After a few years away from that particular couch, I started seeing a new therapist at the end of last year. It had been long enough, I sagely determined, after I was felled by a series of really nasty panic attacks—one happened while I was doing a Q&A on stage with some filmmakers. They didn’t notice, nor did the audience, nor (most importantly) the publicists. But it was happening. Me contemplating running off stage, into the Soho afternoon. It was a terrible feeling, and eventually feeling terrible starts to be a drag, so I found, after a fair amount of searching, someone new.

He is in his late 50s and has a kind, open comportment. He’s much more giving and lean-in-and-nod than my last therapist, a sort of prim and watchful gay guy who retired to Florida. I like this new gay guy, I think. Or, I am warming to him. At first, I thought his platitudes and constant quoting of various people were corny. But I have resisted such sentiment for so long, and lack of sentiment hasn’t cured me, so maybe I should try the earnest stuff. He has me meditating for one minute a day. The panic attacks went away.

For a little while, anyway. They’ve been creeping back, when I least expect them, and when I most do. I am afraid of what I am afraid of, I hate what I hate, I feel increasingly indifferent to what I love. Winter hardens care. Do I like movies anymore? Do I like a play, seen on some chilly Saturday afternoon? Maybe it’s just seasonal. Or it’s media malaise in a time of such austerity. They’re trying to lay off the best people while the worst people watch, safe as houses. They’re trying to take the whole thing apart and replace it with nothing. I have worked in my business for 16 years, well over a third of my life, and for the first time it now feels truly dire and terminal and like I need to start making other plans for what to do with the rest of my time here in the waking, working world.

Something I talk about a lot with my therapist is inertia—I use the word constantly. Why can’t I just, why can’t I just, why can’t I just. I know something’s in me, latent under my lazy skin, but it never makes its way to the surface. At least not yet.

Which causes panic, this stasis. I am scared of the drugs that might help, and am resistant to other concrete life changes that might make this better. (I like a glass of wine too much; I’m a fan of my vape.) I have tried avoiding things, I have tried not avoiding things.

I guess it’s not circumstance, really. I have panic attacks when I’m home at night, Andrew asleep in the other room, me watching some murder show or YouTube video (same thing) and suddenly a feeling hits me, the conviction that a blood clot or some other lurking thing is making its way up my body and that this is my sorry, lonely little nighttime end. Here it is, the moment when I’m carried off, when I disappear, when I slip away into nothing.

My parents just finished a cruise, a lifelong wish fulfilled, in South America, hooking around Cape Horn and then exploring the fjords and inlets of Chile. All the reports were good. They had the best time. I had worried about my mom itching for her work email, about my dad being newly 90 years old and maybe feeling exhausted by all the activity. But it seems they managed well. They saw Patagonian cities, they saw mountains rising out of the sea, they saw the shy, retreating edges of glaciers, so quiet and demure in their dying. My mom sent us pictures and I thought most about the glaciers, those last cracking murmurs of a time before. When I was in Alaska for a wedding, years ago now, we went to a park of some kind and the visitor’s center that was once built over a glacier then stood cantilevered over dry land. The ice had crept much farther up the mountain, winking goodbye.

How awful. And yet, in the depths of my hypocrisy, I relish an unseasonably warm day. Whatever lifts me out of winter, I guess. Whatever can drag me out of the feeling that everything is indeed going to ruin—a career, a life, a liver, a future. My best friend moved out of my neighborhood recently, which is sad. But it also affords us the opportunity to explore new territory, to find backyard bars with good deals where we can huddle in forgiving late-winter winds and make uneasy escape plans, where we consider what parachutes could ever be made of.

It’s not always enough, of course. I too often have nights, far too late, when I go pacing around the living room, circling the coffee table in a weird sort of marching step in my underwear, shaking my hands to get the dread to go away. My new therapist has urged me to find what centers me. To think of all that is known and steady.

I try to gather myself and remember the people I have, arrayed across the planet. Andrew, in restless sleep down the hall. My sister in her Los Angeles canyon, surrounded by trees. I walk the room, knees high and somehow defiant, chest straining with worry. And I see my parents, on a boat at the tip of the world, dreaming of lost things.

In the Blue Ridges,
after everyone had gone to sleep,
I saw the most amazing thing.
Deer, so many of them,
with huge autumn antlers,
jumping in front of a car
that was out on those roads
far too late.

