This is not me.

This is not me. This is not me. This is not me. I kept telling myself that as I stood outside my old building. I'm not this, not weak and torn and muddled. I'm not standing at the bottom looking up. I'm a strong Ohio man who made it out of Ohio. I told myself this, but thinking it I saw myself instead as someone who escaped a small-town background to put myself merely at the mercy of whichever coastal city I ended up fleeing to. Like a model with big dreams, big eyes, and long legs. Like an export from a simpler place, thinking he had made it big but really just adrift in the system and tide of it all. Pulled out by the moon and chased by the sun. Luminescent (WotB: look, this is light not produced from within, reflected light like the moon or anything in orbit really, right? is it stolen or borrowed or passed from hand to hand to hand? is it admirable or dissembling and slightly dodgy? I know luminescent is not the same as luminous). Luminescent and florid, like the most beautiful bird with broken wings. I felt small and stupid. For a flash, I saw myself as this little lost boy in a city he didn't know and didn't understand. What was I doing here? Maybe Mike was right and I should go back to Ohio.



The buildings mocked me, laughing down at my miserable churning, my self-loathing, my hateful sense of provincialism. But then I looked up at the buildings and the clouds above and I felt the concreteness and the ephemerality. What claim had anyone to these urban constructs? How different was I? I reached out and the building was cool in my hand. Shadows moved across my hand holding the building cast by the trees and the sky beyond. The shadows, I saw them grinning and laughing and saw that they were not necessarily laughing at me but only if I thought they were. Turning this way, I saw that I could laugh with them. How many people had passed through these buildings before me? How many people from a million further places than Ohio?

I thought of the class I had taken on New York and the section we studied involving the Irish. They had come with literally nothing, literally the clothes on their back, full of holes and blight. There were stories of men walking for days in search of one single potato to eat during the famine, and they arrived to New York or far-off ports in Canada without even family sometimes. Immigrants would sit in the city unable to find relatives who had moved there before and had said they would be waiting with open arms and opportunity. Or they would get lost, separated from their families on sister voyages, cast painfully through the tumultuous human firmament of movement, one fish in a sea of silver flashes, reflected sunlight and floating corpses, one eye up.

Compared to all that, what was this? Nothing, a trifle. Just keep swimming, Dub. It made me feel small and insignificant to think of my troubles as trifling and unimportant, but that was the source of power too, wasn't it? Who cared about my small little pains, so why should I give them more force over my life than they deserved? I was just one more body passing through. There was no sense worrying about the passage. Just do it, like Nike. I went into the building, up the elevator, down the hall to the door and paused. Knock or not? I wanted to be considerate, but I didn't want to be conclusive either. Knocking and waiting seemed a bit fatalistic, like what would it be like if no one answered and I just stood there. So I compromised, knocked and entered. As the door swung away from me, I pictured the faces I might see in its stead, but the apartment was empty. I was relieved and yet not, all the things that had become querulous inside me quieted for the moment. Everything was familiar in the apartment but lacked life. It was like they had no future in my eyes, like those Buddhist monks who burn all their possessions yearly in order to keep from becoming overly attached to the material world. Summer would be the time to do it, I smiled to myself. You'd have time to rebuild, restock, reconfigure your world while it was still warm out. It was really a ruse, a game you played on your mind, because if you were still burning your things every year you obviously weren't doing a good job of renouncing material things.


I wasn't sure what to do. Should I wait? Should I leave a message or call her? No, couldn't call her because we didn't have a land line. As I thought I wandered into the kitchen. The sink was full of dirty dishes, some rinsed off and some still with food. I dumped the food into the trashcan under the sink and turned on the water. It took a minute to warm up, so I went to turn on some music. Nodding my head and smiling, I went back and put my hands under the water. It was hot and soothing. The relaxing, unwinding sensation of a good, hot shower spread from my hands up my body. I felt the tenseness in my shoulders release. I grabbed a plate and scrubbed at it. Running it under the water, I began to move to the music. The suds slipped from the clean surface, taking all semblance of whatever was last eaten on it with them as they swirled down the drain. The song changed and the beat picked up. My arms kept working and my feet stayed firmly planted, but I moved my torso and my head in time with the music.

