In Praise of Flings

Occasionally I write an essay that I just like, even if I don't really believe altogether...even if I think of myself as being more of an unreliable narrator than usual. I'll either just like the flow or the voice or a combination of both.

This was written for a class on the personal essay taken in November 2010. The text, including the note at the end, is the original. (Originally published 11/02/2010)

I sometimes think that I have loved best those who I have loved least: the women who I’ve had flings with, the women who never knew me. I am not talking about the vulgar rutting of drunken hook-ups, mind you. Hook-ups imply a certain coarseness that I avoid. No, the women with whom I have had flings were loved, if only briefly. And perhaps because it was so briefly that I can say that I loved them best. I did not burden them by giving them all my heart, but that did not stop me from giving them all of my adoring attention.

            In a relationship, passion eventually subsides. Eros gives way to subtler things. Subtler things succumb to the weight of the mundane and couples, despite their protestations and promises to the contrary, begin taking each other for granted. Every couple thinks they are the exception to this rule, but every couple recognizes this as a rule. “We’ll never be like that,” they say to each other and their friends reassuringly, but in a year or two or three or even less…they’re arguing over whose turn it is to take out the dog or who forgot to pay the fucking cable bill again or why the hell they hang out with that idiot and drink so much. It happens. It’s always sad when it does, but it happens. It’s not that everything goes to Hell all at once or that people shift gears and remain that way, but let’s face it…the passion is the first to go. And why shouldn’t it? You’ve got them, right? He’s not going to find anyone better than you, right? And she sure as Hell better not step out on you or else…right? Sure, you’re not just an option. Not just a choice. Nope. No…they would never…perish the thought!

            In a fling, the passion is all there is: two strangers absolutely and very simply desiring each other. Nothing else is expected or even wanted. Sometimes this lust emerges from some other desire. I love how you think. But sometimes it is very simply a glance on the sidewalk of a strange city, or a smile in a hotel lobby, or just a chance meeting with a stranger. I am not sure it matters what lights the fuse. Once it is lit, there is no turning back. Desire has a force of its own.

            When a relationship is new; when love is burgeoning, the entire world seems new. This feeling is a neuro-chemical effect, yes, but that does not detract from its power to intoxicate, to free us from the mundane, to liberate us from the personas that we must adopt in order to keep the peace, to maintain stability, to get along. Flings are everything wonderful about those first precious days or weeks or months, distilled into a matter of hours or a long weekend. Rather than end in a break-up or a screaming argument in front some awful restaurant where you’ve had your last sullen meal, a fling ends in a long glance back over your shoulder as your lover disappears into a crowd or a final kiss at the airport, your clothes still slightly askew. Better than that though, a fling leaves you with a feeling of possibility.  If it is possible to meet and love a perfect stranger, even if only for a day or two, what else might be possible? What else have you been overlooking in your life? What else can you do?

            Detractors will say that it cannot be love if it’s a stranger during a fling that you’re talking about, but I disagree. Chemically, there’s no difference. The brain doesn’t know any, that’s for certain. Dopamine floods the DA receptors. Serotonin levels diminish to obsessive levels, making it possible to pay attention to every new square inch of unmapped warm skin, still hot from a shower or just freed from rain-damp clothes. Oxytocin flows, adrenaline lights a fever, and everything comes alive in a chemical explosion of perfection, of longing, of wanting, of yes and yes and yes and yes. All of that without Monday morning combat over burnt toast and overcooked eggs? Yes, please. All of that with room service, cold champagne, and someone who’ll never see you at your worst? Sign me up.

            Sadly, it would be foolish and slightly ridiculous to attempt to go through life simply having flings. If you’re a man, eventually your friends and family will wonder when you’re going to grow up. If you’re a woman, you’ll suffer from the ignominious sexual double standard that marks you with the scarlet letter S. And in either case, eventually you’ll want something more permanent, something more stable. There’s plenty to be said for the madness of exhausting, sweaty, stocking-tearing, shirt-ripping, ecstasy-inducing, wall-shaking, neighbor-annoying sex, but there’s more to be said for it when it’s with someone who cares if you come home at night; who texts you to let you know they’re thinking of you at work, and who knows how you like your coffee.

