a story of a year

***originally published in October: I decided to leave it up in the archives. personal narrative and all that, right?

…

The first caveat is that this will stay up for a day. The second thing is that this is not the whole truth, it’s not entirely fiction, but it lingers in a halfway space between the two in a way that is more honest than anything. Hence the first line. I’ve mostly used my corner of the internet to talk about my book and the work I do. What life updates I give are peppered in and packaged neatly. I just moved to a new city. The leaves are changing, I’m discovering seasons again, I found my favorite new local cafe to write in. Which are all true. I think of my September (now October) self a year ago, and those were in fact the things I’d noticed, the expositional details that would set this particular era. 

The day I met him he had exactly a year left in the city. I didn’t know that at the time, nor would I have cared if I did. A year is a gentle eternity. An expanse of time. A year prior to that day I met him, I had just moved into my third-floor graduate apartment at Stanford, in that late September, a place with beautiful, aged stucco stairs, still walkable to the undergraduate campus I remembered but still far enough that it felt like a liminal space. I felt like a planet that shifted from its orbit a little bit but could still feel the familiar heat of the sun. It was a wonderful, uncertain year. I finally, finally fell in love with school. And I inched toward New York, bit by bit. 

And then I was in the city I’d dreamed of. 

He’d dreamed of this place, too, he told me. We sat across a table in an outdoor terrace section that would have felt lovely in the late summer, or even that week before. But temperatures had sunk and now I’d locked into myself, teeth clenched, determined not to be seen as cold and shivering. I kept the tone of my voice even. He had a playful smile and bright eyes that made me want to be clever with him. I wanted to appear unbothered, a little detached even. He was hot and I wanted to remain cool about it. I didn’t want him to know I was cold. I didn’t want him to know that my mind was gaping with a deluge of thoughts and anxieties and marvels about this city that I’d just moved to. On previous dates with other people I’d even lied about how long I’d been here, stretch one month into three, into half a year. They could tell, I think. Now I would be able to. But he didn’t press me on it. Instead he told me about how he’d worked and lived and went to school all over Europe, that he’d grown up in the Caribbean, but New York was the place he’d wanted to land at, for a little bit of time. I’m just here for a bit, he told me. On a rotational program for work. 

That’s what I ended up telling myself over the next few weeks, and then months. He’s just here for a bit, I told myself, as I saw him again next week. Not for long, I’d shrug to myself as I emerged into torrential rain from a small indie concert on the Lower East Side to run to his apartment in the East Village. There was a magnetism about him that drew me to him, time and time again, but I always did so in that cooled, detached manner. We went days, weeks without texting, exchanging perfunctory correspondences. I went ahead and lived my life, learned to steady myself on the subway rides to work, dashed to book events after, sent emails, did copyedits, lugged Facebook Marketplace furniture across state lines, cooked shitty meals, revised books, worked, went to drinks, split joints in parks, prepared for my book release, and went on other dates with other people. I trekked to Williamsburg for the weekend in the dead of winter, saw the old apartment that I shared one summer with an old love, that same apartment through which I first discovered New York and in which we broke up, and remembered why I was detached in the first place.

He texted me happy new year and I took two days to respond. 

Eventually as spring came around he emerged in conversations with friends and they would probe at my expression, probably the involuntary hint of a smile. They told me I liked him. I repeated the same refrain; he’s not here for long. What’s the point? He remained cool too, never asking more of me than I asked of him. I half-invited him to my book launch. I briefly thought about him in a plane on a work trip. There would be certain moments that would still me for a moment. He would call me darling in the most gentle of tones, in that low voice of his with his French-British accent. He asked me about my favorite treat and surprised me with it, weeks later, unprompted. I told him offhandedly I was a writer and found out months later he listened to the audiobook. As the days became warm I brought him ice cream and took him to my favorite noodle place in Chinatown. But we never talked about what we were to each other. I never allowed myself to fold and neither did he. I instead made a private Spotify playlist and then became increasingly puzzled by the songs I was adding. 

I didn’t know I was in love with him until I visited Paris this summer, the late summer, sat on the subway, and for a strange moment I looked over and wondered which trains he took during his years here. The French words that he’d taught me, that slipped in through early mornings and late nights, came through in snippets around me. I imagined reaching through time and space and see him, the younger version of him, the university student version of him, on this train. I realized I was ruminating on our past selves that led to this moment, to the future selves, and then, finally: I realized. 

And there wasn’t much time left. 

Someone always leaves first, Richard Siken says. There’s always an uneven, staggered exit. But what about entry? Does someone fall first? Or is there a simultaneous, parallel love? We’d been circling around it, the both of us, each unwilling to concede, each having made like a bandit away from our pasts, from the aftermath of our previous loves. It wasn’t meant to happen and yet it did. He thawed me. Maybe I did for him too. When we talked about our lives now it wasn’t to intrigue or impress. It was, quite simply, because we wanted to know all about each other. And the limitations of the year, which I had once been so frivolous with and so dismissive of, became very apparent to me. 

In the end there was no last minute airport run or alteration of plans. He had a six a.m. flight; I went with him at 3 to the airport to see him off. I started crying noisily and messily next to the security line, so much so that the girl next to me asked if I was okay. I told her I would be. We hugged each other; she was seeing off her mother. I watched the daylight break and then I went to wait for the first train that would take me back into the city. I switched cars and walked home in the misty morning and when I got home I stripped off the clothes I wore on the subway and climbed into my sheets and that was it: it had been a year, exactly a year, to the very date, of when I met him. I tried to fall asleep and wondered if this was something you could sleep off, because how else does one cope with this enormity of a love that has nowhere to go? 

It had been a little over a year of me coming into this city and a year of coming into myself. It was a year that at once was not at all about him but now that I look at it he is everywhere, dotted through, like disparate stars you piece once together into constellations, and then you can’t see it any other way. It was an infinite kindness I did not think I deserved. I think of what he told me on the way to the airport: I can’t wait for the next version of yourself. He’d pressed a kiss to my forehead then, unselfish and unpossessive; he is willing to behold me, to witness me grow into my next eras and still hold love for me while he steps away. I can’t wait to see what you become.