This felt good. The dishes looked almost new or at least fresh and ready for new uses. My actions brought the apartment back to life for a moment. I could imagine doing this day after day, and I could almost hear Sarah's voice coming in the door behind me. "Ooh, hotstuff, I love it when you greet me with your better side! Shake it!" I would wiggle my hips and stick my tongue out at her over my shoulder. I turned to look at the door over my shoulder, half expecting her to walk through it at that very moment. She didn't, and I turned back to my work, humming along to whichever song was playing. My skin was damp with sweat, but it felt good after the humidity outside. I finished and went to the bathroom to wash my face. I was glad to have worked up a little sweat on such a hot day. At least I'd done something, gotten something done. It was so much better than just sitting around and sweating in inactivity. I splashed water on my face and looked into the mirror. Why had I moved from one sink to another just to wash my face? I laughed and wiped at my neck. Taking off Mike's shirt, I wiped away the moisture. The bed, right outside the bathroom in our tiny apartment, looked so welcoming. I hadn't slept for more than a couple of hours at Moira's and a couple more at Mike's. I sat down and ran my fingers through my hair. So many things I could do or directions I could take, but all I could think of was lying back and letting the bed envelop me. I flopped onto my stomach and then my side, looking at the room and thinking of Sarah. Finally, I succumbed to sleep, lying on top of the covers in Sarah's and my apartment.

Consciousness came back to me in a slow swirl. I heard voices, things being moved around. It was dark, almost dark. I rolled over. I must've gotten under the sheets while I slept, because turning over wrapped me more deeply in them. I buried my head in a pillow. This was not how I envisioned this happening. Well, I couldn't see anything, so what was there to compare to what I had envisioned? But light streamed in. I thought about getting up or saying her name right then, but with the sheets over my head I felt like a caterpillar firmly ensconced in his cocoon and though it should have been enough time I wasn't ready to be revealed to the world, nothing more than a failed attempt at metamorphosis.



I felt pressure on the bed. That must be her knees. Another pull of the sheets near my head, one hand pressing down as she leaned over me. Suddenly the sheets were gone from my head. Sarah's hair framed her face like light. She looked happy and I wanted nothing more than to reach out and kiss her. But she poked my nose and said, "Wake up, sleepy-head. We should talk."

Here I reach an impasse. We talked and hashed things out and we both said some things we didn't quite mean like people do. We also said a lot of things we did mean, which is good, which is the goal, the hope. And look, that's the thing about communication. The goal is to have the other person understand what you mean. Sometimes I think this is idealistic. When I say something and you hear it, you don't necessarily understand what I mean even if we have the same thing in mind. If I say 'blue', it might bring with it for me all these connotations, by which I mean things that mean blue to me. If I say blue, I'm thinking of Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong and the ocean and the sky which meet and kiss and cry all at the same time. Perhaps just having the same things in mind and going in the same direction with these things is the goal. If I say blue, at least I know you'll be thinking of all the things you think of when people say blue, or maybe it's just one thing for you, but as long as I know we're thinking about the same thing, I can call the communication a general success.

Sometimes you walk away from an interaction and feel like the other person didn't quite understand what you were saying. Perhaps the things they think when you say 'kiss' or 'cry' or 'meet' are different from the things you think. This is how arguments happen. The thing about communication is to get through a conversation and feel enough of your intent was understood by the other person. The amount of understanding achieved and the contentment with this amount on the part of each participant in the conversation determines how well you get along. If the amount of understanding is dissatisfactory, it makes it that much more difficult to move forward into whatever future you hold together. And that's hard enough when you both understand each other.



