2. for one night only, a pair of stoops

this is the second of two essays that are actually one essay about one night that felt like two nights and, I guess, in a way, it sort of was.

… and you can read the first half, here.

***

My kids are asleep by the time I get home. It’s a school night and they’ve become far more responsible in recent months, putting themselves to bed before 10:30 — a thing I used to have to fight them to do.

I am relieved that they are sleeping so they don’t smell the night on me, so I can drag my past through the hallway on my way to the kitchen, then the bathroom, then my room.

I was supposed to meet someone tonight — a first date if you could call it that. I never call them “dates” — meeting men. Mainly because they almost never feel that way.

Meeting feels more accurate. A first meeting.

***

We had made plans to meet post-Back-to-School night after recently reconnecting via Instagram DM five years after we originally matched on an app in 2019. He had seen me walking my dog and reached out wondering if we were neighbors and hey, remember me, we almost dated once.

I responded to his message like hey what’s up it’s been forever yeah I guess we are neighbors small world how ya been.

It went on like that for a while. First via DM and then phone. Our numbers remained the same and I was able to read back the conversation we had years ago. A conversation that suddenly stopped in September of 2019.

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.

We made plans to meet for a bite in our neighborhood on a night that happened to be the eve of his birthday, a date he had to cancel because his friends decided last minute to take him to dinner.

“I hate my birthday and I didn’t want to do anything but I said yes.”

We rescheduled for the following week. Of course you should go out with your friends on your birthday and happy fucking birthday, yeah? Here’s to you…

***

I didn’t think I would hear from him tonight, assumed he’d be out late celebrating, but he texts me minutes after I get home, after I’ve ditched the less comfortable parts of my outfit and am washing the dishes my kids left in the sink.

I am half dressed, emotionally wasted and completely awake in a house full of sleeping people so when my phone lights up with his name, I turn off the water.

He is home from dinner and wanted to say hi.

Hi, I say back.

It is very obvious to me when a spark is going to turn into a fire. Especially when I am flammable as fuck. And exchanging one hi for another at the intersection between Unexpected Death and Unwanted Birthday is kindling drenched in gasoline.

We are both swimming in similar brands of existential loneliness and live four blocks away from each other and have re-established a connection as people who are now officially middle-aged.

And in my two letter response I am saying yes to whatever is about to transpire.

***

Grief has always made me horny for connection, death turning me into some kind of lonely hunter prowling the streets in my funeral blacks. I’ve always been like this: my formative years spent grieving dead friends in a hometown that seemed to be cursed with adolescent tragedy.

For as long as I’ve had a body, I’ve had to prove to myself that it’s alive. Over and over again with whomever is looking to do the same. It takes very little to turn me inside out when I’m grieving — the skin of me too crawling for clothes.

I have turned held glances across crowded rooms into wordless fucks in locked bathrooms so many times they feel mundane. Forgettable come morning save for the scratch marks. A werewolf who wakes up human again and can’t remember where she was during the full moon.

In the hours after Hal died I fantasized about fucking every nurse on the 4th floor of the hospital — wished they could put hands on all my pulses, tell me over and over again that I was still alive. I was so disoriented in that moment. So out of my body I was afraid I’d never find it again. Someone please find my body so that I can climb back into it. Make me feel like I have a body that is mine to keep for now.

All of this to say, grief makes me feel vampiric with longing — not necessarily for sex but for SOMETHING. A feeling. A reminder. A hi.

It isn’t just death either, but the grief of my children’s birthdays, my son going back to school. The loneliness of having no witnesses to milestone events, all of which have felt like sickness these last few weeks.

And so. I binge late night on connection, wake up hungover after having given my phone number out to strangers. With no desire to talk to them again.

Casual connections have always been my coping mechanism. And, even though I’m not supposed to admit it — am supposed to feel ashamed that I alleviate pain with sex — it has almost always worked.

I have always wrapped my pain with the bandages of pleasure, pleasure with the brutality of pain. Topped my ice cream with dinner salt instead of sprinkles.

