Thrones + Slugs + MORE

“I need you to trust me now so you can trust me in the future.”

He kept alluding that there was someplace for us in the future, a place I couldn’t see. I wanted to believe him that there was some time and space in some imagined future where we’d be together again, but I didn’t. I understood what he meant. Life is long. People who leave come back. There are cycles we can’t even see, already playing out. Two springs ago, we were sitting at a bar drinking a beer, talking, watching a basketball game unmasked. Something we’d never gotten a chance to do together. The last time I’d seen him I drove to a New Jersey airport to pick him up and we’d spent days just in my house together because of the pandemic. We were finally on some semblance of a date we were never really going to get to go on. I once dreamed this man was on a wooden throne staring straight ahead and I was sitting at his feet. He ever slowly leaned down to kiss me before sitting back on his throne. That was our whole relationship. I was one moment, one kiss, one minor vulnerability, a small willingness to dethrone, and nothing more. He was already making a life with someone else. Moving to the city with someone else.

I was supposed to be at karaoke with Gauraa, Elliot, Natty, and Liz, that night in Philly, not listening to his story about how the universe is unpredictable and we could find our way to one another again. My friend had even warned me, “Don’t let him control your time, I know you don’t want to hear this: but let him go.” I didn’t listen. I was texting Gauraa intermittently telling her I planned to meet up later, but I wasn’t going to. I was already wrapped up in anything he wanted to tell me was a possibility. I wondered why he was so invested in telling me there could be more between us in some future that didn’t yet exist. That day, Gauraa and I sat together on a fake leather couch and talked for the first time in person. Her excitement about the magazine, her loveliness, her vibrancy, her sense of humor, and brashness, all so warm and enveloping. Our friendship was just beginning. Things were about to deepen, I could feel it. When her text came through about karaoke I’d justified it. I’ll see everyone another time. I didn’t know it then, but there wouldn’t be another time with him, and there was also no more time to see Gauraa. 

That fall he called, “I owe you several apologies” he’d said when I picked up the phone. He was pulled over on the side of the road on some California cliffside. He was lying down in the back of his car with his phone on speaker. It bobbed on his chest as he talked with me. He was always taking trips alone like this, just scurrying away from everyone and everything.

“I’m sorry about your editor. You were doing important work there.” 

“I don’t think I could have survived the pandemic without the magazine, without you. This is very difficult. It’s very hard to let you go. It’s very hard to let all of this go.”

“I know,” he said. “It can be special and it can end. Both things can be true.” 

“I wanted it to keep going.”

“What? Us?”

“All of it.”

⦿

Last spring I opened myself to someone new. I adored him fearlessly despite his warnings. On the white leather couch in the hotel room, I put my head on his chest and we looked at the Empire State Building together through the port window. Earlier he had recounted the entire plot of An Affair to Remember like it was a bedtime story. Two people romantically involved with two other people, become friends, fall in love on a ship, and make a pact to meet at the Empire State Building in 6 months if they end their other relationships and have made enough room in their lives for one another. The question loomed—did we have enough room for one another after all we’d both been through? 

Earlier, when I briefly turned my back to him in my nightgown, he reached out and touched the inside of my thigh and when I peered back, he smiled and I smiled back, knowingly. The quiet tenderness of the gesture almost broke me. He was quiet and deeply tender, and yet he could also be stern and sometimes haughty—which amused me. Even earlier, he lay on the bed and it was my tongue, and my tongue, and my tongue—. The next morning in MOMA he took photos of something blue and I took photos of something black. After that, we didn’t take any more trips. By August I dreamed I walked into my bedroom and caught him standing over a woman who was sleeping in my bed. He was desperately trying to wake her, get her out before I entered the room. I couldn’t see her face or body, under the covers she almost looked like a duffle bag or segmented worm. In the dream, he realized he’d been caught and stared out the window away from my gaze in glacial silence. Upon waking, I rolled away from the window and kept thinking about her shape under the covers. His baggage. He tried. I thought I’d made enough room for her, his grief for his ex, but I guess not. I felt something slimy in my bed. I threw back the covers to see small spotted leopard slugs near my feet. I half-screamed. I must have tracked them from the yard the night before. I’m a hopeless creature now. I’m just a girl who shares her bed with slugs now. I’m sleeping with slugs now. Slug girl. I flushed them down the toilet. Slugs eat decay–why shouldn’t they set up shop in my bed where all good things die?

⦿

This spring, some nights when I think about Gauraa, and I think about my pandemic relationship in NYC with his new girlfriend, and I think about the man with the baggage who is terrified, I walk to the confluence of the rivers and want to scream between them. How to accept a galaxy of never? A quantum of never. A vacuum of never. A massive of never. The violent sluicing grief of never. When you ask the universe for things, it gives them to you in perverted lamplight, or it’s a circus version of your ask—still—

I THOUGHT THERE WAS GOING TO BE MORE.