Sarah and I, we understood each other pretty well. But we ended the conversation heading in different directions. I didn't feel like I could abide by certain life choices she was making. She was upset at my stubborn refusal to accept these things into my life with her. So I packed a bag. Nothing dramatic, just the essentials. And I moved out. But moved out, what does that mean? How many people have moved out of a building before? In essence, it's just a movement from one place to another. But we make it more significant by giving it metaphorical meaning. Moving out means going to live somewhere else. It means not coming back. It means thinking of yourself differently. You are no longer the person who lives in Brookline. Instead you live in Newton or Medford or Somerville. What I'm trying to say is that when I say I moved out, I mean my body was no longer there as often as it had been and it was no longer the place I thought of for sleep or for the placement of material things. Beyond that, I leave it to you gentle reader to determine what 'I moved out' means as the story unfolds. Of course there were feelings attached to this transition, and I was very much absorbed in this metaphor of personal change. Prior to this juncture in the story, I felt inclined to describe these things. However, at this point I find myself uncomfortable with the overbearingly subjective nature of this narrative; I think my point of view makes it too narrow a picture of what happened.

Let's put it this way. I'm trying to write out the events of something that happened a significant amount of time ago. When I tell this story, I'm using words and describing situations. That is the entirety of this narrative so far. Keeping in mind what we've discussed about communication, it becomes apparent that I cannot expect you gentle reader to understand everything as I have come to understand it. That is, of course, the goal. But there are so many hurdles. These are just words and you are such a complex person with dreams and worries of your own. I cannot expect to describe these events in the best way possible for you. I can only hope to do it the best way I see fit. However, the way that had taken shapen before now becomes a hindrance, something I hope to overcome.

This is what happened. I was trying to write about my conversation with Sarah. I found myself reliving it and getting lost in the emotions of it and, upon reading it over, I was unhappy with the way I had portrayed Sarah. I felt I was being unfaithful to her concerns, her cares, the directions she took to get to this conversation and those she took away from it. It bothered me and I even considered discontinuing my writing. Because why write about someone if I can't do them justice? The other people I was trying to write about posed similar problems. Reading how I had described them, they seemed less like people and more like archetypes or projections of people. This was the problem: they were metaphors of the real people I was trying to write about it. Believe it or not, Dawn is a metaphor. She is not simply the woman who came awkwardly into my life as a harbinger of my change. No, she has a story of her own, an entire set of experiences and reasons for intersecting with my life at exactly the point she did.



Or Michael, look at him. I cannot help but look at my depiction of Michael and think he is a kind of pastiche, an amalgamation of disparate parts that mirrors my own feeling of disconnectedness. I cannot say whether this is the way he viewed himself. But in writing about him, he becomes a kind of figure representative of my thoughts and feelings and the way the real Michael interacted with my thoughts and feelings. To be more specific. In an upcoming scene, I come across Michael watching porn. This is something I have to think he did. We always joked about it. And sometimes I found myself thinking of Michael as someone who watches porn. More than that, it gave me a huge range of connotations to deal with, some of which really didn't apply to Michael. I mean, I put together the jokes we shared about porn and the fact that Michael slept with more women than I did and I came to a point where I was thinking of Michael as a kind of womanizer. Far from it, though. I remember several conversations we had where I was struck with his vulnerability and tenderness. When he talked about his little sister or an ex-girlfriend he was especially fond of. When he was alone with art or music. Michael was more than a black-Jewish friend of mine who was into Spanish and worked at a marina and watched porn and slept with more women than me. If I was a more talented writer, I could evoke all these things while still telling my story. Or if I achieved telepathy and could beam my thoughts and memories right into your head. Sadly, when I look at what I've done so far here, I shudder at how how conventional my beautiful, unique friends come to seem. They might as well be cardboard cut-outs springing from the landscape of my tale as if from the pages of a pop-up picture story book. And I wonder if I too become a character in my own story. I feel like I am reading along as the events unfold, but there I am on every page.

Thankfully, there is a solution. I beat myself up over this for days, a whole week at least. How hard my life is! Discussing this with my friends, the answer finally presented itself. I would let them tell their part of the story. I propositioned them and they eventually acquiesced. I would like to do this for the rest of my story, perhaps alternating my take on the events with the story from someone else's perspective. This proves impossible, however, as there's no way of asking the people from the rest of my story for their version of events. I would have to leave Boston again, retrace my steps, although I guess that's what I'm doing here anyway. I guess that's the value of telling a story: you get to relive the events without the trouble of actually going through them again.

Anyway, without further ado, I hand over the reins of this here narrative. Back in a few.

-Dub