One Bedroom

I wore your shirt today. It’s my shirt actually. Black, number 24 on the left shoulder. It is my favorite shirt. Not because you gave it to me. It fits me, and I don’t have a lot of long-sleeved shirts.

You gave it to me before you told me. Hi, I said, welcome back, how are you, tell me about the trip. A black shirt and a pair of shorts that were much too large. A belt cinches them into a wrinkled mess around the waist, and they hang almost to my ankles. They are plaid. Like golfer’s shorts. They look silly on me, a perfect reason to wear them again and again. The thin material sticks to my legs on humid summer days.

How presumptuous of me to assume you would still love me, nine days later. What a shame, to have pinned my hopes on such a fleeting love. It is fine today. What liberation, for hindsight to so clearly display the reality of a situation. I grasped so desperately for what we had, and when I could get a hold of it I squeezed and squeezed. In May you were a dried date, unhappy and lost. In June I pitted you, forced out the hardness at your core and let it bore into my own soft, bruised skin.

I cried. I cried for so long, and so hard. Ah, but sweet liberation. A chance to take a step back, to take a breath, to take stock. It is so obvious now. We were perfect when we started. But that was then, and then turned into a new now again and again. In September I took your pit out of my chest. It isn’t do or die, is it dear? The black and white of in love and out of love is a creation of some screen writer in L.A., or the tortured soul of the musician. I remember when you loved me so hard that my heart heaved and my eyes saw nothing but light around you. I remember when you kissed my cheek and pedaled away, to your room, to the airport, to the East Coast.

I remember when you returned, the light extinguished, my pain in its infancy, growing up fast. I remember when I let go, too late, with too much trepidation, unwilling to admit that it could be so plain. It wasn’t black and white.

I told you it wasn’t all or nothing. The feelings were different. Did that mean there were none? Ultimately, yes. But it was gray, and then a deep and dark purple, with lightning flashing white. From the bridge the city looked dark and empty, visible only against the purple sky behind the line of skyscrapers. The flashes of light brought night to day, for a moment. I cried to know that you couldn’t see it, and wouldn’t see it through my lens. Nor our lens, the one that was lying on Franklin Ave., thrown to the curb by wheels and wheels, stained with dirt and surrounded by a gang of cigarette butts.

I miss you, sometimes. I don’t love you, not anymore. I don’t know what you do or who you see; I can’t promise I would feign an interest if you told me about it. But my memories are in tact, and with time, they banished the gray and the purple, turned the lightning to a flash bulb. The bulb flashes on your calves below your shorts, hard and cut with fine lines of muscle and bone. It flashes on your lips, and they move to greet me, to explore me, to speak to me. It flashes on my face, smiling, happy, hairy, and ready.

She gave me the bracelet after she told me. It’s not a pattern, not so precisely, anyway. She told me in the same room you did. We sat on the same porch later, feeling the distance. One year after your change in heart. Her trip meant something different, something much more explicit, something much more formulaic. A man, a bed, a condom. She is not lost, not so young and without direction. Her voice does not apologize, and does not dance around the disclosure. It does not push me out the door.

Today I tell her I won’t repeat the period of desperation, there will be no waiting or wishing. I tell her it is not all or nothing. It is, really, much more complicated than that. I tell her yes, I will meet her for tennis tonight. At home I put her bracelet on the desk, and I put on your black shirt.