            There’s plenty to be said for the security of having someone with whom you can grow old with; with whom you can raise a family, with whom you can see life’s troubles and triumphs with. Joy is exponentially more joyous when you can share it with someone, even if they occasionally hate you. Life is simply more fun when you have someone who knows you, who allows you your faults and quirks, and whose faults and quirks you have learned to love as part of something greater, something sweeter.

            Flings are fun, yes. But they are better, perhaps, as something remembered from the safety of a pair of arms that will not let you go, even for a glance from a perfect stranger. I may not have not always loved those best, but I have always loved them most. 


Author's note to friends and family: I will probably never grow up and settle down.  

Bittersweet

(Originally published 12/18/10)

There aren't enough words like "bittersweet."

There aren't enough words to describe the warm sigh of longing that creeps up from the pit of your stomach and pounds like a runner's heartbeat in your chest.

There aren't enough words to describe what it feels like to feel something and not be able to express it. There aren't enough words to describe what it's like to be wordless.

There aren't enough words to describe what it feels like when all you smell is the cold, raw salt of the ocean and her shampoo because it's 9pm and she's snuck out of the house to hold your hand and you absolutely cannot bear to go home yet. Absolutely. Cannot.

There aren't enough words to describe what it feels like have I love you locked down in a cage in your throat. Presque vu doesn't work. L'espirit d'escalier might come close, when the curtains draw shut and the lights go out and the shadow crosses into night. The light under the door goes out with a click. You're alone.

There aren't enough words to say goodbye when you don't want to. That's why they drag out. That's why there's no eye contact. That's why they stand at the top of the stairs and you don't look back.

There aren't enough words to say I'm sorry I wasn't around to catch you when you fell.

There aren't enough words to describe being in a place where you can see what seems like every star, though words like "gratitude" and "awe" scratch the surface.

There aren't enough words for love letters written with no. 2 pencils and expertly folded into high school works of art and unfolded into drama that feels like it will never stop making you weak.

There aren't enough words to describe what it feels like to be on needles and pins waiting for the letter to arrive, the phone to ring, the text message to sound...or to describe the sore, sharp frustration when it's never the person who you want to hear from.

There aren't enough words to break the tension in a hospital waiting room.

There aren't enough words to make sense out of the suckerpunch that takes the wind out of you the first time you hear someone tell you they love you.

There aren't enough words when you're manic, stacking words on top of each other, struggling to keep control, clenching the wheel, gritting your teeth, and trying to avoid crossing the median into the oncoming traffic of psychosis.

Mostly though, there just aren't enough words like bittersweet. Especially for people who mean to ply their craft and trade in words.

Friends For Life

(Originally published July 15, 2012) 

I had a friend in high school that I used to run around and get into trouble with. No surprise there: that was the reason for having friends and probably still is. We'd drink, drive fast, consume questionable amounts of questionable substances, and then pass out, usually after miraculously returning to his house and watching some crappy movie for the 500th time. We played in a godawful punk band together. We were close. Really close.

What I remember most about him was that we continuously promised--in the way that only drunks and 16 year olds getting drunk can promise--that we'd be "friends for life." At some point after the 15th Budweiser or the second pint of rum, chased with Coca-Cola in a parking lot or a park, we'd swear it: friends for life.

The last time I saw him, the conversation, while having sparks of our old camaraderie, seemed a bit awkward, strained; too-polite. We were still friends, yes, but that bond had grown transparent, stretched thin by time and distance. I haven't spoken to him in years. I scarcely know what he's doing now. I don't know what we'd talk about now. The old times are just that: old. There's little point in rehashing them except for the sake of stale sentimentality and forced nostalgia. The life of our friendship for life seems to have more or less expired.

