The Chasm and the Sun
or, That Time I Was in Love
Every word of this story is true, except for all the facts. It’s also told out of order, because truth is rarely so kind as to come to you chronologically.
The nice thing about stories is, you can tell them however you want.
It’s 2011. I’m hunched into the darkened A/V booth. Dimmer switches and volume sliders glow faintly in my peripheral vision. On stage a woman I just met is painting a ten-foot tree on a thick sheet of canvas draped from the ceiling. Being quite a bit less than ten feet tall herself, she begins by gripping handfuls of the cloth in her bare hands and ascending it, paintbrush held in her teeth and dripping green abandon until she reaches her desired location, then swung wildly within her arm’s reach to capture first the left, then the right expanse of the tree’s canopy. It takes a few ascensions and descensions before the highest areas are filled in, their swoops and gullies now shaped as much by the movements of her climb as by the brush itself.
Overhead, Tom Waits is playing. Specifically, “Falling Down”, from Glitter and Doom Live. Many details of this day will escape me in time, but the song will stay with me forever.
By the final verse, the trunk has taken shape, the paintbrush mostly forgotten in favor of bold hand-smeared streaks of brown. While Waits grumbles and groans about knocking down a hotel, she begins fingering various knots and imperfections into the surface of the tree, refining the looser work of moments earlier, and sitting there in the booth, something comes over me physiologically. Like an overclocked computer, my mind and body have been tricked somehow into running beyond their recommended capacity. The feeling ripples through me in moments, leaving behind a minor headache and a tinge of nausea, like realizing you left a burner on hours ago and it’s too late to do anything about it.
Driving these symptoms is an absolute, intense focus, like I’ve never experienced before. The object of that focus is the woman on stage, for whom my regard has gone from casual interest to…something else.
Two hours earlier, I’m greeting her as she arrives at the theater — a small community operation here in Pittsburgh that I help manage when I’m not at my day job or writing plays of my own. She and some friends are renting it for the weekend, and I’m there to keep an eye on things. We chat for a while, waiting for the others to arrive. Personalities unveil themselves gradually like plants spreading out in the sun. It’s immediately clear that she’s smart, articulate, observant, her wide eyes taking the measure of things and processing them efficiently, astutely. She’s short, with long, sandy blond hair and a climber’s build. Her name is Elaine.
Four hours later, I’m downstairs locking up for the night. Despite my sudden affliction I’d managed to act normal as I helped them reset the stage, the way you act normal when you’re out with friends and notice a tickle in your throat that might be a cold but you don’t want to fuck up the evening over it. Only now do I have a moment to reflect on what’s just happened, and put the thing into words:
I think I’m in love.
At this moment I haven’t dated anyone regularly in about three years. That’s not in itself unusual. You could classify me as “looking”, but in the way that you might be looking for a good Thai place — it’s not preoccupying, but it’s there in the back of your mind if something catches your eye.
If movies and television are to be believed, that’s how these things are supposed to start: with dating. Honesty and intimacy carefully modulated over a succession of evenings that turns into weeks, then months, and then if you’re lucky, your casual interest in each other blossoms slowly into love. Realizing suddenly that you’re in love with someone you’ve just met, someone whose affections are in no way available to you, is like carrying around a sun in your chest and having to spend every moment of every day pretending it’s not there.
Three months later, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Elaine and I are walking to a bar near my apartment, hand in hand. She leans in close for a moment and puts her head against my shoulder, cracking me open and sending streaks of sunlight scattering across the chilled pavement. This is our second date, and once we settle in at the bar I drift deeply into Analysis Mode — how did this happen? Why does it feel different from my other experiences with women? I’m a rational person neck-deep in an irrational experience, and instead of just accepting that I’m trying to get my arms around it and force it into a shape I understand.
We return to my apartment, make out for a while, fool around for a while. I’m in no special hurry to have sex and she seems pleasantly surprised that I don’t pressure her about it, suggesting that I’ve [done everything right], leaving unspoken the array of worse decisions she’d been waiting for me to make.
Feeling emboldened by this, I decide to go ahead and ruin everything.
Once there was a boy. He did most of the things you expect a boy to do, acted mostly like you expect a boy to act, but he was never quite what people thought he was.