It was spectacular,
to seem them,
hopping across the street,
in headlights,
interrupting the night.
Headed toward the river
near the house,
running at winter,
or away from it.

On the plane home,
face pressed against the window
to make sure we weren’t crashing,
I saw a cruise ship,
big and belching and gleaming,
making its way out of New York.
Chancing late hurricanes,
stomach viruses,
other unexpected deer
that might streak across its path.
It was spectacular, too.

In California,
I saw my sister.
All her autumn antlers,
her adaptation,
the new allowances
of her evolution.
Treehouse and ritual,
happy car purring along,
driven hard and far.
She gets slimmer,
more fixed,
with every visit
to her foreign life.
There in the jungle
with its faint view
of a distant city.

We took the plane to New York together,
she a few rows behind,
machine barreling into night.
She’s losing her great house
she’ll stay with a friend
she’s running out in front of my car
and I can see her
only for a second.

From a window.
From a couch
upon which I awoke with a start.
There it was, so clearly:
life passing life,
moment ceding to moment.
I want to know all of it,
to capture this week that we spent.
But it has darted off already.

At my sister’s house
in the canyon
the motion sensor light
would sometimes flick on
while I was trying to sleep.
I imagined intruders,
rapists and murderers,
cult ghosts from fifty years ago,
come wandering old routes.

But it was just an animal,
we told ourselves in the mornings,
over seltzers and coffee,
the sun burning
just behind the hills,
the day in the process
of being reasoned out.

It was just an animal,
we said, we say,
that troubled us.
Nothing more serious
than the nature of all things
to worry about.

On my way home from the mountains—

the collar-bone crook of one mountain,

anyway,

a shadowy place

where a friend has disappeared—

I flew over Atlantic City.

I could almost read the sign

at the top of one of the casino towers

announcing its intent.

It all looked so innocent from above,

though Elmore Leonard, or Louis Malle,

or anyone else

would probably refute that idea

from the ground.

I thought of the wad of cash

in my nightstand drawer.

The smallest of nest eggs—

contained within it:

a bird that will never fly—

conjured up out of the carpet

by the mock-casual press

of a slot machine button.

(You can still pull the lever if you want,

for old time’s sake;

such a gracious, if small, deference

to ritual.)

I was at the Borgata,

with the first and only

love of my life so far,

new to that experience

while I flexed a few perks of my job.

A free weekend away

that turned us a profit.

Technically, it was me who won,

who dropped in the quarter and took the spin.

But we knew, without speaking it,

that it was ours.

We said it out loud anyway;

made a plan for the money,

this two hundred and something crisp dollars,

that would someday buy us more time—

dinner somewhere, a play, a sliver of rent.

I’d switched to an earlier flight,

so I had some sun to see all this.

On the edge of Halloween,

headed into winter,

toward another year

of mutual chance.

The plane dipped over Long Island,

and I got scared for a second,

as I usually do on planes.

A silly feeling, maybe,

when bumping along,

borne aloft

by so much luck.

After a screening this afternoon, I stood on the busy sidewalk of 29th street and smoked my last cigarette of Cannes (having been home for almost a month). I decided to listen to a sad song while I walked back to the subway rather than finishing the latest comedy podcast droning its way into my ears from LA.

It was windy, but the air was still humid and close. The weather felt big, and the tall, tall buildings of almost midtown were enormous. (It is still so boggling to pop back into Manhattan!) I walked the short distance imagining myself at the cinemascope ending of a movie—what a poignant, subtle conclusion it would be, a person simply making their way to the subway after so much has happened.

It is difficult to grapple with what’s happened. Am I the only one finding that? I know that we must admit the important layers of this: we did not die, loved ones were okay, we kept working, held ourselves in the clench of our lives as so much cratered outside. Past that, though, it was tricky. It still is. More than that. Immediately post-vaccination, I felt the airy lift I was supposed to, the world not cracking open but gently re-revealing itself, a shining, outdoor Shangri La that had been hovering there, only hidden, all along.

That feeling lasted just a few weeks, though, as grim news lapped at the edges of the merriment. But it wasn’t really the news—concerning as it is—that sunk me back down. It was more the sudden weight of life, tossed into the pool and crashing down on me just as I was coming up for air. It was the realization that a year and a half—and quite likely longer—does actually change a life, that things will never go back to being the same. And the realization that I no longer really remember what that same was.

