this feels worthy of an introduction, but i’m not really sure why. just a second version of a freewrite about a visit with an old friend/ex that i am still friends with. we hadn’t seen each other in awhile, our visits are always a little awkward, but i think we’re both invested in maintaining our friendship. emotionally i think it feels like when you broke your arm five years ago and no one can tell you ever broke it, and it never hurts, and you don’t have your old cast anymore you kept when they sawed it off, and you don’t even totally remember how badly it hurt when you broke it, but you still remember that it happened, and you cried a lot, and now you have that funny little bump that nobody else notices, but you still know that its there, and sometimes you rub it and wonder why you ever decided to jump out of that tree in the first place. you know?
This will not be weird, you think, as you tap your foot to your Gossip cd, four rows back on the discount fare bus taking you from your sister’s apartment in Boston to your ex-girlfriend’s apartment on the upper east side.
It has been three years since you ended your two year relationship with this woman, during a silent but otherwise unremarkable handjob in your college dormitory bed. Stuck tears and sweaty hands mechanically moving in the same directions that used to do all kinds of cliched magic, move mountains bring this woman to her back to her knees to herself, oh, yes, please, i can’t do this, anymore.
Three years later and you’ve recidivated (i like this word a lot but can’t tell if i’m using it correctly here. feedback?) to a place no other partner of yours has ever ventured with you. You call each other occasionally just to say hello. You tell your friends you are happy for her and you mean it she asks how your parents are doing you finally come home to the coast you belong to and without thinking anything you sit down in front of the greyhound website and buy the ticket.
Only in New York would you feel lucky to pay nine hundred dollars to share a one bedroom hallway, you realize, as she opens the door which bangs into the half size oven, bisecting the part of the hallway you are supposed to intuit as the kitchen. You don’t have a toaster?
You freewrite about this visit on the bus. So much time has passed. Not like that first visit six months later when you visited her first new apartment in Boston before she met someone and moved to this hallway. You awkwardly shared a bed–her housemates had cats–slept with both socks and everything else on– and woke up from nightmares in which you were forced to have sex with her. She woke up frantic maybe even crying maybe you’re making up that last part from the same kind of dream and you both laugh, sigh, spoon, and finally sleep. Happy new year.
No. There are multiple birthdays and women now between that night and this one. Almost too many to remember those years ever happened except you still call each other old nicknames, hey kid, where do you keep your can opener?
Let’s put on some music, remember when we listened to this album, you say, thinking about college and things that were a long time ago and not your relationship so much, but it is kind of implied, and you can’t lift your eyes up until you change the topic, that isn’t what i meant. Those pictures hanging on the wall used to hang above the bed I slept in with you, that blanket kept me warm on your couch in your unheated house, I knit you that hat because I loved you. You want to speak and laugh about yourselves but every memory you have together is one of this relationship, better pretend that the whole thing never happened keep in touch it was great to see you I think I can get back to the bus depot myself from here.
You think in facts. You don’t believe in objectivity but you do in these moments and you want everyone else to do the same so you can stop feeling around for the boundary that separates nostalgia from possessiveness, a darkness you thought your eyes had long adjusted to with this one. this time. Maybe it is walking through the park and past the walkups your parents and other people’s parents once lived in that makes you so uncharacteristically uncharacteristic.
You are overflowing. You are leaving in fourteen hours.
When you get off the bus again in Albany, calling her to say you have arrived safely and thank you for your warm hospitality, and then you will hang up, put your phone back silently in your left pants pocket, and get back to the business of your life.
