Just before I left New York I was overwhelmed by a feeling of weightlessness. It’s the same feeling that strikes when I dream that the world is just about to end. The world wasn’t going to end, but it was going to change, and so I bopped around New York with the reckless indiscretion of a pinball, like someone whose actions are at once both crucial and meaningless. I had things that I needed to do and things that I needed to tell people, and maybe they would hurt them or maybe they would hurt me but I couldn’t move West without getting them out of my system.
There was someone in New York who was falling for me. Outside of a highrise apartment building in the mid-fifties with the early summer sun creasing the corners of the grid I said goodbye to him, my face broad and moonlike tilted up towards his. I knew he was thinking about kissing me and we were both scared like kids who prior to this had only ever practiced kissing on our hands. If he had moved his face any closer I would have run, back into the highrise, up the elevator, and straight to the kitchen for another beer. He was falling in love with me but he didn’t love me yet so he patted my hair and said, “Good luck in California.” It was really hot that day, too hot for May—my dress was sticking to my collarbone uncomfortably. He started making his way down the sidewalk and I flicked my wrist in a half-hearted attempt at a wave. Later, with the safe distance of 3,000 miles between us, he told me, “You bolted into my life and shook everything around, and then left before I could understand what you had done.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I was a hurricane those last few weeks; volcanic, spewing my feelings everywhere without a single thought to the consequences they’d have on the people I left behind.
He was wearing his glasses. I liked when he wore his glasses. “You were here and suddenly you were gone. It felt like camp was over.” I thought that was a sweet thing to say.
Later that same night on a roof in Brooklyn I almost kissed someone else who, when I later confessed I had almost kissed him, thought I was trying to say I was in love with him. I wanted to say: “I don’t love you but I want to be close to you, I want the space between us to collapse,” but I didn’t think he would understand it in those terms, so when I left New York we just stopped speaking. It is strange how you think you can know someone because of the way the muscles in their face move when you say something coy, or the way they laugh when they get very stoned, but I think now it’s impossible to know someone unless you have been inside each other, crawled there and curled up and slept for awhile. Maybe it is a dangerous thought, but sometimes I feel like it’s hopeless to try to really know someone without sleeping with them. Maybe all of those people in low-lit bars and on paid subscription dating sites are looking for someone to bed because they have figured out what the rest of us aren’t yet convinced of: you can sleep with someone without knowing them, but you can’t know someone without sleeping with them, at least not in the all-consuming way we crave to know each other.
A friend once told me, “People crave sex because it’s the closest you can be to someone without being that someone.” Just before I left New York I pined for closeness in a way I never had before. I wanted to be intimate with someone, but was confused and didn’t know how, so instead I tried to be intimate with everyone. I left anonymous notes for strangers in bookstores and jammed tightly in parking meters; I let two men sitting outside of Mud Coffee on East 8th Street try on my glasses to see if they should buy new frames. When they asked me why I looked so sad I started to cry into my coffee and said, “I was supposed to move to San Francisco with someone I love and now I am moving to San Francisco alone.” The one with the beard slipped my glasses off of his face—he looked so strange, a stranger wearing my glasses—and patted my knee. “You are too young to be so afraid of loneliness.” His voice had the uncertain tone of someone feigning wisdom. I took my glasses back from him and in the same tone I said, “Yes, but are we ever too young?”
I didn’t kiss anyone my last week in New York. Instead I saved all of that intimacy for San Francisco, where I run around with it shooting off of me in bright, brilliant shards, tiny echoes of the closeness I crave but perhaps am still too young to really understand.