"Friends for life" is just one of the scores of illusions that must eventually surrender to reality, but of the lot, it's a relatively benign fantasy, like thinking oneself capable of starting a revolution or making the world a better place or any other college essay topic that should never be committed to paper. Far worse is the idea that one knows more than one knows: the absurd melodramatic adolescent world-weariness that, unfortunately, is often allowed to exist long after its expiration date. Any American over the age of 18 who has ever written about "their soul" can be said to display symptoms of this. Nobody--and I mean nobody--gives a rusty fuck about your soul, except, perhaps, psychotherapists who'll happily listen to you rattle on for as long as you like on the subject while inwardly rolling their eyes and charging you by the minute. Friends for life at least suggests real sincerity between two people. That's worth more than a million imagined revolutions.

What nobody tells you when you're 16 and swearing friendships for life is that you live dozens of lives when you're alive. No one lives just one life: not even the most boring of people. The life I had then is incompatible with the one I have now. I am geographically distant, but more so than that, my heart is simply no longer in the same place. I am not my 16-year-old self anymore.

That doesn't mean I've changed all that much. It simply means that my priorities have shifted. My considerable frustration with the world hasn't decreased: it's matured. I no longer have any fantasies of ruling or changing the world. I simply want to keep its ugliness as far from me as possible. Nostalgia holds no real draw for me except, perhaps, as a literary tool: I'm quite happy to keep my past in the past. That may seem irreconcilable with my tendency toward "golden-age thinking," but I never had any illusions that my childhood or adolescence were idyllic or that I was living in the "best years" of my life.

None of this negates the lifetime friendships I've had. Lives within lives end. They meet little deaths that, like all deaths, we may feel acutely at first but eventually become accustomed to and learn to accept as new lives flourish in their receding shadows. It's notable that the friendships that remain clearest to me are the ones I've had with people who have actually died: the ones whom death has polished with the illusion of perfection and wiped free of all blemish, all real humanity in all of its awkward imperfection. When our friends die, we too, drink from the waters of Lethe and forget the past as it actually was.

I don't look back to those days of stupid mistakes and bad ideas with any kind of sentimentality, nor do I judge them as terrifically idiotic. They just remain details that, for me, seem to have lost their richness and hue, having paled under other experiences; other lives. 

Toaster Breakups and the Theatre of the Banal.

(Originally written/published 04/07/2013 8:41 PM)

My first "serious" girlfriend and I broke up over a toaster.

I don't remember what, if any, the argument was or even if the argument was about a toaster, toast, or anything toast-related, but I remember looking at the toaster in her kitchen and thinking to myself "we're breaking up over a toaster." That is what the memory, now faint, is anchored to: an image of a toaster and the hazy recollection of one of those fights where one of the combatants begins laughing because of the sheer absurdity of the battle, because of the realization that the fight is not at all about what the pretense is, because of the realization that all fights with people we're in relationships with can be boiled down to stupid minutiae that point to larger misunderstandings, ever-widening gaps in communication and momentum that starts to drag thanks to the dulling power of unmet expectations. 

As a relationship decays, the final stage is absurdity. All you can do is laugh. 

The fight in the kitchen was poorly acted drama and my laughter kicked down the fourth wall. It was the umpteenth break-up and at that point, I simply didn't care. We often force ourselves to pretend to care about things we don't feel all that strongly about. All feelings are, at their core, feelings of ambivalence. Nothing new there. 

Still, there is the toaster: the object of indifference. The silent bystander. The man on the street uninvested in the two people arguing loudly in front of a restaurant or in a parking lot where their voices echo and sound like metal.

I've had other toasters since then and all of them remind me of this. That's not to say I am emotionally invested in them. I'm not. Occasionally, however, I'll be cleaning out the crumbs or making toast and I'll think about that fight and how the retrieval of memory alters it a tiny bit every time. Sometimes it is a toaster oven. Other times it's a plain white or chrome toaster: two slots for bread and an internal timer sensitive to people manually popping the toast up before its allotted time. 

Don't pour any meaning into the crumbs or the idea of timing. I'm talking about toast. There's no larger metaphor. Like the break-up, this is not an essay with high stakes.

