Remembrances

I don't remember the first time we met.

I can recall almost every subsequent time. Two-and-a-half years later, walking down a quiet sidewalk in a quiet neighborhood, light fading to deep and clouded greys, and I passed by a stranger, not paying attention -- a small smile and slight tilting of my head, but all unfocused, no eye-contact -- and, two steps later, I heard my name called out, and turned, and it was him. No reason for him to be on that street, that evening -- and he couldn't remember when I was arriving, and was trying to reach me back in the States to find out exactly; he hadn't been home that afternoon to get my message. (Did you think I would come all this way and just...not call you up to say that I was here? And he smiled, and shook his head, but he'd been excited or happy or something else entirely.) He was on his way somewhere else, but we stopped and sat in a small pizza joint, and drank lemon verbena tisane, and watched each other across the tiny table, and smiled quietly. I remember having lunch with him in the restaurant of an unbearably swank hotel -- him saying, by way of explanation, I feel like eating smoked salmon -- and having the vegetarian plate (I can still recall with total clarity the texture of the spring rolls as I broke into them with the heavy silver fork, the taste of crispness and oil and soy saltiness), and how before we went in and found a table he touched the piano in the lobby -- huge and shining -- and found someone who worked there and asked if he could play it; he sat down and ran his fingertips along the keys, played something short and sweet, and beamed (and several hotel front desk-type people stood and watched him, and watched me watching him, and when he thanked them and stood up one of them told him he was welcome to sit and play a little longer, but he grinned at me and looked at them and said that really, he was not a fine enough pianist to do more than just fool around incompetently on such a beautiful instrument, and anyway we needed to have lunch). I remember, later that week, having coffee in an intimidatingly posh cafe-and-chocolate shop -- we sat beside the windows that led out to the deck, or patio (but it was winter, and closed off) and the every-hair-in-place and perfect waitress looked from him to me and back again with the same look that people almost always gave us, when we were anywhere together -- a sort of suspicious disbelief, an edginess (a dear friend who met him told me, once, that the two of us together projected a kind of energy that was so very Real it left one mildly shaken, disturbed, wondering) and we sipped espresso and ate exquisite chocolates, and what we talked about was nothing, and what we didn't say said everything that was needed.

I might recall the later-in-the-evening of the day we met -- sitting on the floor in the living room, near the enormous endlessly tall glass-windowed doors that led out back to the sort-of-patio behind the house, the light late-summer grey-violet fading, and that candle that I'd brought your parents, lit, upon the table. Watching the wax liquefy, and waiting for the small trinkets buried within to be exposed, burning our fingers on the melted wax to pull them out, or paging through my lovely illustrated copy of the Tao Te Ching (I had another one sent to me, that winter, to give to you for Christmas). I know it was a sun-filled afternoon, mid-summer; I expect that it was on the driveway in front of the house, or in the cool-tiled entryway, but I can't quite fix the moment in my mind. (And later in the evening might have been later in some other evening; so many evenings, similar, and melting together and pristine.)

Have I ever told you that I had never known love before I knew you, that I had never loved at all? (And I mean any sort of love, for anyone at all.) You cracked me open and made things possible; you let me taste potentiality, though I doubt I knew it at the time (I'm sure I didn't, even).

A year after I'd moved here, finally in my own tiny apartment, rid of my previous roommate -- the only year I had my own actual plugged-into-the-wall telephone -- I would call you sometimes, in the middle of my night, and almost always when I was drunk enough to feel capable of talking at any length on the telephone. You were always beyond amused at these calls (I remember how I would call occasionally, or you would, when I was back in the States after that year -- how it would all come flooding back to me, how it never made any sense, how your voice was home and nothing else came close). I don't, however, recall anything I ever said to you, or anything you might have said to me. (Later, 5 years later, nearly, you talked about something I'd written in a letter to you, once, and I had no idea what you were talking about. I still wonder about that, now, today.)

I remember 5 years later, after not-quite-two months in Italy, pretending that my life was different (and perhaps, during that time, it was) and it had been almost as long since we had spoken -- different addresses, different phone numbers, no phones at all, and it's so almost-impossible to find someone you've lost when the distance between you is so vast and inescapable. And I'd been in the city for two days, tracked down emails and phone numbers and different people and finally there was your voice on the machine and the message I left you was...what, I wonder? The next day, at her house, and I borrowed her phone to try calling you again, and you were downtown, at a hotel, after a morning concert and a meeting with someone, and I was 20 minutes away from there and rushed from the house to meet you. Walked in and saw you, sitting at a table by the windows, reading a newspaper, and I walked up behind you and paused, and stared at the back of your neck, your cheek, and reached out my hand to touch your shoulder -- you startled slightly, and stood up, turning to face me (you were wearing a fine wool suit and your tie was in your pocket and your face was split with smiling) and you held me so tightly and for so long that when we finally took a half-step away from each other (my hands still on your arms, your hands against my shoulders) the other people in the lobby were watching us, mildly confused and curious. When we walked down the street and you wanted to have lunch -- I'd already eaten but I said I'd be happy to drink tea and watch you have yours.

Have I ever told you, really told you, what you have meant to me, all these years? How you were, in some ways -- in certain hard-to-grasp and fundamental ways -- the beginning of my story? What, though, could I say -- because I could write volumes to you, and about you, and in the end it's all words but I don't know if any of them say what I would like them to. I don't remember the first time that we met (though the many late-evenings after, sitting quietly in candlelit darkness, the many afternoons drinking tea and laughing, those long moments one day, sitting on that park bench, and you stretched out and laid your head in my lap and closed your eyes to the early-summer sky); I wonder if you do, if I asked you, if you would have a story of your own to tell. Because you are what I measure things against, I think -- even though you aren't what I'm waiting for, not really (except, in certain ways, you are). And we are impossible to figure out, to nail down -- we kiss like lovers, still, because that's a line we can't keep from crossing (the categories are inadequate, we need to write a whole new dictionary, break through the old definitions and create our own) -- but what we are is something different, something beyond that. Something both more and less. I can't remember the first time we met, perhaps, because it seems we've always known each other, and so there wasn't some first, beginning moment.

What I remember, clearly, is walking down the street with you that afternoon. And as we walked, I abruptly grabbed your hand, because (I told you this, then, and you smiled with your eyes and squeezed my hand in return, fingers intertwined) the only way I could believe that you were real -- that this was happening -- was if I touched you, kept touching you, did not let go.