How Life Works

On heartbreak.

9:30 AM in class and you text me that you got a job. Los Angeles for the summer. God’s cruelty winks at me when I think about our two summers together, you a stay-at-home son stretching dollars and me schlepping work clothes from 116^th and Riverside to Bryant Park for eight hours in a cold office. Anything to sleep together, or so was the logic at the time. Love makes no sense. I’m bitter over here now; where was this then? God’s irony winks at me as I remember that I was always trying to change you, and of course that change only arrives once I’m gone. Of course I had to leave in the first place for what I wanted in you to ever see the light of day.

This is how life works, and people. We crush together in a blitz and we ride it out, as far as it can go, and now something’s lost but so much is gained in the detritus, for somebody else. This is how life works, the ceaseless letting go, the uncarving, the narrowing. We shed and shed and shed. We diverge. A faithful person would say we taught each other exact lessons at an exact time and destiny rang the bell when they were learned. Or when they weren’t, and should’ve been. We untether and repel away like magnets.

And I’m crying, for some reason, in the bathroom outside my class at 9:32. We fill our cups with more life and the life crowds around itself in time and neither of us fit in each other’s anymore with all that new space. Where do you go if you keep living? Where am I supposed to put you. I don’t find you in music, or the foods we liked, or the places we went, like I thought I would. I find you in my body. My lips have a harder time forgetting than my memory. I surprise myself with that tender and girlish vocal register I haven’t reached in two months. Words like “baby” and “sweetie” make my heart drop. I feel you in the pressure around my eyes, my tears, the back of my neck, my hair, my feet. I hear you in my head all the time. I can imagine other men so I think I’m healed but I know I cannot open with them. Not because it hurts or I’m scared, but because they are not you, and I don’t know who I am, in love, without you.

The vindictiveness returns; you took something from me. Not virginal innocence but psychic self-protection. You sanded all my edges and got to the heat of me, the hot core, and you let it melt everywhere and you accepted me and you loved me even more at that center. Kissed me at 2 pm in broad daylight, sober. Held my hand and my gaze. And you stitched yourself into my most primal understanding of love so that every man I ever meet in your wake will be leveled against what you meant to me. What a shame, then, that this is how life works. ◆

This short essay is part of a larger, forthcoming collection titled KEEP DYING.