I remember parties, and a kind of cross-city ramble resembling the boozy digression of my 20s, but a bit more assured. I remember a rush, a haze, a feeling like I was living some grand existence without ever touching the ground, ever really connecting to any one thing. Of course, there were dull and dire days during all of that, but who would choose to remember those? No, in the abstraction of my mind there is just a sparkling blur, one I have found myself clumsily grasping for as real life has, allegedly, set back in.

I hope I am not alone in this feeling of mourning, this constant fear—a terror, really—that I am scrambling at something entirely irretrievable. Like I am trying to pick up an anecdote midway through, after a long and pregnant pause. Isn’t it so strange, and so sad, that so much is now definitively over, that we are on the other side of an undeniable piece of punctuation. There is no return, really. There is only carrying on, a new limp a part of the portraiture.

My sister and I took a trip in July, she meeting me in France after the Cannes film festival, and that almost felt like a before thing. Except it was charged with difference—masks and tests and all that necessary protocol, yes, but also an ineffable haunt, this little curl of a voice that whispered, “It’s not like it used to be.” I thought maybe it was France, that I’d somehow grown tired of it (spoiled me!), or it was just the weirdness of rumbling around on trains with my sister for the first time in so long, surrounded by people speaking a different language.

But it wasn’t that, not really. It was "not like it used to be" in a sharper, more persistent way, the pebble in my shoe that has me so startlingly aware of the lines and shapes and matrices of the world, all of a sudden. How could anyone, with death so persistent a topic for so long, not grow to see the frayed and finite threads binding us to everything? How are we supposed to enjoy anything fully again, when we’ve had such a regular reminder of its eventual end?

Luck, I’m aware of. Fortune, too. I know that some maudlin post about how out of step with reality I have been feeling is, well, out of step with reality. But there it is anyway, this nagging feeling like maybe we all died already, that what we’re staggering through now is some after-effect, residual but fading. I find myself imagining a membrane that I might step through—back into the life I think I had, or into a future when all of this feels so peacefully settled.

A friend and I found a little tucked away space in a park by the river, a picnic table and an umbrella where we can post up to surreptitiously drink wine and watch the boats on the river. I love those fucking boats, the busy process they confirm, New York chugging along in its infinite capacity. You can see the planes from Newark, too, a view recently stolen from my building’s roof by some hideous new condo building tinkering its way upwards to blot out the sky. There, in that park, the East River breezes whispering a calming song, I begin to feel re-clarified, certain again about my mind and my body and their place in—as Mary Oliver wrote—the family of things.

That feeling is fleeting, though. Then it’s back into the plainness of life, the sensation that everything has flattened into some tiny fragment of what it once was. I have to trust—I hope you trust, too—that we’ll get it all back. Or, rather, that a new and thorough thing will slowly bloom in the old thing’s place, for those of us lucky enough to still be alive and, for all the wear of age, healthy enough.

A few years ago, I wrote a poem about a restaurant in Cannes, in which I wondered what it might be like to revisit it in the future. I found it again this year. It was still open, though I think it has a different name. And the little burbling fountain that stood next to its outdoor seating was silent and dry. So there it was, still plugging along, just a bit hobbled by circumstance, a little less pretty than it was in more ideal times.

I hope I get to wander by it again next year. I hope that the person glimpsing it then feels fuller, sturdier, more sure of the weight and consequence of his presence. That he knows he did not disappear into the couch, was not wholly lost to worry, did not irrevocably snap some tether that linked him to the great and troubled and bitterly missed past of his life.

The song I put on, walking to the subway in all that huge weather today, was this. I love its swell, its grandeur, its reminder that some stuff is not entirely reducible. It stays, small and determined and indelible as the new scar on my shin, from when I tripped on my suitcase, the night before I got back on a plane, cursing in the dark, forgetting how grateful I was to be feeling it at all.

