I should probably tell you at this point that I don’t write in chronological order. And none of it will be about you. I have never written about a man, ever.
We got off to a promising start. You took hikes the same distance as mine, about five miles, on different sides of town. I thought that was funny. Like we were casting circles, leaving our thoughts to dance behind us, a trail of ephemeral entities that get taken with the fairies. Like we needed somewhere to stomp out the confusion.
You hated covid because we couldn’t go to coffee shops, the museums and the restaurants, your local haunts where you could draw musical inspiration from. You said you wanted things to go back to normal.
To normal. That irritated me. I thought covid was delightful; absurd and entertaining. I enjoyed the craftiness of it, the sneaking around, meeting up on fields, caves and beaches. Driving Mulholland drinking rose in camelbacks, the primitive intensity of apocalypse dating. Looking for men who could build fires and shoplift.
But you were funny, sharp, quick-witted. Stylish and attractive, but in a hyper conscientious way. Awkward and honest in a valuable way.
You showed me your hike and I showed you mine. Yours wound a loop through the hills of highland park, culminating in an impossible pond, dusted with lichen and moss. You told me you were followed by coyotes regularly, and you didn’t know what that meant. When I didn’t have sneakers you spent an hour looking for someone with the same shoe size as mine. Later you would send me a song about that moment, and I appreciated that. I didn’t tell you then, but I appreciated it. It was one of your finer moments.
We had sex with a plastic jesus hanging over us, in a Christmas themed hotel room. I joked that if you couldn’t build me a fort out of blankets, I would never date you again. You couldn’t build the fort, and you also didn’t realize I was joking. If we had stayed together longer, perhaps we would have fallen in love, or perhaps I would have started to hate you. It was better this way.
Maybe I needed a gestation of normalcy, and you needed an existential shake up. It was a vacation of poles.