Loren and I met in masks. His eyes, which are yellow and then blue and then black, smiled at me from across the street, doing the work for his lips and his teeth.
When our masks came off, I pressed my knees up against his. He smelled like satin, like he was made for luxury, like he was something I could unzip and crawl into. Sometimes people kiss each other, but I know that it was me who kissed him.
In college I studied chemistry and before exams I’d often dream of carbon bonds. Hexagonal shapes and synthetic equations played against the backs of my eyelids. More than once I solved equations in my sleep. Kissing Loren felt like that, like waking up with the answer.
***
In August, Loren and I walked through a square in Switzerland. It was a square with cobblestone streets and a baby grand piano at its center. Sitting at a bench with his fingers on the keys, a young boy played “Stairway to Heaven” with his eyes closed.
We stopped walking to watch the boy play. The notes drifted up into the air, which was warm and thin from the altitude. Loren wrapped his hand around mine. I could tell we were thinking the same thing.
A month earlier, Loren had played “Stairway to Heaven,” on an acoustic guitar at my mama’s funeral. He’d worn a black linen shirt and black pants and dress socks that he’d borrowed from my uncle. In the days leading up to the service, he practiced the melody again and again. Then he performed it before 400 people, next to a casket with a pride flag draped over it.
***
You could tie dye a t-shirt to match Loren’s gaze. Folding fabric, and wrapping rubber bands, and squeezing bottles of ink. Yellow and then blue and then black. I’d wear that t-shirt to sleep every night. I’d let it get soft in the dryer and then I’d wear it again and again.
When I was in high school, I decided that you could tell if you were in love with someone if you had memorized their freckles. I was lying on the floor of my then boyfriend’s childhood home when I developed this theory. The freckle was on the back of his left arm. I can still picture it, its slightly irregular shape, dark against his pale skin.
There’s a small tag of skin on Loren’s right eyelid, just below the lash line, which you can only see if you are inches from his face. I like to search for it, tucked away above the yellow and blue and black, while we lay beside each other on the red linen sheets of our new bed.
***
On Thanksgiving, my whole family sits around the dining room table and cries. It’s become something of a tradition. One by one we say what we are thankful for and one by one we cry and cry. Last year we cried for the end of something, this year for the beginning. This year, my mommy sat at the head of the table, which had always been my mama’s seat.
Before she died, my mama recorded a video. In it, she talks about her history, her grandparents and parents, her time in high school, and college, and law school. She speaks to each of us, little notes that preserve her personality like a bug caught in amber.
In one scene of the video, my mommy joins her. Together they sit in the sun. “If I had to give you one piece of advice,” my mommy says into the camera, “I’d tell you to choose love every time.”
We watch this video for the first time the day after Thanksgiving, all of us piled onto the couches and floors of the living room in my childhood home. At my mommy’s words, I reach for Loren’s hand.
As I finish writing this scene, I realize I didn’t even think to tell you that Loren was there too, part of the family crying side by side.
***
I am at an artist residency in Virginia with a poet named Jenny George. It’s a great name, isn’t it? Jenny George. Jenny George is a middle-aged lesbian with short cropped grey hair. She’s my favorite person to sit next to at breakfast.
Last night, all of the residents gathered in a room that we refer to as the library for a reading. Before the reading began, we passed open bottles of red wine and individually wrapped pieces of Dove chocolate between us. There were three planned readers, myself, a novelist whose name you’ve almost certainly heard, and Jenny George.
Jenny George has this very specific way of sliding her glasses up her nose. Four years ago, her wife died of ovarian cancer. Jenny George sat with her wife while she died. I learn all of this from her poems, one of which is titled, “Black Butterflies,” and details the movements of hands in black silk gloves wrapping a white sheet around a dead body. These poems will be published soon, in Jenny George’s second book.
“Moments of extreme grief and extreme love can bring about mythological, spiritual sentiment,” Jenny George announced mid reading, as she slid her glasses up her nose. “But I didn’t want my whole book to live in the realm of the spiritual, so I wrote some poems about being entirely, embarrassingly human too.”
Then she read a poem that began, “Jenny George sucks in the garden.”
I don’t want this whole essay to live in the realm of the spiritual, so I’ll tell you something that is entirely, embarrassingly human. Loren never puts his shoes away. He leaves them in the middle of our living room floor. This makes me so irrationally mad that I nag and nag and hear my voice climb three octaves. This makes me so irrationally mad that I wonder if he even loves me because if he did, surely, he’d put his shoes under the bench where they belong.
In truth though, the fact that Loren and I have a living room and a bench together, places where our shoes do and do not belong, feels like the strongest evidence of the mythological and spiritual realms that I’ve come across so far.
***
Loren was there when my mama died. He sat on the floor beside her unconscious body and played her Patti Smith and James Taylor songs on his guitar. At some point during the five and a half hours that it took my mama to die after losing consciousness, he brought my mommy a matcha from Starbucks. I don’t know how to explain to you that in that moment, as her wife died slowly beside her, bringing my mommy a matcha from Starbucks was the exact right thing to do.
Loren was there when the funeral home sent two young women to pick up my mama’s body. He was there as they pulled black silk gloves onto their hands and prepared to wrap her in a white sheet. I hadn’t remembered that part, until last night when Jenny George read about it.
The night my mama died, Loren and I laid beside each other in my childhood bed. It felt as if the day had fused us together, melded our skin somewhere unseen. I’ve tried to explain what that day was like to other people, I’ve tried to write about it, to take it outside of my head and put it somewhere real, but I’ve never quite been able to. With Loren, I don’t have to. He was there, it lives in his head too.
Something entirely, embarrassingly human: that same night, lying in bed and newly fused, I farted. Loren laughed. And I laughed. And then we laughed, and we laughed, and we laughed. That my mama could die, and we could keep laughing at farts felt like a revelation, like a secret that we’d never be able to explain to anyone, and with each other, wouldn’t have to.
***
A few nights ago, here in Virginia, I read a book of poetry called, “Couplets” in one sitting.
In it, the author writes in rhymes of her love for a man and then a woman. There’s one stanza I can’t stop thinking about:
“In poetry then, let me say that love
Has been, above all things, the engine of
Self knowledge in my life - and even after everything
Is still what makes the rest worth suffering.”
Something entirely, embarrassingly human: Jenny George says that the author photo on the back cover of “Couplets” is a thirst trap. She’s totally right, it is.
But I read these lines, and I can’t help but to think that we’re all basically saying the same thing. That in the face of loss and grief, we’d choose love every time.
That in the face of mythological, spiritual pain, to be in love is to wake up with the answer.
Thank you so much.
I love you Jess💞