Breath of the Wild

I can see One World Trade from Andrew’s apartment. Before the disease, I would look at it and sort of sigh proudly and say, “Hey, there’s work!” Because my office is there, but also because, there was, actually, work—Manhattan, the tall world, teeth of dreams. Now it’s this weird hazy memorial statue. At 7PM the pots and pans start banging, and thus we know it’s 7PM again. Sometimes I look at the tower and think what a metaphor it is now, this thing poking up to remind us of a past terrible, world-changing thing—I guess a monument to time both remembering and denying it—amidst another terrible, world-changing thing.

It’s nice to be with Andrew at this angle, to be on his bed, some soft part of him against me; the fuzz of his hair, the warm of his cheek. When I see 1WTC in these spare days, it’s from such a considered distance: against Andrew’s solid mass, a building in the corner of my eye. A whole past. A future, too, sure.

I started playing a Legend of Zelda game, this expansive thing that lets you wander and wander and wander. You, in the shape of this pretty elf or whatever he is, can climb and run and swim for hours and never end up anywhere in particular. It’s a gorgeous game; there’s a mission hovering around its edges, but mostly it wants you to hang and explore. Sometimes when I am on Andrew’s bed and I see the dim column of that faraway building, I feel so choked and small that I have to turn on the Nintendo and let Link go running for a while. No direction really intended. Just the freedom of his flight, across some brilliantly lit expanse. The game is terrific, enveloping. What a thrill to get lost.

You find the borders though, eventually. Some wall gradually looms up to greet you; there is a lonely moment when the game literally says, “You can’t go further.” What a familiar bump, huh? Chasing limits is a short little run these days, the quickest sprint to the end of the room, to the edge of what’s comfortable or reasonable. I finally said it to Andrew yesterday, because I finally meant it: “I’m so bored,” I whined. I wanted to go to a restaurant or sit at a bar with a big balloon glass of wine. 

We’re looking at apartments. We were supposed to move this month, but that’s obviously been delayed. It’s odd to dig into home—my creaking IKEA bed, the bad desk, all the stuff I thought I’d be so committed to, three years ago—while knowing it’s temporary. I bought an area rug and a new microphone setup because I podcast from home now—reader, I podcast!—and it feels wrong to have made even that commitment. I’m outta here so soon, any month now, and Andrew and I will have our own needs that surely won’t include this $40 rug, that surely can’t accommodate the long reach of the boom.

My sister left LA finally, decamped to Rhode Island once it was safe enough. She’s with my parents, and they are beckoning me there. I can’t imagine visiting them. What might I bring with me? I don’t want to get them sick, but also a shameful little part of me also wonders if I might miss the closeness of this experience, the tight neatness of quarantine, the order of its demand. Won’t I feel that much less clean once I’ve left the terrible bubble? I’ve been so proud of myself for doing nothing, for staying so small—I did my very best shrinking into nothing! 

You can buy a house, as Link, in the video game. You spend some money and then spend some more to make the place nice. It’s a whole complicated thing in the game, that then kicks off a whole other complicated thing that has nothing to do with the main narrative, nothing to do with beating the bad guy. I did it all with relish, spending and spending and spending until my little Link—I like to dress him in short-shorts and a topknot—had a place where he could store his unwanted shields and swords, where he could sleep. It’s become important to me, that he can sleep. My charge, who couldn’t possibly ever care.

I got bored and complained about it this weekend. No one listened, as they shouldn’t have. Who wants to hear about Cannes! Who do I know, all of a sudden, who really cares about all the busy bullshit of my life now that it means nothing? I’ve sat on a friend’s roof a few times recently, and from there you can see the LIRR rattling east. It’s nice to see some motion. I want to hop on the roof of the train, like in an action movie. Grip its edges, have it take me all the way out to the end of the island. When Andrew and I went to Montauk last fall, my first time there, it was so underwhelming. There was a whole thick town with a street fair, when all I’d expected was a lonely lighthouse with one troubling nightclub thumping at its feet. There was no Surf Lodge to be found in October, so we just wandered, my shoulder happily against his as we walked. 

I can’t wait to explore like that again. Sometimes, as Link, I stand and make the camera twirl around him, my right thumb pressing on the joystick to make a lazy circle. He’s so beautiful! I feel a shudder of silliness, of sadness, of a kind of longing it’s too embarrassing to explain, looking at him in all his possibility. Sometimes I warp him to somewhere else, just to shake off that clenching feeling. And sometimes I turn the game off and join Andrew in the living room, where a little more life is happening. His roommates alert about something on the TV, me stumbling in from the imagined world, still so shocked to find us all here. 

