The Persistence of Memory in The Alex Era

Your apartment is dressed in the shadows of twilight. Black sheets of it pulled down the walls, over the furniture. It hides the coffee cans of used syringes in the kitchen, the little metal weed pipe on your computer table. The darkness transforms your kitchen to 4 walls of lifelessness. Later, when you turn lights on, I will watch the room wake up and breathe. I will see the walls are covered in torn sheets of yellowed legal pad, doodles of manic mouths mid-scream & wilting flowers, scratched out in your harried scribble. The drawings flutter like living things on the breeze you create as you walk through. A butterfly garden of your troubled innerness. But here, now, as we sit in the living room, at the end of our first date, it is all still.

The broken-in couch sucks me down on the cushion next to you. I have heard the term “devastatingly handsome” but never fully understood it till now. Your tall, pugilistic frame clothed in a suede jacket, t-shirt, baggy jeans with a metal chain attached to your keys. Even though I’ve not seen someone wear a chain like that since Jason Lowery in the 7th grade, for some reason it looks right on you. You starving artist, you rockstar. You junky poet thief. You have a winter cap pulled low over your ears, containing your wild Beethoven-esque curls beneath. Your green eyes, intense & intelligent. The deep cleft of your chin that you hated, that you called a “butt chin”, but that I loved and wanted to rest my thumb in.

I know I probably shouldn’t be here, but I seem unwilling to do anything about it. You also seem to know I shouldn’t be here with you. You were embarrassed to invite me up after our coffee date at Café Domenico, a coffee shop that will become the backdrop to so many scenes in the movie of our ill-fated relationship. You tell me you don’t usually do this and you hope I don’t think you’re a sleaze, but would I like to come up and look at this book you have of Dali’s artwork. It’s a line that wouldn’t work on most girls, but it works on me. Besides, I don’t want to go back to my parent’s house, having moved home again after not being stable enough to complete my 4-year degree. I am living in an unfinished basement that frequently floods. The cement floor feels slimy under the slap of my bare feet. My bed is on wooden blocks, but dusty green mold climbs up its legs like vines. My belongings are moved to higher and higher places, but still smell musty and always feel mottled with dampness. There is foxing on my beloved books and the pages are wrinkled with moisture. Occasionally mice run along the rafters over my bed. I mostly spend my days avoiding my family who spend their days avoiding me. I am binging and purging into a garbage can in my room multiple times a day at this point. When it is full, I shamefully sneak the acidic bag out the back door and put it in the family’s garbage bin in the middle of the night so that no one knows I’ve switched from anorexia to bulimia–even though I continue to lose weight rapidly. And you? You were always afraid of being alone. So it is easy for you to offer and easy for me to accept.

I’m fresh with the fragility of my most recent nervous breakdown…but so are you. We met in the psych ward. I’ve never felt love at first sight before, never believed in it—till I saw you round that corner into the common room. You just swaggered in like Brooklyn itself walking in. You grinned at me. I can still see it-the broad, cocky grin of a charmer… Felt something drop and ping in my stomach. Who knew love could feel like illness. I heard my thoughts as loud as if I’d shouted them into a storm, “If I can just make him laugh, he’ll fall in love with me.” In our first therapy group together, I introduced myself as Delilah with a straight face. When they got to you, you looked at me, grinned and introduced yourself as Xanadu. Xanadu, an idyllic place…ironic coming from a drug addict on a mental health unit in a hospital. We both laughed and it was as if the gods themselves arranged us like chess pieces…lined us up to make our next move.

That’s why I am now sitting in your apartment, at the promise of looking at a book of melting watches painted by a man with a moustache that looked like the long fuse of a bomb waiting to be lit… with you, the man I will eventually marry.

Even though the long stretch of a fall night is a canopy over us and your living room is dim, you put the book of paintings on your lap and we pore over it. Our noses nearly in the crease of it, nearly bumping. In the background, John Frusciante thinly wails away about his heroin dreams while bending notes to his yield on his guitar. The song A Doubt comes on & our faces turn to each other. And like Dali’s watches, we melt. Even though I’ve mostly avoided physical intimacy with men, we kiss passionately on your couch…I want to trace the skyline of your teeth with the tip of my tongue. You taste of chemicals. You tell me later that I taste of cream. Our hands search…And then…

You push me off your couch onto the floor.

At first, I’m too stunned to be upset. Before I can become upset, you tell me you don’t want to rush this and if we don’t stop kissing, things are likely to go too far too quickly. I should’ve known then everything was too fast, too intense with you…that we would fucking combust. I should’ve known that we were stars—dead before we even get to enjoy the shine. Instead, I just lay there on my back, giggling, saying the most non-sexual things I can think off. Naked grandmas. Tennis Balls. Dog Shit. Cottage Cheese. Till finally, you are laughing too. You pull me up off the floor, turn the lights on and offer to give me the grand tour. This is a joke, of course. The little apartment on Oneida was so small you could see pretty much everything from one vantage point. Your bedroom, which we jokingly call the West Wing, has room for a bed and a cd player. That’s it. But we don’t stay in there. You simply switch the cd from John Frusciante to the jazz bassist, Charles Mingus. You twirl me around, lead me back out to the living room, flop back down onto the couch behind me. After a few minutes, you lift my scarred arm into the air and pretend to play the bass on it.

