearing stories and then telling stories. So I asked you to tell me stories, and I imagined what it was like to be that version of you. And how life had taken a different turn, perhaps for the better, because otherwise we would not have re-met.
Heading back to the apartment you rented from Airbnb, you pointed out a mural painting on the side of the adjacent building. You said that it belonged to that man, now married with kids, running a local coffee roaster and coffee shop, different life all together. That former local cultural maker and you, both middle aged and fathers, both cease to impress women. I told him that I had a girlfriend, about the same age as he and the man on the wall, who had circled in the same circles, who was too cool for her own good until it was much too late, had often boasted how that man on the wall wanted to date her but she refused. I was never part of that crowd, I was probably doing a safari in Kenya’s Maasai Mara reserve and pretending the tent hotel was really just a tent while the servers brought me papayas and mangos as I looked down the river bank on my cushioned chair, where the baby hippos were playing with their mother, when you were covered in real dust and sand in Blackrock City. You dated painters and artists, I dated boys who were born with a silver spoon or spoke with a heavy Scandinavian accent, who were too preppy to ever get their shoes dirty. We were on the opposite spectrum, yet, we met up once in 1998.
In the dim lit room you retold me stories how you first met me at a water rafting trip, and how crazy I was on our first date. Lying naked with you, fast asleep after watching transvestite porn, and how you woke me up with your tongue in the middle of the night and how much you liked me then. I would then tell you how we ended it, it was not a real ending, because I did not like to end things. We were having breakfast on Hayes street, you had taken me to Suppenkuche, for a real German meal. Afterwards we strolled in Hayes Valley, in 1998 it was still up and coming, and you stepped into a shop that made custom tailored pants, you lingered over a pair of mustard colored pants, just long enough for me to realize that you were bored of me, and I no longer held your affection. The next time we met, I had already gone with another man. At Pier 23, you spotted me dancing and I was very cold towards you, you said, I was with another man by then. How could we remember so much about 1998, when we had spent so many years apart? We were not meet again until 2011.
As you thrusted yourself into me, I cried in pain because I had not been having sex since we were last together, you told me over and over again how much you loved me and you had never ever felt this way about anyone else, choking on your own words, I told you to stop saying these things. I couldn’t handle the declaration of love, I knew you loved me and still, I couldn’t bear the thoughts of being loved.
“How do you know that you love me?” You asked of me. I couldn’t tell you because I couldn’t organize my thoughts on the spot. We used to say “Why do you love me” to one another. Then we’d ask “do you love me?” We have five thousand ways to say “I love you” in the form of a question. We have exhausted everything there is to figure out how two unlikely in love person fell in love with one another. And we have exhausted every single way to say I love you.
Instead, I asked you what had become of that woman you dated next door. “We did not talk for almost 10 years, then 5 years ago I got an email from her. She just said ‘You are an asshole.’ Then 3 months ago, she friended me on Facebook.” You replied. “So did you accept the friend request?” I asked. “I sat on it for a few weeks, then I accepted it.” I asked what she was doing now. And how old she was. You told me that as far as you could tell, she’s not doing much. A painter. She paints sometimes. She’s my age. I wondered what you did to her to make her say “You are an asshole.” It had been the only theme that was consistent about you. Every woman thought you were a cheater, a careless man who only worried about yourself. Yet the version of you to me seemed nearly too clingy, too loving and too giving. I could never know why I deserved this love, it made no sense because no one in the world could have loved anyone so passionately so unconditionally and so lengthy.
In the middle of the night while I listened to the wind blowing and the rain pouring, I realized how I knew that love you so. When we were apart, I tried not to think of you. Because every time I thought about you, my heart actually, literately hurt. That ache wouldn’t go away until I was covered with my own tears. Late at night, when you woke up to read emails from me, looking at photos of me, I’d wake up too, in a different city, even different country, and I’d think of you, my thoughts were filled with love, tenderness, longing and sadness because I was not with you, and I knew that I’d love you until I turn into ashes.
Early in the morning, you covered my eyes with a mask and tied me up with ropes. Spread eagle I was, you took your time to play and caress me. It was our third and final session of sex for the evening. You took photos of me in that comprising position where I was completely restrained. You jammed your cock in the parts of me that were exposed. Then for the finale, you fed me your cum in my mouth, I drank everything, what else was there to do?
Afterwards you released me. The morning was near. We showered, and gathered our things. It’s going to be a few busy weeks. My future was not only bright but also filled with new opportunities. I might just be getting something incredible coming my way. A new position, a new company, a tremendous upside and there were not just one but two opportunities waiting for me. I was to conquer the world, yet I was nearly at the top of the world already. I drove you to work and we said goodbyes.
The rain had stopped. The storm had passed. it was a sunny day.