I was walking somewhere in Brooklyn on Saturday, braced against the bitter cold, trying to find something nice to look at that might rescue the day from feeling impossible. I found myself on the same block that a guy I dated years ago used to live on, an unremarkable stretch of brownstone-ish buildings interrupted by a dip in the road, a rare New York hill, made so cars can pass safely under the track of an elevated shuttle train. Near the end of the block, I saw a faded blue building, paint chipping, one edge against an empty lot, that sudden break into a view distinguishing this house from all its tightly tucked neighbors. 

There was something lovely about its pale color, there in that particular mid-late winter afternoon light; the sun holding for a longer linger than it had just a few weeks before, something almost conciliatory, apologetic about its last glow before giving the day away. I noticed something about the building, or rather recognized something about myself in it, a memory of being a teenager, taking a weekend photography class at the Art Institute of Boston. They’d send us out, then a little further into spring, still cold but thawing, to capture interesting things we saw around town. For me, it was so often buildings like these. When my parents moved, we unearthed so many black and white photos, all badly developed by me, showing the artless cracks, the mundane wear of things, in a way I thought, back then, was really quite artful. 

I liked that little moment of connection, between the ardency of past me—trying so hard to see something; to show it, too—and the fleeting attention of my current self. It probably was a pretty building on that block in Brooklyn, maybe was a meaningful second that I spent rushing past, west toward what was left of the light, and to the place awaiting me, warm and populated by a few friends, fixed for a few hours as anything ever can be. 

Later that night, I went to Andrew’s. He’s working all weekend on a new experiment, up there in the mysterious lab in Washington Heights that I’ve still not seen. He was waiting all day for mice to poop, so he could study and submit the samples, to see what passed through them and how, if maybe something can be gleaned from all that, something that could—in some iteration, some development, years from now—save someone’s life. Those brave mice will be cut open on Wednesday, for further study. I told a friend in LA about that gruesome part of Andrew’s work and she, an animal rights activist, flinched. I explained that there was a greater good being served by all those inspected turds, those sad, tiny piles of guts. She grimaced and at least agreed to pretend to agree with me, so dinner could continue and we could talk more about what was going to win best picture. 

Andrew was tired, and grumpy, from a day sort of wasted on waste. I tried to make him feel better by offering an enveloping kind of cuddle, wrapping myself around him as we sat on the couch and watched part of a James Bond movie. He eased a bit, falling back into the sofa until we both started to nod off. I shook myself awake and said goodnight, back to my apartment down the street, so he could get some good rest and face the mice again tomorrow in a fresher mood. It was even colder outside than I remembered from just an hour or two before, the kind that numbs your legs through your jeans, makes you pity yourself in some vast, Russian way.

I thought I’d brought the cold to Los Angeles when I went last week, as it dipped down into the high 40s most nights I was there. It seemed so strange, to be shivering on Santa Monica Boulevard. Surely, it was my fault. I’d carried it with me in my tightly packed suitcase, stuffed with a suit and otherwise all the wrong clothes. But another friend told me, “No, we do have a little winter here.” Then the next day it was in the mid 70s, gloriously sunny, the sky clean and smog-free so you could actually see the mountains ringing the basin like forbidding walls. I see them as forbidding, but I know many people who live there see a kind of protective promise in them. That you can drive up into them and see all they contain and then, past them! Past them a great expanse of desert and more. Or you can stay in their wide embrace and just go to the beach, unbothered by the rest of America. Me, I feel penned in. But they were still nice to see, to quietly acknowledge their presence on that warm day, as my sister and I crossed over the foothills, into the Valley, in search of breakfast. 

Andrew and I are going to move in together in the spring, at the end of May. It’s an exciting prospect, one that will perhaps give a gentler, less urgent framing to grumpy nights, to days when I am sad and searching for something life can’t provide on any one afternoon. The routine of it, the comfort of knowing—Protection! Possibility!—sounds to us like a good thing. I believe it will be. Walking on that street in Brooklyn, with the peeling blue house and the forlornly forgiving light, I thought, Maybe we’ll look on this block. Maybe we’ll find some home here. I imagined myself suddenly zooming into the future, taking a hard turn off the sidewalk and up toward one of the buildings. Finding new keys in my pocket somehow and letting myself in to my new life. The rest of this season skipped entirely, in favor of yet another something else.