I moved to California less than a year after the break-up. Like or unlike a lot of young people who leave home,  once I left, I stayed gone. My next break-up was far less dramatic: I was in a relationship with someone I liked but didn't love and who became more annoying and less attractive to me every day. 

The next one was more dramatic: more bad theatre. As were the ones that followed.

Maybe that's a smug re-imagining of the narrative--I'm sure it is, actually--but I'm also pretty sure I know bad theatre when I see it. 

The tropes are all there. I once wrote a list of all the reasons people give when they break up. It took up several napkins. Unfortunately, I lost them or used them as napkins or, more likely, realized that even reducing everything to a series of acknowledged (or not) clichés doesn't prevent one from having to participate in them or their enactment.

This has come up in my History of the European Novel class lately. It ruined Flaubert for me.

Among the tropes were the obvious:

"It's not you, it's me."

"I'm just not ready to be in a relationship yet."

"I love you, but I'm not in love with you."

"I love you as a friend, but..."

"I always drive people away..."

"I need someone that can/will..."

"We're not good for each other: this is unhealthy..."

"It's not you, it's me..."

"I want to see other people..."

"You deserve someone better..."

"We're just too different..."

and the slightly-less obvious:

"I'm allergic to your pet."

"I've just been cast in a movie out in Hollywood/New York"

"I've just inherited a castle in Scotland."

and so on. 

I don't remember which one was invoked during the toaster episode or, really, any of the ones that came after. They're not always singular. They're often combined. The person leaving often wants to seem magnanimous and kind, as if they're doing the other a favor. The person being left often wants to take up the cross and ask why they have been forsaken. The variations on "why" often contain elements of martyrdom:

"I wouldn't have done this to you..."

"How could you have..."

"You'll never do better than me..."

"This will come back to haunt you..."

etc. etc. Anger is concealed. The bruised ego swells to Christ-sized proportions. The leaver shrugs and leaves and the one who is left can't believe their one and only isn't listening to them rage against what invariably amounts to

1) An incompatibility of personal neuroses. 

2) A matter of choice. 

I've uttered variations on both sides of these dull dramas. So have you. So has everyone. They're a permanent part of the social matrix. Break-ups don't take place on on some exciting futurist stage: they take place in the theatre of the banal. Expired domesticity curdles into sludge. It doesn't ferment into wine. It's not even the opposite of the agitated, unsure excitement of new love. That, too, is prone to bad, equally banal theatre of its own and attaches itself to things just as surely as break-ups do: one reason why couples that break up tend to avoid places and things that they associate with the dead relationship until the context for those places and things eventually frees itself from the association. Again, nothing new here. 

Toasters eventually become toasters once the curtain closes, once the fire dies down, once the screaming match ends and the names fade to the past tense: when the is becomes was. There are few, if any, props all that are all that interesting on the stage of the banal. Occasionally someone does something ugly and it splatters the headlines, but there's really nothing new or shocking or of any interest to whatever indifferent power pushes the show along, scripting the highs and lows of couples in turmoil, singles in transition, the world on its axis. Blood and ink dry quickly. The audience moves on. No one is surprised. 

On the stage of banality, there's just a dull, scripted humanity that we share with people we either recognize or decide are nothing like us...and who make the same choices about us. Dress it up in labels. Apply significance where you see fit. Make fundamental attribution errors. Rewrite it. There's not much happening on stage: you might as well amuse yourself by embedding meaning where you might otherwise just embed sliced bread. 

The answer to the question "why" isn't answerable when it comes to asking people about their motivations. I don't think people really know why they do anything they do. The answer, despite whatever transient value we place on it in relation to our outrage, our heartache, our joy, or our bliss, might as well be a toaster.

Sweet Impossibilities: "Engaged"

(Originally published 4/22/14 530AM)

"The best women," I once wrote, "leave at three in the morning." I didn't mean to sound crass, though I wouldn't blame anyone for reading arrogance into it. I wrote it just after 3am one morning; just after a woman left me alone with a half empty bottle of '98 Duval-Leroy half-afloat in a bucket of melted ice. I had waited for her that night, unsure if she'd come and see me. And she did. Out into the cold night, wearing jeans and a sweater.

