Yesterday, on the way to work, I was sitting on the N train and this man walked on and he had blondish hair, a wide nose, a coarse brow, and deep lines on either side of his mouth. He looked just like someone I knew but twenty years younger. I don’t know that man anymore, a decision that was mine. I was either going to continue knowing him and be irritated or see his face in strangers. Years ago, he wrote a novel and I could tell that the protagonist was a teenage version of himself. He was aloof, charming, complicated, troubled but dreamy. He was the fucked up all American boy, who I use to fantasize having when I was a teen. I met him in his 50s and I remember thinking, if I met him when he was young, this would have been a bad romance. I didn’t realize that I was speaking about the present. There was no version of him and I in the past, there was only now. I wrote in my journal, don’t keep communicating with him. I felt like I was falling for his teenage self. I wrote that he had tragedy all over him.
This was January, 2023. It was a barren time. I always took to the term barren. I recently quit a hotel management job the previous November. I had gone on a cruise for my friend’s 40th birthday that month and when I returned, my coworker said, “We didn’t think you’d come back,” aka I would quit. I had no conscious intention of leaving my job, but maybe those words seeped into my brain and flicked a nerve. The night I left, I was halfway into my two week notice when I was left alone at the front desk. And when I say alone, I mean alone. I didn’t even have an engineer on duty in case a pipe broke or if a toilet was clogged. I had been in control of the music that played in the lobby and I put on Bjork’s Debut because it reminded me of being young and angsty and riding in the back of my parents’ car. I thought it could help calm my nerves.
What I didn’t expect to happen was that I was unable to find a job afterwards. I didn’t want to work for hotels anymore, but they’d been my lifeline for almost fifteen years. It’s how I paid my rent, and honestly, I was pretty good at the job. I may bug out and have mini meltdowns (my husband and my best friend have seen me as a feral, shrieking animal) but I know how to keep my calm around people, especially people I don’t know. But the jobs I applied to weren’t responding and the ones that did, even ones that involved a call with the GM, just didn’t pan out. Days turned into weeks, which turned into months.
While I was living in my own existential wonder world, the author, the lost teen, the bad romance man asked me to make art with him. And I liked what we made but it was telling of who we were to each other. Our collaboration didn’t go as deep as I wanted. We combined his art and my writing and the two didn’t quite meet. They sort of laid on top of each other. I trust that there was intimacy on each side, but there was never a merge. Art imitates life and vice versa.
I had what I needed at that time, although need is not want. What I needed was security of some kind. I had it with my husband, with our home, with our outdoor cats we never touched, who would wait on our back porch, not so patiently, but repetitiously, every morning and evening to be fed. My mother gave me money, which she was in need of herself, to help with my portion of rent. I had some people, men, older men, interested in my writing and were speaking highly of me. These are things that I don’t forget.
That summer, I went on an impromptu trip to Italy, paid for by someone who I shared a bed with, in a grotto style room, lined with walls of limestone. I hadn’t been to Europe before and I just turned 40 and it was a gift. But nothing was sticking. Relationships weren’t sticking. Job opportunities weren’t coming to fruition. Intimacies that I wanted were not met. And while life was still being lived, I knew that nothing was concrete. I think very few things are concrete but I needed a home, a place to be, in addition to the home that my husband gave me, in addition to the fragmented home I grew up in that always had complications but was never absent of love, in addition to the home that my best friend and confidant has given me since I was eleven. I needed a place to land, where I could grow.
An hour ago, I finished a book called The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan. It’s about a closeted man in the 1950s, who lived three or four different lives. He always felt like he didn’t live enough, although his stories and history described anything but. What I was so impressed by (I’m not easy to impress) was the way that Patrick made a fictional story that was round and complete and somehow managed to infuse his own voice and point-of-view. And he did it in such a way, that his voice wasn’t put on the characters, it was in them, and you couldn’t tell a difference between the two. The main character is a man who is always a bit on the outside of his experiences. There’s a moment where he says he hasn’t lived, and yet, the reader has lived with him. I’d like to remember that. We’re always planning and trying and seeking and we move towards what we think is next.
When I look back at that time, two years ago, when it felt like I was swimming with nothing around me, I remember that maybe I needed to be in water. It may have been necessary to feel like I was bobbing in an ocean and an island was not yet in sight. Even if I reached land, there’s still a question of what I’d do once I got there.