The Write Thing

In an alcoholic anonymous website, somebody once wrote: I don’t know if the glass is half-empty or half-full, I can’t find the glass! Upon reading this clever line, I realized that in fact there is a third option to pessimism and optimism…absence. Maybe there is a glass, or maybe there isn’t. Whether it is empty or full, that again is a matter of perspective.

I have spent most of my weekend classifying books and deciding what to keep and what not to keep. Like an obsessed librarian, I was forced to open my own catalog of reading, my chronology of life through books. Moving out is certainly a time-consuming process, but it is also enriching. It forces us to pause when we cannot, because we are fighting our own lack of time, to look at what we are leaving behind. Some people are fortunate (or unfortunate?) enough to take themselves with them in their journeys. This time I am not. I have made a decision to take only the necessary part of me. Some of these books will make it to Houston initially, but others will have to wait for me to either take them, leave them or retrieve them if life sews a more permanent path to good ol’ Texas.

Yes, I decided to travel light. I want to live with less instead of more. I want to find the glass. I have been wanting to do that for quite a while, but something stopped me…it must be the reluctance of all human beings to change, or the fear that if we let go of things, of people, we will feel the emptiness. As I look back on the half-empty bookcase, I would say that it all depends on how you leave. It is not so much about the act of departure but about the way in which we go. Most of the time we escape — and believe me, I have been there — but sometimes, if we do the homework that life sprinkles here and there between the pages of our own mysterious book, there is a fair chance that leaving will be an action of growth instead than a side door to more of the old self.

The two bookshelves that remain to be cleared before they find a new home at my mother’s contain the effort of growth that stemmed out of the need of fleeing far away, where no old ghosts of bad family love could find me. Something good came out of escaping, but it only did when I had the courage to come back and face the demons I thought I had left behind.

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.