Chiaroscuro
A memoir of light and dark

On the 3rd day of school I was blindsided by a bright and dark-eyed woman in the 3rd row of Microbiology; crossing the street in front Witte Hall; sitting on the steps at the Museum of Modern Art. She let me know where to go and I let her lead me there. She drew a bar graph in class to explain how men whose names start with ‘J’ were not to be trusted, but ‘M’ was okay. We went to the symphony on our first date, and she bought a tiny hat on the way that made us look like I should’ve been Fred Astaire. I can’t dance, but she still let me kiss her under her streetlight.
By Christmas I was gifted; I had never known such holiness. Every step was in sync, our mind’s eyes were locked, and I couldn’t see anything else when I was with her. Lifted by my idealizing, I left my roommate grounded and touched back down in her kingdom by the sea, just recently rescinded from a fellow who used to be me. He even met me for coffee once, and suggested in the way that exes do that there was more to the story. I told him I could handle myself. He said he believed that I would.
We go months in and we’re winking at forever: 12/12/12, we spent our doomsday together in bed, just in case. At that age, still, there’s plenty we’re just finding out about ourselves as well. I’m a poet and she’s an artist: she went out to a gala to ponder her colleagues and their thoughts, I stayed home to work out my own. When she returned around midnight, I asked and she replied that it’d all gone alright. The type of thing she could really only get into with fellow artists, she’d say. And once she’d said that she kissed me on the cheek, turned the lights out and turned over, and left me alone with my thoughts.
One night we lay next to each other in bed and we talked of the things going on in our heads and she mentioned to me making out with a friend… but she shouldn’t have said that. She looked at me strangely; I asked her to explain it, but for minutes she insisted that it all was in jest, that the smoke in the air had her talking nonsense and that if I could just let this one go we’d stay friends… Friends? I told her that this was no time to pretend and I asked her to tell me what all of this meant… and she tried to cry, but she didn’t really feel like it.
People don’t make those kinds of mistakes, after all. One thing doesn’t lead to another until you find yourself under someone else’s hips, stripped of your conscience, ready to meet me back at home with a rye smile and a kiss. One time, two times, ‘less than ten’. She told me where she went and I let her lead me there, believed her, still unsure, even after, how I’d led her astray… imagine, the guy getting whipped playing master.
I sat under the bridge that night, smoking my very first cigarette, and I burned while it burned. Like reverse alchemy, a broken heart goes from gold to lead, and the weight stays perched there in the chest cavity until… well, you drown it in the meantime. And while I sat there, saturated, I wondered whether I might’ve taken a map off the wall in that gallery, forged my own path through the halls, followed my feet, found the room, picked a seat… and if, still, I’d’ve seen you against the wall, a masterpiece, and, at angles, your eyes would be following.