I am only ever moved by the friction of rival sensations. Hungry for tastes that destroy each other and the kind of love that will not last.

Which is why, even still, even now, maybe always, when I feel close to death or loss or letting go, I hold my hand out to whomever I know will make me feel alive, found, held — even if only for a moment. Even if only for a night.

***

The conversation is as I expected it would be. It is full of questions for the world that neither of us can answer. He is feeling lost and I am feeling distant and it is a relief to have someone to smash truths against and be understood. And even though we’re speaking from two wholly different experiences, we twin with a fraternal longing for things we cannot articulate.

He asks if he can call me after an hour of texts and I say yes and when the phone rings I feel it in my chest — the sudden closeness that occurs when you move from silence to mouth.

It is nearly midnight but I wait until 12:09 before I sing him Happy Birthday and when my little song is over he asks if it’s too late to see each other.

Says he’ll walk over.

Says he has to see me now.

“…Just for a minute. I won’t stay long.”

“You can’t come in,” I tell him. “But I can sit with you outside.”

“I just want to see you,” he says.

And because I want him to see me, too, I say yes.

***

He appears minutes later.

It is the first time I have seen him in person and it makes me feel shy even though we’ve already sent each other nudes. Even though we’ve already had sex with words. I am still half dressed, the bottom half of me in pajamas and we hug in the dead grass outside my house for so long I wonder if this is all we’re going to do.

Not just right now but forever. Hold on.

I lead him to the threshold of my home — the stoop if you will — it’s a small stoop and barely fits two people side by side so we wedge our bodies, backs against two walls and face each other so our knees touch.

We say nothing to each other at first besides hi.

Hi.

And then we kiss.

There is something so juvenile about making out in front of a house when your kids are sleeping inside. I am almost always sixteen again when it happens — my children becoming parental figures who may or may not catch me in an illicit act.

And kissing, to me, feels illicit. I have had sex in public with less inhibition than I feel kissing someone on the lips.

We make out for I don’t even know how long before one of us pulls away to say something. The conversation moves from personal to deeply personal so fast that I suddenly feel protective of him. Want to keep him here with me forever where it’s safe. Have decided right here and now that I love him in a way that will fix him even though we’ve only been sitting here for twenty minutes. He has been drinking and I can taste it on him even though he’s supposed to be sober. Hasn’t had a drink in twenty years until… recently.

When I ask him if he’s okay he says “not really” and because there is nothing I can say to a relapse, I throw my body over his like a sort of blanket. Tuck him in like a baby between my legs. Woman as temporary rehab.

We will spend two hours like this — with my legs wrapped around him, our chests pressed against each other, breathing. We won’t have sex but we will feel around each other’s bodies and say all of the things that people say to each other when they want to feel like home. We will gaze into each other’s eyes like we’re watching ourselves in a movie — trying to answer unscripted questions that no one was creative enough to ask either of us until now and we will both feel an emotional shift under the weight of being seen, kiss each other mid-sentence with a kind of forced punctuation that causes music and other things to swell.

And then this time next week we will be strangers again.

But not yet.

No, right now we will say meaningful things to each other with our hands in each other’s pants. And pretty soon it will be 4 in the morning and I tell him I have to get up in two hours and even though I don’t want it to end I will say goodbye.

“You have to leave now even though I don’t want you to.”

And he will FaceTime me when he gets home because, “hi.” And then we will talk for another twenty minutes, huffing the last of the fumes and when I say goodnight I’m so glad you came over he’ll say goodnight I’m so glad I came over, too.

Two hours later I will wake up to the sound of my twins fighting over the bathroom, make lunches haphazardly, and take three of my four kids to their carpool/bus stop. I will come home exhausted to a son who is packing for college.

Later that day, I will send him a voice memo and for another day or two, we will keep talking. From voice

to text

and then to the occasional DM.

And then: silence.

Because sometimes that’s just it.

Gate closed where it once was open.

The battery of the phone first dying, dy…ing, then dead. With no calls from the car once it’s recharged.