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.