My friends repeated to me all the things they didn’t like about him; I acknowledged that they were correct and yet I did not agree.

Every time I went to the ophthalmologist they praised how well my bowie eye was healing. 

 

 

There’s a melancholy song by a lilty Norwegian singer I’d taken to playing a few dozen times a day. Its chorus went:

I was going to love you til the end of all daytime

I was going to keep all our secret signs and our lullabies

I was made to believe that our love would grow old

We were going to live in a treehouse and make babies

We were going to bury our ex lovers and their ghosts

Baby we were made of gold —

I played it on loops and wept. If I were in public, I’d have to go to the bathroom to do the latter. If I were at my house I could just weep and not care that no one knew that I was listening to a sad song pantless and weeping, eating olives at my kitchen table. 

I was sitting at a café listening to the song on a Sunday afternoon when he texted and asked what I was up to, asked if I’d like to come over. I packed up my bag immediately. I had no face to save.

It was one of the last nice days of late fall.

He was in his backyard, at a white table with the Times. I strolled up, my nonchalance intentional.

“Oh hello,” he said. I felt all the things I knew I should no longer feel.

“Oh hello,” I said.

He went inside and came back with a shaker and gin and prepared us two martinis. We shared the paper, occasionally looking up to comment on one thing or another. This was it. Whatever was happening, this was right. This was how I wanted to be when I was thirty, and forty, and seventy. I knew this. I realized how wrong