Heart, Heart, Lose

When I got home there was a ticket on my car and a letter in the mail. A card from Brooklyn. His address in the upper left corner was surprising. I’d asked him for mail a few times before I stopped talking to him altogether. Nothing came of it. Nothing at all: No mail, no phone calls, no visits. Mostly email and text, a flurry of ambiguities, refracted moments that scattered when I tried to make sense of them.

I dropped the parking ticket onto the table and sat on the sofa. I turned the envelope over in my hands. He’d written the addresses upside down.

The card was a vintage TWA travel poster of San Francisco. The bright cable cars climbed up California just past Grant and the entrance to Chinatown. In the distance, the Oakland Bay Bridge. Cars lined the streets, undoubtedly parked by men in sharp suits and hats accompanied by women in gloves and dainty pumps.

No one sends mail much anymore. To find the right card and mail it moved from the mundane to the meaningful. Rarely is a note tucked in the bills and the circulars simply a note: How can it be?

Not like for the owners of those cars in the TWA ad. I wondered briefly about the postcards they sent on vacation and how carefully they selected stationery, whether they ever just dashed off “I love yous” to loved ones.

I met him in Brooklyn, at a café where we planned to meet for the first time. I almost left, because I waited so long for him, and I had to meet a friend for dinner. He messaged me, saying he was on his way, he was stuck in traffic, he was in a cab, he was coming, and then there he was and everything softened in the world as if someone had smeared vaseline around the edge of the lens.

He’d brought a notebook, so he could write to me. We stopped staring at each other long enough for him to write me a letter on the first page. He slid the book over to me. “You can’t read it now. Wait. Then write to me.”

That night I waited for him at a party. I drank more than I should have, the way we do when desperation slithers its way into waning hopefulness. My mood devolved into a hollow brightness, my grin lopsided as much from bourbon as from the weight of felled expectations. At around 1:30 am, I nonchalantly loped out of the bar and found a cab.

In the hallway on Waverly, as I was fumbling for the second key, I felt my phone vibrate. Just in time, just as I was giving up, there he was.

There is a moment when a person shows himself to you. We like to think it takes a very long time to get to know someone, and maybe it does. But from the start he will show himself to you, in what he does and doesn’t do. You can see it if you are willing to look at it now, not as it might be one day. And not as it comes to you, wrapped in good-on-paper and silver-tongue ribbon.

I flew home a few days later, buoyed by October sun on the Brooklyn promenade and wild, impossible promises about the future. Why not? I asked myself. Why shouldn’t it happen this way? Amidst the grand gestures and the dramatic declarations, the mask had slipped a few times. At least once, I saw a man who offered something of himself, something I could tell had been tucked deep away for a long time. So I asked that man, without his mask, to visit.

A few weeks later the man and his mask were at a gate at LaGuardia. At 5:00 am my phone rang.

“I’m not coming to California. I can’t do it.”

“What? What’s happening? What time is it?”

“I’m not coming. I can’t. I can’t do it.”

I blinked, gulping my breath. I lay in bed but felt as if I hovered just above it, my heart storming in my chest.

He flew instead to Detroit. 26 hours later, news of him surfaced in Idaho. He stayed there alone, on an existential spirit quest of sorts. Then he drove to San Francisco in advance of his flight home.

He did not call when he arrived, but he announced his arrival just the same. Friends called to warn me, but I knew already. I sat in my house in Oakland, and my phone vibrated once more. He was asymptotically close to me, as close to me as he could ever come.

The Heart wants what it wants, and so we found ourselves talking a few weeks later, and then again once more, from opposite coasts. A little had changed, but seismic activity did not mean his tectonic plate had shifted.

How do you fit together a puzzle that gives you pieces from a mixed grab bag? How long do you wait to know if the answer is right, or if the answer is even an answer at all, instead of another riddle? How long does your Heart give way to another Heart, one that hides below its surface as much as a glacier, and moves as slowly?

So the unhearting and the unfollowing, and then the silence.

Until the card, with the plane that soared through the clear sky above the bridge and the bay. A ghost plane that landed, filled with people who never boarded.