She was wounded by a breakup. I was bruised by an embarrassing misreading of the pulse of a fling, the sharp sting of rejection. She made me promise that if I ever wrote about her, I would call her Ophelia.

We took refuge in a friendship that blossomed after summer. Eventually, it gave way to curiosity, affection, and the first glimpse of newness. Then 3am came and I knew she was still hurt; still thinking of someone else's touch. I realized that Ophelia could not kiss me, not then, and be lost in the same place I was. And so she left, leaving no trace, not even a taste left on a glass, a reminder of the bittersweet impossibility.

I was profoundly sad when I met her for coffee the next morning. I was in love and she was saying goodbye. Or perhaps I only thought I was in love. Perhaps I wanted to be in love with someone who could not possibly love me so as to not have to deal with the reality of having to love someone or something possible. 

It is easy to love the impossible because the impossible can never disappoint you...and you can never disappoint it.

That doesn't make it untrue. That doesn't make it not love.

I never went back to where we met. It will always be the city where she left me at 3 am, the city of a wobbly table and her hands and the end of fall. I leave it there, untouched, in an eternal November, an eternal impossibility. She left a few months later. I cannot imagine that there is anything there that would remind her of me.

We lived in the same city for a few years, but never spoke, never saw each other. We never met for drinks. We never texted. I never ran into her by chance coming out of the deli or buying a bottle of wine for an apartment warming party. I emailed an apology once, just in case I had done something wrong. Sometimes I think we apologize simply because silence becomes unbearable. Should I never have kissed her? Should I have asked her to stay? Should we have had another martini at dinner or not had martinis at dinner? She replied in the gentle, even, archaically agreeable way that she had always replied to my emails and she did her best to thin whatever residual shame I had in losing a friend in an attempt to find something more where nothing more could exist. It had nothing to do with me, she wrote. I wrote back, but after that, I never heard from her again.

I think of her now only because, in a way, I am where I am because of her. The day she said goodbye, I sat at a desk in the hotel and I wrote "Engaged," an essay that, to this day, people have told me is the best thing they have ever read; that people ask whether or not is true. 

In it, I ponder the impossibilities that we face and how time blurs things. Were her eyes blue or brown? Did she actually care for me? Who will she be with? Does she remember me? Will she? 

Those aren't just questions we ask in the past tense. They flood our minds in the present tense when things are new, when things are beginning...and when they are ending. What will happen? What is possible? Who is this person who feels so natural? Why can't I commit to this night, these kisses, drink this mouth like a Lethean well and forget?

The answers come weighted with the impossible. Those last kisses at 2:45 am murmur the end of everything possible and the beginning of everything that cannot be.

No one ever really leaves. They persist as sweet impossibilities: always there, always out of reach. They shine light on the things that are possible, the loves that we must suffer for, the hearts that we hope still beat for us and that call us into our eternal Novembers at three in the morning.

You know this because you hold her still, but mostly you know it because you cannot hold her and you will not hold her again.

But not yet, not yet. Those things will be, but not now.

Put them away, then, and feel her fingers circling yours.

And kiss her again. You have no time.

2021 Note: ironically, she did go to law school and get married. Although we live in the same city, we never spoke again.

No One Flying Nowhere.

(Originally published 2010, the predecessor to "6F")

I am no one on an airplane. 

If I was someone, I might not like it. 

Air travel is sitting in a metal tube with your legs cramped and your feet hot and your elbows tucked close to your body as you try to saw a piece of barbecued chicken or eat a bite of iceberg lettuce from the tiny square bowl covered in plastic that was brought to you. Your elbows are tucked in so you don't disturb the person next to you. 

That person doesn't give a damn about disturbing you. That's why his iPod is turned all the way up so you can hear it over the white noise of the engines and that's why he's eating like he's at the trough at whatever local buffet he usually frequents. Rotten bastard. You hate him for an hour or two and then you forget all about him. 

You never remember the faces of strangers on a plane. 