I saw a sailing class in Venice
crisp white boats
with numbers on their sails
coursing in a gentle circle on the lagoon.

I was on the vaporetto
heading to some movie,
and it was funny to be there,
all the way there, in this postcard city,
and thinking about Martha’s Vineyard.
Where I also saw a sailing class,
on a pond below James Taylor’s house,
when I was on the island with Andrew.
It was early August then,
now seeming so summery, so faraway,
only a month later.

I had this strange realization,
while rumbling in our island car
to a little fishing town,
that just a year ago,
not even a year,
I didn’t know any of these people.
But then there I was,
headed somewhere with them,
feeling some sense of belonging.
At least with Andrew,
smiling fellow,
face soft with the contentment
of being where one wants to be.

It’s something,
the swiftness of learning.
To so passively maneuver
time’s invisible turns.
A year from now,
what will be surprising?
What will be the bumpy little amazement,
when I suddenly come to,
and find the constant of myself,
that eternal always-me,
for a brief second again?

Surely between now and then
it will mostly seem the present,
bobbing along.
I won’t take many moments
to note where I am,
how I got there,
to feel the steadying, startling grip
of context.
One just takes the boat to the place
without thinking.
Steps off,
feels the day’s particular sun,
and trusts its warmth.

My parents sold their house. The house they bought before my sister and I were born, in that weird slip of time I’m told was the late 1970s. They’re moving to Providence, city of my father’s birth, and a place where a modest condo can be bought, for two people facing next and (yes, we all must admit) maybe final chapters. Over the 4th of July holiday, I spent a teary two nights in the house, going wandering in Boston with a friend and then, just as it was time to leave for the train, taking last passes through the small expanse of the place. I cried. I made myself cry? I don’t know if the tears were real or forced or if forced tears aren’t actually real. But I did. Almost wept. My mom pulled the car out of the driveway and there was my dad, good old Dad, walking the dog up the hill, the last time I’d ever see that. I blubbed, discretely, until my mom asked me a question and then it was hard to hide. “It’s just a building,” she said, which is what I’d told myself, what my therapist had told me. It’s just a building. Just a thing that teemed with all the stuff of our lives for 40 years. And now it’s not.

The day before this goodbye, my family and I went to a wedding. My cousin’s kid got married, an assemblage of people I’d not seen in at least 20 years. It was held at a country club south of the city, and was full of that kind of straight wedding swagger I hate so much—is there no worse sight in the world than groomsmen in suits clutching bottles of beer? That effortful commitment to male casualness amidst the formalness? It speaks to such an ease, the way these men move through the world, that my sister and I were repulsed by it. During the wedding, a long and violent thunderstorm rolled in. But just before that, my family and I wandered the grounds of the country club, walked along the ridge of a hill that offered a view of the city, the whole of Boston laid out there in the hazy, humid distance. The four of us there, lined up and regarding it. It felt like a maudlin farewell. To this city we’ve all been so tethered to, just then rendered so small, so faraway. 

I traveled a lot this summer, more than I had planned. I went to Provincetown for a few nights, my new favorite place, and felt the mid-June thrill of all that. I went to Los Angeles, mostly for work—a grinding reporting assignment that has yet to bear fruit but still could be something good, I hope—but also to see my sister. She’s so good at day trips, feeling so blessed with a car, and we drove up to Ojai, spent a late morning and early afternoon in its clenching, clean heat. We hiked a short distance to a waterfall, where barefoot kids were laughing and dogs were shuffling around. We went into town, roaming an outdoor used bookstore where I searched for my own book and, as ever, came up short. I’d heard so much about Ojai and, while finding it beautiful, was surprised by how little it offered. “You have to be rich to enjoy it,” I said to my sister as we got back in her car and, sealed up in the air conditioning, drove back to the city. 

