1. for one night only, a pair of stoops

on brief encounters made possible by ghosts, birthdays, dead phones, dead friends and the curse of finding poetry in motherfucking everything

I am splitting the following essay into two newsletters because of length and also because it felt apropos. I will send part 2 out later this week but for now, this is part one: Everything That Happened Before Midnight.

***

“Hold on, I have to say hi to a dog,” I say, cigarette hanging out the side of my mouth. My roommate from 24 years ago sits fullscreen in the glow of my phone as I duck out of view for a moment to pet fur.

The dude holding the dog’s leash doesn’t look at me, probably thinks I’m crazy which is what I say into the phone as he walks off.

“But I don’t care. Crying in public makes me feel motherfucking alive.”

I am FaceTiming from the stoop of a house that hasn’t been mine for more than twenty-years. I am bloodshot and mascara smeared in the clothes I wore to my twins’ back-to-school night. It is 8:30something and for the next two hours people will walk their dogs past me as I hold a phone in front of my face — gazing at and crying with and becoming the kind of annoying person who FaceTimes in public without headphones on.

I am on the phone with a man who is reminiscing just as loud as I am from the dark of his own backyard in PDX. He is grayer now but still talks the same and smokes cigs the way he used to smoke them when we lived together right here in this very spot in front of this very house with our old friend who died today and “REMEMBER WHEN…” and “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT” and “I KNOW. ME TOO, MAN. FUCK.”

We haven’t seen each other in the flesh in almost two decades and I wonder if my face feels as estranged to him as it is reminiscent of home. Because that’s what his feels like to me.

Grief is always strange, the way the memories suddenly traipse in and sit on your chest, trip you down both familiar and unfamiliar sidewalks, confront you with the passages of time.

I feel as nostalgic as I do for those days as I feel embarrassed for the woman I learned to become in a world of boys. Want to show my past how far I’ve come. How strong I am. How different…. but instead, in the shadow of my old house, I cannot and will not and won’t. The memory of then has become too thick a fog for me to see myself as I am now. Uncanny valley.

He calls me Becca and every time I hear my name leave his mouth the way it used to sound, it breaks my heart the way old movies do or a song that reminds you of a feeling you know you’ll never get back. A CD you purchased from a store when that was a thing, then listened to all the way home.

“WHENEVER I HEAR ANY SONG FROM KID A I STILL THINK OF YOU.”

Light another candle and releaaaaaaase me. (Releeeeeaaaase me.)

Grief has a tendency to recede the sand and dirt and whatever else has accumulated over the years revealing an abandoned ship. Broken in places you had forgotten about. Unscathed in areas that remind you of the magic of the time you used to sail.

What the wind felt like on the water.

How you looked in a captain’s hat.

The version of your name that was written on the wood.

For me that name is Becca. A name I haven’t gone by since.

***

We can’t believe it’s been twenty-four years since we lived here, we both keep saying, both of us parents now, him divorced.

His kids are younger than mine are and when I tell him I have a son now who is the same age that I was when we lived together, he tells me that he remembers how one day I just disappeared.

I do that sometimes: ghost. And when people do it back I am often relieved. Offended, too, but mostly understanding. Sometimes an Irish Exit is the only way to leave. But that’s not the way I remember it. That is not the story I have told myself after all these years.

Sometimes I want to know why someone disappears and sometimes I’d rather not. Sometimes I can’t remember which person pulled away first and appreciate the ambiguity. Sometimes disappearing is the only way for me to leave.

Otherwise I’ll just say goodbye forever. Keep coming back.

***

I reorient the screen so that my old roommate can’t see me, only the house we used to share — the place we lived, laughed, loved twenty-four years ago. From January, 2000 - March, 2001: 516 Genessee Ave, across the street from the baseball fields at Fairfax High.

It used to be sky blue with dark blue trim and now its beige and has the ugliest fence you’ve ever seen. Beige is my least favorite color and I can’t sit on the stoop because of the fence but we look at the house long and hard together, drag our eyes over the parts of it that look the same. We retrace our steps up through the front door, down the hallway and into our bedrooms — the wall that separated us different but the same.

He’s been drinking and I have not been but I light up a smoke immediately and hold it up to the phone and he does, too and when he sees PARLIAMENTS on the packaging he gets excited because he never stopped smoking them either. Holds up his pack like look at us we’re still the same dirtbag kids.

And then we imagine Chris, feet up on the couch, making us laugh over stir-fry, which was the only thing I knew how to cook in those days, the three of us sitting around a table I only recently got rid of. We draw him onto what used to be the front lawn with the pen of our memory; the night it snowed for thirty seconds and then stopped.

“This is where we were bad enough to get into trouble but good enough to survive,” I think, giving him the tour of the exterior with the camera of my phone.

And we did survive.

Not all of us, but some of us.

Some of us survived.