Air travel is sitting for twenty minutes with a full bladder waiting for the flight attendant to clear your neighbor's tray and your tray so that you can get up, walk unsteadily down the aisle, and then cram yourself into a closet-sized lavatory, steady yourself against the wall, and piss into the stainless steel bowl filled with the bluest liquid you have ever seen, trying to not miss out of courtesy to the other passengers. 

Or at least that's how it is if you're a man. I feel bad for women: they have to contend with dealing with actually sitting on the damned thing. 

Air travel is the boredom of reading about the best steak houses in Charlotte or the top day spas in Seattle in the in-flight magazine. The flight attendant will tell everyone that they are welcome to take a copy with them when they leave, but judging from the half-filled-in crossword puzzle (how could the person before you not know that number four down was coral?) and the torn out sudoku page, no one ever does. You're sure that you'll never want to buy a ring with the birthstones and initials of your children because you don't have any, so you leave the relic in the seat pocket in front of you along with the safety information card that nobody ever looks at. I never take the damn thing, anyway. Maybe other people do. People who want rings with birthstones and initials. 

I always sit by the window. I used to sit in the aisle because I hate trying to pass people sitting next to me. I got tired of people jostling my elbow or my shoulder, though, especially with the drink carts. A lot of airlines don't have drink carts anymore. This plane is an Embraer RJ135. The only really good seat on this plane is 11B: the exit row aisle seat. I'm sitting in 6A. This is a pretty good seat because there's no one next to me: there can't be on this plane because it's a 1:2 configuration. I'll be among the first out of this big metal tube and although I don't have the leg room that I would have in row 11, I'm closer to the door. 4A was available, but the number 4 is synonymous with death in Japanese so I never sit in the 4th row, even though I am not Japanese. 

I like not having anyone sit next to me because then I don't have to make the small talk that people seem to make when the plane is about to land. Few people talk to strangers in the air or during takeoff. During the descent, everyone seems relieved and wants to make small talk with their neighbors. The conversation always starts the same way: "so, are you coming home or here on business?" I always want to say something strange, just to see what their reaction might be, but I don't want to call any attention to myself so I grudgingly play the game with them. I usually say that I'm in town for a wedding. That way I don't have to talk about what I do for work. It might be fun to say that I'm in town for gender reassignment surgery, but again, I don't want to call attention to myself. Not having a seat neighbor solves the problem before it starts. 

The plane takes off. The plane lands. I get out into the airport. 

I know airports very well. All roads lead to dead ends or baggage claim. Baggage claim is always on the same floor as ground transportation: cabs, buses, limos. You put the big gate numbers behind you and walk straight and fast. Avoid the moving walkway: there's always someone who is standing perfectly still on the left-hand side. Stand right. Walk left. Simple? You'd think so. Avoid it. I get in a taxi and tell the driver where to go. I have everything written down on an index card. Flight number, flight times, hotel address, hotel reservation number: everything contained on one piece of paper. If I lose it, that's ok. I have it in my phone, too. 

I get to my hotel and check in. I get in an elevator. The elevator doors open and close and open. There is a mirror above a small table with a phone and some flowers on it. There's a placard on the wall indicating two series of room numbers and two arrows pointed in opposite directions. I feel a sense of control returning to my life as I slip the plastic key into slot above the brushed steel doorknob. A red LED light turns green and I hear a small click before I push the door open and walk into my room. The layout is identical to every other mid-priced hotel I have been in. Toilet and shower are immediately to the right. There is a small closet with 4 hangers, a bag for laundry and a bag to put your shoes in if you want them shined. There's an iron and a small ironing board. In the bathroom is a small coffee pot and filterbags of Starbucks Pike Place. There are three rocks glasses covered with paper coasters and a miniature bar of soap. In the main room, there's a desk next to the television which faces the bed. There's a lamp and a landline. The room smells like some type of cleaner and cheap linen. I know that the room attendants probably didn't put fresh sheets on after the last guest left. I try not to think about it. I hang up my jacket, loosen my tie and I sit on the bed. It is cheap and comfortable. Predictable and uniform. 

 The room is anonymous. 

 So am I.