The Write Thing

It was a Thursday. I was supposed to take a morning plane to San Francisco and meet you in your early afternoon. The plane was delayed, and I remember calling you while I was on board to warn you that I would be late, and perhaps you would like to go to the hotel and I’d meet you there and…

The movie they showed for the five-hour flight that separates Houston from San Francisco was A Flash of Genius, and I never got to see the ending. I do remember being quite intrigued about its ending. Would the man end up beating Ford in the battle over the intellectual rights to his invention of windscreen wipers, or would the film dare to go beyond the American dream to show the American reality, where the system always wins. “If the movie is American, then it ends well”, you said, making me smile. Yes, you scored again.

I made it late to baggage claim, and you were already there, light-packed for the weekend, patiently ready to go on the train that would take us to the hotel you picked, Vitale, just across from the Ferry building. You seemed embarrassed when the receptionist gave you his “welcome back” greeting, as if that had exposed your privacy in a way that simply escaped me. However, I found it particularly charming that you would make a point of clarifying your never having been there before, as if I had a say in that.

Looking back, perhaps we already meant more for each other than we dared to acknowledge to ourselves. Yes, we preferred to play the game of pragmatism, not making more of a weekend escapade to San Francisco than what it was… the opportunity of meeting and repeating what we had already been on a night of Pinot Noir and Italian food in Buenos Aires a few months earlier. So we innocently embarked on the endeavor of trying to be the practical and wiser versions of ourselves, spending three days and two nights together in a magnificent place that meant so much to you and would hold so much for me. For you, the moment of magic was when I held your hand at the gay bookstore in the Castro area to show you a funny postcard. For me, the magic was there but I refused to see it, putting up a barrier of denial between myself and my feelings until I could not even act on the bare emotion of your imminent departure. I could not hold you, or kiss you as you stood near the door…how could I? My body no longer responded to the mind that calculated each step on a no-expectation prerrogative for whatever was unfolding between us. The door closed behind you, and my eyes filled with tears. Not even an idyllic walk to Fisherman’s Wharf in a chilly winter night would lighten up the heaviness of your loss. J’etais perdue. I already loved you.

Oh silly W, writing nice practical emails and trying to dust off her little demons upon her return to safe, workable Houston…the West Coast tornado had arrived, and with a stroke of patience had shaken me off my base. All of a sudden, there was you all around and I still refused to face it. How hard it would be to date again, I wondered aloud on a computer keyboard. Your answer on the other end was simple and protective in its impossible pragmatism…yes, we would take this for what it is, being lovers as time allows.

A year later, it is your reference to sleep in that email what my mind evokes most vividly of that reply…your lack of sleep, the importance and elusiveness of it, how you build around its absence. Throughout the year we would revisit our relationship with Morpheus, and sometimes sleep would become more of an enemy to fight than a lover to seduce. At times it would become a contextual intermission to the unfolding of our love, a natural pause and eventually a fact.

Perhaps sleep comes to us like a natural companion now because we are, instead of trying not to be. A year later, I think we have dared to dream…and when the god of sleep takes its true form, it has wings.

There are moments in life when silence is all that is possible. In an odd, untimely way, I believe I had a severe case of this almost for the last two months. Lots of things are changing in my life right now. New doors are opening while others have closed apparently in a much more certain way than I would have imagined, or even liked. Oddly enough, it is in those times when writing becomes the obvious channel. However, I have not written — except for work reasons — for exactly 59 days.

I cannot possibly expect anyone who ever read this blog to even become aware of my return. Those generous souls who would now and then glance at the website for a peek into whatever oddity I would decide to indulge my keyboard into by now have probably given up all hope. Yes, lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate. You would do the right thing by refraining from trusting an erratic author. Life is much more beautiful when you do not have to be surprised by other people’s changing moods.

If I were a good writer, I would be able to summarize in a concise text my whereabouts since I decided to put this blog in the freezer. Oh, well…I don’t think I can do that. Therefore, I will speak about the future, about new horizons, about uncertainty itself. Houston beckons, this time for a more permanent contract. What this means is a lot and nothing. It means I still have a job, and new challenges, but it does not bind anyone to anything — including myself. A few years ago, Houston had also seemed to be the place where I would be residing on a longer term basis. However, neither life nor I were ready for the jump, so the whole fantasy only materialized in a short story I wrote at the time and which I named “Letters from Houston”. It was written in Spanish…and I’ll never know why. Houston was on hold, and in a very particular fashion, I was coming out of my own personal limbo of indecision and non-living. Many things changed in the two years that passed since a first door to the US was closed, partially by H1-B quotas and partially by myself. I plunged into my own abyss, emerged half-victorious and wounded, and created my own re-birth, as Sylvia Plath would say beautifully at the end of that prodigious scene of The Bell Jar. I played around the limits of desire and succumbed to the demons of dysfunctional relationships, I naively believed it was possible to set free a repressed love and not pay the high cost of its loss, but I also learned to let go. I learned that letting go is the only way of healing, and the hardest.

Yes, I miss her sometimes…her laughter, her friendship, her beautiful eyes, and I secretly know there will be no letters from Houston, and no Copacabana Palace. We are no more anything, and it scares me to think that I always knew…because I wrote the end of my own story throughout the summers of her absence and my pain and I was right, even before she severed the bond to escape a friendship that now she feared.

Oh, but this posting was supposed to be about my future. Well, nothing is really about the future unless it comes from our own past. So I will raise a symbolic glass of champagne and toast to us, to the land of no regrets, to the bitter taste that time will turn into sweet vignettes of a youthful Paris…the world we knew before, dont je ne regrette rien

The flight landed exactly an hour later than scheduled. The airport was humming with the first sounds of that unwanted somnolence that fills the gap between the late night and early morning flights. My fellow travel companions and I were on the other side of the divide — the select cast of late arrivals. Even the frantic hailing that normally beckons from tiny taxi boxes as one exits customs was absorbed into the general airport sopor. Nobody was supposed to be waiting, so it was just a question of picking the most unassuming box (or with the shortest waiting time) and paying for the ride home. It was no longer raining in Buenos Aires, I was told, but that to me was a dynamic reference to a past I never had to deal with. I came from sunny beaches and warm summer weather, and in that slice of bliss the rain is simply a musical interlude that enhances the general piece, like Thaïs meditation.

My driver was a tall, athletic and handsome man in his early thirties. He was polite in that simple way in which some people can be polite at 3.00 am in the morning, commenting on the weather and his ruined weekend plans, and sincerely concerned over the repeated postponements that his Christmas Party had undergone on account of the lousy weather on both sides of the Río de la Plata in the past few weeks.

Taking the highway home so late in the foggy night was delightful, as the risk of traffic jams was clearly reduced to nil in the early hours of a Monday. I was home in a third of the time I would have needed during the day. I dropped my bag on the floor beside me and started a quick negotiation with myself for fewer hours of sleep in exchange of a goodnight email to her.

The house was silent, my dog having gone to spend time with helpful family members. The night brought a strange mix of company and solitude when I crossed the doorway earlier, as if there was actually someone present when nobody was actually there. I sighed as my fingers started a short dance on the computer keyboard.

Who knows? Maybe silence is a companion with a presence of its own, if we want to listen.