On the day that our ceiling caved in, I gave a chocolate bar to a crying teenaged boy outside The Coffee Bean. The #6 bus had gotten caught behind a cable car, and it took so long to trundle down Market Street that I had enough time to send out approximately 10 text messages, all of which revolved either around my best friend’s strange sex life or the fact that my boyfriend and I had to evacuate our apartment building at 6am because of a suspected gas leak.
The bus stopped at 4th and Stockton and I became so fed up with its crawling speed that I hopped out and decided to get caffeinated at The Coffee Bean instead of Starbucks. This decision seems innocuous, except that if I had stayed on the bus until my real stop, or if that day’s Obama event hadn’t stalled all of the Muni lines, or if my ceiling hadn’t caved in at 5 that morning, I never would have seen the crying teenaged boy in a camouflage hoodie.
I lived in New York for five years, where people are notorious for mistaking the anonymity of a large city for a good enough excuse to cry in public, but still it is weird for me to see teenaged boys cry. I don’t remember ever witnessing any of them cry in high school, not even my then-boyfriend, who broke up with me with the detachment and professionalism of a doctor announcing a terrible diagnosis. It happened in his parents’ basement. Suddenly he was like, “So we haven’t made out yet today, maybe we should just be friends now.” I was trying to play it cool so I was like, “Okay,” and then started sputtering like a steam kettle and waited for fifteen painfully shameful minutes in his living room for my Stepmother to pick me up.
He didn’t cry that day; only I did.
There is something eating him from the inside out. Dark and prickly, it begins as a tickle in the lungs and then unfurls like a weeping willow tree into his arteries. His spinal cord is a freeway, the fastest point between spokes of tissue, so it scurries up into the brain. Close to the scalp, what is killing him settles and swells. It slithers under the door into the place where memories are kept, a room full of glass jars filled with silver slivers of meaningful moments. These are what make a thing a person, what make a person a human: our collective experiences, our scabs and skipped heartbeats, our well-worn attempts at bravery, all tucked away in this cave of jars.
What is killing him kills him slowly, consuming those brilliant jars, swallowing them whole. Memories are knocked off one by one: the first to go is the way his father’s voice sounded, coarse and down-home, on the way to a Mets game in the summer of 1988. The second is the brightness of her hair, how it fanned out like reeds around those delicate cheeks, an ethereal crown of hay-colored strands he couldn’t keep from burying his face in.
Check it out!
(No, that is not an actual picture of my 42-year-old ex-whatever, thank you very much.)
When I go to New York now I stay in hotels with fancy soaps and tri-blend sheets instead of East Village studio apartments. I attend meetings in neighborhoods that I am so embarrassed to be in that I refuse to check-in on foursquare (!). I’ve been back three times since I moved and haven’t taken the subway once; cabs, expensed to my employer, whisk me between familiar divebars and unfamiliar midtown Hiltons.
To say my life has changed in the past nine months or six months or even three months would be an understatement; to say every molecule of my being has whirred in tornadic chaos is probably more apt. This week last year I was crumpled dejectedly on my mother’s couch, crying into my hair after a not-so-foolish April Fool’s Day breakup. Now I have built a life and bought a couch with someone who says things like, “When we get married…”
Each time I go back to New York I realize that it’s only me who’s changed; I’ve grown soft around the edges, that cutthroat ambition I used to brandish so fearlessly brushes off me like ash. When I see my friends they fling their arms around me with that New York bravado and ask if I miss Manhattan; the truth is that I do, but never as much as I thought I might.