In Los Angeles, I spent a lot of time holed up in my hotel, a once-trendy place on the Sunset Strip that has a thumping pool club and is just the right amount of uncomfortable to feel cool. It’s a full-service place, so I could take my meals there, do drinks on the patio, barely leave the confines of it. I went a little crazy, swaddled up in the gray blanket of that place—its easy, healthy-ish, sour food, its lukewarm sauvignon blanc mood. I felt like I was there for a whole long Shining winter, growing a beard and going insane and locating some truer kernel of myself than I’d ever known existed. I let myself skitter out into the night on occasion, to see friends and revel, just a bit, in the riot of a city I hate. (I’m sorry, L.A. friends. I have tried so hard to like Los Angeles, but it makes me so stressed and unhappy and full of constant Sunday Scaries that I have to hate it. That said, I can’t wait to visit again.) But mostly I was alone, conducting halting interviews on the phone, pacing around in my cold room while tall trees fluttered in the balcony window. One uneasy afternoon, I watched a bug crawl around the enormous beanbag chair the hotel provided and figured it knew what to do with this lump of furniture more than I did. 

I just got back from Fire Island, another place I have tried to love and—unlike L.A.—might finally be done with. What a dream of an idea that place is, and yet in execution, or at least in my admittedly narrow experience of it, what a drab and horny and exhausting thing it actually is. I don’t fit in there at all, which is a strange sensation for someone who has prided himself on being able to adapt, to quickly recover, to renegotiate physical and social spaces as needed. Fire Island, the Pines in particular, is a bridge past a bridge too far, I’m afraid. Not because I don’t admire its moxie, its Speedo tan-ness, its louche, buggy reverie. I love that people love it. I just feel sad that Fire Island is something like Paris—a beautiful dream I’ll never be able to actually step into, that I’ll never feel filling me like air, like smoke. (I Juul now—another life update.) But it’s good to have that conclusion—to know, because of increasing adulthood and experience, that it, hey, just isn’t for me. I wish it the best. I wanted to blow a kiss to the island as the ferry puttered away back toward Sayville. Goodbye, place! Goodbye, dream! Goodbye all you wonderful people who partied and yearned and grieved and fucked and fell in love there. See you in Ptown, maybe. All you lively ghosts, living and dead.

Fall trips loom. Film festivals, which are so much fun. I’m going to Venice for the first time, next week, and I am so stressed and excited and curious. I booked an Airbnb that’s not near the movies, that’s on the main island with all the canals and handsome gondoliers and luring, leering pasta. (My Fire Island diet nearly killed me, readers.) I chose holistic life experience over festival ease in booking that place and I hope I don’t regret it. And then it’s straight on to Toronto, a festival I love, a town I am growing to like, with people I know and with whom I’m so ready to pretend it’s summer camp again. Fall camp. Autumn camp. What a good time that will be.

But it will keep me away. I’ve been away so much this year, which has been exhilarating—I gave an award out on stage at a loud gay discotheque in Guadalajara, Mexico!—but also lonely, and denying. The thing I’ve sort of stylistically held for the end here is that I fell in love this year, and while it’s a new-ish, only nine-month relationship (“We have a baby,” I said to Andrew tonight), it’s still a totalizing thing. It’s impossible to look at all of this—parents moving, cities roiling, islands churning—not through the lens of that. How terrifically grounded I have felt this year, to something good and happy and intimate and huge in its smallness. This is the first time I’ve really written about him—a scientist, a smiler, a kind and gentle person who calms me and encourages me—and it feels a little scary to type it out. But there he is, suddenly a center. 

When I was home over the 4th, my mom told my sister and me a story about our cousin, the one whose kid got married at the country club. I guess when this cousin was little, a toddler maybe, she would often say, “I need something.” Just that. That quiet little unspecific thing. “I need something,” she’d say in a small voice, tugging at pant legs and looking up at the adults hoping they’d understand and satisfy whatever it was she was asking for. I’ve thought about that a lot since my mom told us about it, there in the backyard I’ll never see again. I need something. I need something! I NEED SOMETHING! 

Of course we all do. Need something. Need so many things. I get corny, thinking about it. I want to say what a mad and blissful and terrible adventure it is, to go chasing after that need. It is. But, again, that’s hokey. So I guess I’ll just end this ramble with a little moment, from Fire Island. I went to bed early one night, and was half asleep when some of the boys of tea came home. I heard them rumbling around upstairs in the living room, muffled laughter and bottles opening. It reminded me of being a kid in the house I grew up in, that will now be lived in by a nice family from Framingham who wrote a heartening letter to my parents about how much they loved the house. That feeling of life happening just beyond the light under the door. And maybe it is. But in that room on Fire Island that night, there was also the beautiful dark, also the hum of the air conditioner, the whine of the mosquito, and there was me, breathing and blinking and alive. That was so much, too. 