I knew then, that I never wanted to leave.

And I end up staying far longer than I should have. That night. In general. Looking back, if I had known our end, would I have followed you back to your apartment that day? Would the intense love we had ever make up for the way you broke my heart? I’ve never been quite been able to come back from it, never been quite right. Sometimes I try to picture myself dropping you off after the date, waving at you from the safety of my car and returning to my moldy little kingdom of isolation, never to see you again.

Recently, I told someone about a time when things were going poorly between us and I was killing myself as a cashier at Wal-Mart. This handsome man in fatigues went through a checkout, a couple aisles over. Because it was slow that day, he drew my attention. We happened to lock eyes and out of habit, I smiled at him. Later in the day, I saw him again—this time, at the end of my line. I worried he was coming to complain about something, as I waited on the several people ahead of him. When it was finally his turn, he asked me out, telling me that he had noticed me earlier in the day and couldn’t stop thinking about me smiling at him. “My friend that was with me thought I was crazy for coming back here—but I was like, ‘man, did you see that girl’s smile? Come onnnnnn’… And…what’s the worst you can do, turn me down?” And I admit, I thought about his offer. I thought about what leaving you would mean.

No staying at drug dealer’s apartments, sleeping on filthy mattresses under strands of half-lit Christmas lights, swiping burnt spoons off the toilet before I can pee…No hiding like bedbugs, waiting on your dealer’s other customers to leave, hoping he won’t have to use the weapon he keeps by his chair. No being screamed at in stores when I wouldn’t give you money to buy heroin. No watching you rage over fear of being dope sick. No going to Bob’s Diner to split a cup of coffee just to have a place to kill time while we were homeless. No dope nods. No hunting for items of mine that you sold for drug money while I was at work. No watching you commit to a story that we both know is a lie, knowing that everything that leaves your lips after that will feel like a lie.

But also…

No sharing Kentucky Butter Cake at Café Domenico, discussing Russian authors. No Dali book. No nicknaming me Bunny. No reading Bukowski or Dostoyevsky on Sunday mornings while drinking coffee in bed. No singing along to The Police in stupid accents. No saying Bread & Butter, when we had to let go of hands to walk around an obstacle in the sidewalk. No getting so turned on by each other that we nearly fuck in the waiting room at your psychiatrist. No sleeping on your shoulder on a NYC subway. No going to see The Kooks and scream-singing the lyrics to each other as we threw elbows at the pretty co-eds around us. No reading the love poems of Pablo Neruda on the bank at Forest Park. No listening to Waltz for Debby after making love on a hot summer day in your 6th floor apartment. No Proctor Park picnics, spitting olive pits down the steps while swigging 40s. No driving to see Rufus Wainwright in a car with next-to-no brakes, unsure if we would make it to our destination and really not caring because we were together. No going to book sales together, looking for that Fante we never found. No looking into your green, green eyes and seeing the world there.

At the time, all of what you gave weighed more than what you took—and so I told him I was flattered, but it was not good timing, that I had a boyfriend and I was trying to make it work out. He said he respected that, just had to try and he walked away. The other customers watched me reject this handsome chivalrous man & looked at me like I had just given birth to a talking goat. A few minutes later, he returned, slapped a piece of paper down on my register and said, “if you ever change your mind…” and walked away. I flipped it over. It was his name and number. His name was Liam Nightsky. Even his name was a fucking romance novel.

I kept the number.

I kept that little scrap of paper and, on our worst nights, when you would say the cruelest things to hobble me: I would slip out of our bed, pull it out of my journal and hold it and think about what my life would’ve been like if I had simply said yes to Mr. Liam Nightsky. That little piece of paper became symbolic of making a different choice…of an alternate reality where my beautiful boyfriend wasn’t held in the claws of a terrible addiction that made him unrecognizable to me at times…of a love that was maybe a little boring, but simpler and without any bloodlust. A toothless, neutered love.

But I had made my choice. It was you. Over and over I made that choice. Till there was nothing left of you to choose…just coded calls and meeting on corners to exchange money and little packets of white.

We know the rest of the story. I eventually left. For a while, I thought we might reconcile, but we didn’t. I moved on…but you and I stayed married till the day someone fucking violently killed you in the height of COVID. You were one of many in a sea of still and breathless bodies stacked up in the hospital 5 minutes from my house. They left you in the morgue for weeks, your neck and ribs snapped like a bird that flew into a window at a great speed like a bad fucking omen. Finally, a funeral home buried you in a nameless grave that I can no longer find without the freshly dug dirt to guide me. And some days, like today, like a thousand days from when we were together, I choose you as the thing that’s going to hurt me…and I mourn.

But, Al, remember our first date? Remember that Dali book you had? It had that painting named The Persistence of Memory? It feels heavy with meaning now, looking back.

Sometimes it all still feels perfect…
If only it could have really been.

Last updated January 27, 2024