I cannot see beyond it

after Sharon Olds

Looking up the history of my apartment building while waiting for dinner with you, apparently an old mansion spliced up into rentable units: vestigial chandeliers adorning the hallways, decades piled on top of one another like layers of sediment. Stratigraphers the two of us nursing our waters. Back to your place, and then I leave for mine for the night, walking the same twenty minute walk I’ve traced dozens of times by now, body almost on autopilot, aware of the traffic patterns with no conscious effort at all, leaving another fine layer of embodied memory for the next time I make the trek. With my eyes closed, even.

The downpour last Friday had me rushing into a Duane Reade to buy an “emergency poncho” like a schmuck. When I got to the yoga studio, water in my boots, I caught you on the way out and insisted you take it. Descending the stairs you kissed my hand before you went.

“True Love,” by Sharon Olds:

I open the window and snow has fallen in a

steep drift, against the pane, I

look up, into it,

a wall of cold crystals, silent

and glistening, I quietly call to you

and you come and hold my hand and I say

I cannot see beyond it. I cannot see beyond it.

I cannot see beyond it. In class I lie down on the mat with the blanket pulled up over my face like a death ritual. Breathing in, loosening my grip on all that has come before, submitting also to anything that might come next. Reduced to a point of light on a trajectory dark and uncertain. Then, every experience a foregone conclusion, something that has already happened and was always going to happen. A sense of impossible timelessness to it—causality shorn away and mere sensation and epiphany lingering in loose spatial relation, in a realm untethered from time’s incessant march.

Around this time last year I was walking San Francisco many miles a day. Around this time two years ago I was bedridden with bronchitis in our apartment in Sunnyvale, California. Around this time three years ago I was in Austin high and falling in love with you all over again.

They don’t tell you that as you age you don’t naturally break through to some ecstatic clarity: instead, life only becomes more complicated, composed of more sediment compressed down upon older sediment, more concerns to consider, more owed and more owned. The struggle is to remain free in the richness of the present even as you become increasingly haunted. Inexorable: from Latin, meaning “unable to be moved by begging or pleading.” Example usage: “inexorable progress.” To beg with life, to ask feebly on bended knee to just let me stay in the infinite now, like a pearl enclosed in the tender flesh of the mollusk.

I loved you, which meant we tried to stop time together. I asked you if you wanted to hang out forever and then I joked that I put in a calendar event for it, which I didn’t, because I couldn’t. Nevertheless we made a heroic effort: we ritualized, tried to make the old new every year. But everything jostled against itself in the rivers of time. Oft-repeated phrases of adoration grew stale and began to chafe, while other once-presumed axiomatic shared values silently drifted too far to reconcile.

It’s already over. In every moment, whether painful or pleasurable, knowing there is a point in time in which this is all already over.

Upstate last weekend I nearly fell in the rushing white waters, nearly fell save for your grip steadying me. Safely we made the passage from one bank to the other, in one long chain of hands in hands granting deliverance from the river’s inexorable flow. I loved you so much in that moment, my feet sliding against smooth mossy stone, the sun warming my shoulders, your bright laughter a beacon on the other side. I wasn’t swept away; I was free. You made me free.

I quietly call to you and you come and hold my hand. You come and hold my hand and you kiss it. You kiss it and you drop it. It’s raining outside; you have my emergency poncho.