On my way home from a party,
stuck at a sandy little airport in California,
I thought I saw an old friend.
Her ghost, there in a row of seats,
head bent toward her phone,
like the rest of us.

I was tired,
delirious with a small sadness.
From having to leave the sun,
having to say goodbye
to so much warm adventure.
For just less than a second,
I actually thought it might be her.
Found, after all these years,
out traveling,
on her way to Phoenix,
or Chicago.
It once felt like we were all headed to Chicago,
so maybe it would only make sense,
for her to be finally going there now.

I shook that off, of course.
Instead spent
just a couple beats more,
marveling
at how similar this girl’s features were:
the same forehead at feline tilt;
rosy bulbs of cheekbones;
shoulders solid with purpose;
sitting still as knowing.

I was wrapped in the lull
of airport-bar white wine,
that expensive, lukewarm blanket,
and plodded past the ghost—
or, the idea of the ghost—
and over to where I needed to be.

She followed me into the air,
shaking me awake once,
the plane bumping over a state
where she’d never been.
I almost murmured to her,
under the drone of the plane.
I wanted to, half asleep,
assure her.
That I’d seen her.
Saw her glint
drifting through that girl
in Burbank.
Which isn’t so sandy, really,
or so small an airport.
That just sounded like a nicer place
to see my friend.

It was cold when I got home,
and late.
I felt scared of my neighborhood,
dark and frigid in the slip of a new day.
It was windy,
and there was some insistent noise.
Something industrial.
Half a churn, half a moan.
There are a million things in Brooklyn
that it could have been.
But I’d never heard its particular sound,
at least not then, at three in the morning,
the only one awake for what felt like miles.

Even the cats,
new to the house
but already proudly settled,
didn’t stir.
One of them, big orange rooster,
was folded up on the kitchen rug,
still as answers.
I thought of him
when I was back in my room,
willing sleep,
the wary sensastion of the noise
still persisting.
I felt a sudden jolt,
an impulse to creep to the kitchen
and watch him sleep.
To lean in the doorway,
that sturdiest of spots,
and, just in a whisper,
say “Boo!”

We found the time machine
Just over the farthest bridge
Beyond it the hills bent their way
Toward Ohio, and, somewhere,
The ocean.

It was metal rusted over,
With a pushbutton top.
You knew how to get in,
Had been in it before,
Folded yourself into the chamber
Waved your hand to me.
Just enough room for both of us.

And when we turned it on,
With whispers and levers,
It wasn’t a whir, or a flash of light.
Just a paper bag uncrinkling
A few of our laughs in reverse.

When it was done, when we were ready,
We stepped out, limb by limb.
Spiders out of the shower drain.
And the whole world
Was young again.
There were the first flecks of beards.
The giddy porch knees.
The thump of music
Humming in golden rooms,
deep inside houses.

We threw our heads back
And spoke our language.
We put on plays,
Were swept up into snowy nights.
We felt drunk and dumb again,
Our shoes newly resoled,
Our insides less tape and glue.

“We’re plums, or bumblebees,”
we thought.
“We’re airplanes.
Calm, blooming hearts.”
We found every old corner
Only they were full of people now.
The long lost Sarahs,
The forgotten Jons.
We could see each and every hand
That built the applause
When we bowed
And everyone thanked us
For bringing them back.

When I woke up,
Winter dripping away outside,
You’d gone off again
Down the bare-limbed street.
My clothes were in piles,
Messy ziggurats,
On a small patch of your new floor.

I rose up and away,
The cheering, dirty city
Standing softly.
The rivers stumbling and rolling
Into each other.
The bridges crisscrossing them forever.
Like the cargo boats I saw while landing.

I imagined they’d come
From exotic ports, faraway.
Tangiers, or Sydney.
But none quite so knowing,
The way places are,
As Pittsburgh.
Noises and light disappearing
Over its steep hills.
Gray like gray has ever been.
Green like green will ever be,
In our little giftbox future.

Your hands still moving through its air.
Making a point,
Celebrating some grand or silly idea
That had suddenly struck you,
Had just risen up between us,
While walking.