I had this delusion that she was only a song stuck in my head.
I thought if I could change the way I remembered her mouse-like everything I might be able to sleep without dreaming of her. The thing about having something stuck on repeat in your mind is: you hate it just as much you loved it in the beginning, and there is no place for contradictions in matters regarding love. So, I thought maybe I could find clarity. I thought that maybe, if love really was involved in this fantastic mess, I could find the right words to make everything work out between us.
Ultimately, my delusion was that I could write something that would fix us.
We were so genuinely unreasonable together. It was a closet of a hotel room. There was space for a bed with a mirror above it and one shelf on the adjacent wall. The bathroom was just large enough to fit in. One couldn’t expect much more space this close to Times Square. It didn’t matter. We only needed enough space to hold each other. I picked her up and threw us down together onto the bed and she giggled innocently. As we lay close on our sides, facing each other, I looked into her eyes as if I were seeing blue for the first time and I whispered, “Nothing outside of this room exists.”
“You know that’s not true,” she replied.
I did know it wasn’t true. I knew how this ended. I wanted to be a tree with paper for bark. I wanted to wear her heart for the evening like a well-fitting band of silver and imagine ourselves into this womb-like room for an entire lifetime.
But I only had a few hours until work and she was leaving the city in the morning. How could she treat me like the city? She was just a tourist passing through my soul. She just wanted to experience me for a night and then return to her life. I knew how this ended and I chose to ignore the inevitable calamity. I hoped for a quiet suffering at the very least. I hoped that when she removed herself, it was done quickly and gracefully so the pain could be appreciated for what it was. I knew there was nothing I could say.
Everything I had imagined about her was true. She was soft and delicate and her eyes couldn’t keep contact with mine for long because her insecurities would pull her away. She was just as I remembered, but infinitely more than that as well. Her lips tasted like finality. I had arrived. This was where I was meant to be.
But we knew it couldn’t last. We were scared to check our phones because we didn’t want to believe in the outside world and we didn’t want to know what time it was. How could I leave her? I was ready to complete my journey, as if my whole life had been an expedition to find this hotel room. It was fitting that the most peaceful I ever felt should be in the epicenter of this chaotic city.
I sat out in the hall while she called her fiance. It was dimly lit and I sat under the window, reading the news on my phone as my silence was moderated by the noisy streets below. A warm mixture of different colored neon lights washed the carpeted floor. After a time she opened the door just enough to poke her head out and hide her nakedness and called out for me to return. I didn’t ask her anything because I cared too much and didn’t want her to know it.
There was a moment when I thought that this night was the end of the world. It felt so natural and appropriate to touch my lips to her skin and taste not only her sweat, but a lifetime of confusion and insecurity as well. The moment when I looked into her eyes was the last gasp of air before I drowned. Behind the cellophane she wore to defend her pulsating, isolated vulnerability, I saw the glimmer of a possible future. Maybe it was just a trick on the eye, or something like mistaking a satellite in the night sky for a shooting star. All I could do was hang onto her with my lips and try to dissolve into the room as time slipped away.
Who could possibly know how this was going to end?
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