the day after i left you
The day after I left you, my mother took me out for a steak dinner in a fancy restaurant downtown. She was so happy that she had two glasses of wine, and she never drinks. I had to drive us home.
The day after I left you, I signed a lease for a new apartment. It’s beautiful, and it comes with a parking space — always a struggle at your place. There’s a heated pool and you can smoke cigarettes inside. It’s nestled behind the Santa Monica mountains. To get to and from my office, I have to drive through those tunnels that connect to the 5 North, the tunnels that I love so much.
The day after I left you, a sweet and beautiful man, a smart and accomplished man, a man whom I’ve known for a long time but to whom I have never given the time of day, swept gracefully into my life and brought with him his kindness and his humor. When I fucked him later that night, he looked me in the eye. After we were done, he told me that he thinks I am beautiful.
The day after I left you all my friends celebrated. They told me how proud of me they were, how happy they were for me, and they berated you with endless hostility that I can only assume has been building up inside of them this whole time. I smiled and told them that it’s hard but I’m glad I’ve arrived Here, which is beyond There, There being where you are.
The day after I left you I smiled and agreed with my friends that things are going to get so much better now. I let them get excited about the prospect of not having to hear about your infidelity, your cruelty, your inconsistency. I did not bring up your unique tenderness. I did not talk about the way you’d wake up intermittently throughout the night to cover me back up with the blankets you invariably would steal once you fell asleep again. I did not let them know about how, all wrapped up in you and watching shitty movies that we wouldn’t really pay attention to, is the safest I’ve ever felt — safe from the demands of my day-to-day, safe from this world run exclusively on productivity, safe from all the Before’s and the To-Come’s.
The day after I left you, I hopped on a sunshine train with a long-haired Adonis who likes to show me all the ways he is better than you. We deserve each other — I, the young attorney and he, the multimedia artist: self-described as “living his personal legend.” We deserve each other in the most meaningful of superficial ways. We have dramatic, sensual sex — you know the type, the type I hate. He holds my hands in his as the electric darkness settles over us and whispers in my ear, “I love your pussy.”
The day after I left you, I sat in the parking structure that is attached to my new apartment, which I will move into in a month’s time, and absentmindedly searched your address on my phone. 2.2 miles. Isn’t it funny how that worked out? That the first tear, which would ultimately become the chasm now separating us, was that I had to spend a year Far Away? But now that I am hurtling back to Los Angeles, my imminent arrival documented in leases and employment contracts, you and I are farther away than we have ever been… drifting, drifting, to such different parts of this galaxy that soon we will forget. But I don’t want to forget.
Speeding down the freeway into the desert, headed for the lights of the casino that promised us a good time.
Dwarfed by the mountains, searching for an abandoned neo-Nazi camp in Malibu.
Drunken impassioned karaoke renditions of Sam Cooke classics, punctuated with cigarettes we’d share while admiring the dirty boulevards of L.A.
Sitting, perched on the edge of your bathtub, smoking Camels with the bathroom door closed — tippie toes.
The day after I left you, I sat across from my mother at a fancy restaurant, our dinners between us. As she enthusiastically rambled on about her latest film, I remembered:
In the middle of the night, the sounds of the storm that raged outside of my little faraway apartment woke me and I texted you.
“Thunder, can’t sleep.”
It took you a minute to respond with a call and I could tell as soon as I picked up that you were out-of-your-mind drunk. Pulling the covers over my head, I listened to you tell me about how you had peed in your bathroom drawer instead of the toilet last night, how you are playing bass for a band fronted by a girl who thinks she’s a witch, why you’re going to vote for Bernie Sanders in the upcoming election, and that you wished I was there.
“Let’s go get a steak dinner when I’m back!”
“A steak dinner! Yeah, yeah, I’m game.”
The familiarity of your slur drowned out the storm and I fell asleep like that, beneath the covers, connected to you through a cell phone, warmed by the prospect of returning to you soon. The prospect of a steak dinner!
I just wanted to say goodbye. To the blue of your eyes, the hot honey amber of the whiskey, the muted morning glow of waking beside you. I don’t want to go, but I have to go. I cannot belong to you anymore, when you barely want me. I have to go. But I just wanted to say goodbye.