Surrounding the boy on all sides was a chasm. Unlike other chasms, it followed him around wherever he went, as if he was wearing it like a backpack. It lay not between the boy and the places he wanted to go, but between him and other people.
Because the chasm was so deep, and so dark, the boy couldn’t see it. Because he carried it with him, for a time he didn’t even know it was there. Only in his interactions with others did it make its presence known. In expectations not met. In sentiments not shared, intimations not recognized, moods not discerned.
The boy had never known anything else, so for a long time he had no words for the chasm, no awareness that it was unusual. Its contours had not yet defined themselves. This was just how people were.
I: THE CHASM [1987–1999]
It’s 2022, more than a decade later. I’m at my office’s holiday party. After a couple glasses of wine, my supervisor’s inhibitions recede enough for her to ask if I have a significant other — worded carefully so as not to assume a gender. In twelve years of holidays, cookouts, and happy hours I’ve never once brought a date; I have to think people have wondered but this is the first time the question has been put to me directly. The answer is, well, a long story.
This story is primarily about Elaine, but to fully appreciate it you must understand its context. You must understand that love at first sight is not a thing that happens to me. It is, in fact, contrary to every other romantic experience I’ve had before and since — as if a bodybuilder woke up one day and knew in their bones they were a ballerina.
It’s thirty-five years earlier, and I’ve developed my first crush: a girl named Violet, in my kindergarten class. As an adult, all I’ll remember about her is dark hair. The first in a long line of brunettes.
It’s three years later. I’m seated on the school bus, waiting to begin the drive home. It’s a long trip, and I’m listening to a tape of “Sebastian the Crab” covering various reggae-adjacent songs, reading along in the songbook it came with. The other children laugh, roughhouse, gossip — whatever normal children do, I couldn’t say.
Bewilderingly, my current crush, a girl named Nikki, sits down beside me. As far as I know she is only currently aware of me as the boy who runs a little too close to her when we’re doing laps in gym class, so it’s safe to assume her seating choice stems not from desire but necessity.
I embark upon a crush much the same way you would a mortgage — soberly and with great caution, over a period of weeks or months. Once the earliest tugs of attraction make themselves known the process that ensues is strictly logical: I have to get to know them a bit, to conclude rationally that we’re compatible — or as rational as I can be at eight, or fifteen, or twenty-five. Is part of me just searching for reasons to justify that initial, superficial interest? Maybe, but over the years plenty of people have not made it to the far side of this process. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Having been granted my crush as a captive audience, I ease my songbook in Nikki’s direction, offering it carefully as if a stampede would ensue if the other children only knew the riches on offer, and ask if she would like to read the lyrics to “Hot, Hot, Hot” along with me.
This brilliant idea is my first grasping attempt to find a common interest with a girl I like instead of just considering her from afar. Alas, Nikki declines — and somewhere in my mind’s substrata I conclude that my destiny lies elsewhere.
Seven years later, I’m seated in English class behind a girl named Kate, where I will remain for the whole of sophomore year. After a string of childhood crushes with no clear pattern, Kate is patient zero for what will eventually become my “type”: short-cut brunette; lithe; incisive; wry. Jane Lane from Daria, more or less. She’s also a bit geeky, which at this point is an exciting new feature for a pretty girl to have.
Somewhere in adolescence I discovered that my ability to snap off a witty remark allowed me to remain, if not traditionally popular, at least a fairly welcome presence at school, and for the most part I’ve been content in that role. Now, for the first time, I experience a conscious desire to get someone to like me — and it turns out that the defined structure of a classroom setting bestows upon me an unexpected social dexterity. In the hallways, the cafeteria, or (god forbid) outside of school, social interactions are opaque, unpredictable, but here at my desk I know the rules, which means knowing how to bend or break them to my own ends.
Over the course of the school year I take the role I’ve been assigned and develop it into my best approximation of a likable person. With careful applications of intentionality I experiment with the person I am perceived to be; adjusting and rewriting the role’s contours; reinforcing its weaknesses and amplifying its strengths. Within the controlled environment of our English class, I’m able to expand my bit part in someone’s life into something resembling an actual friendship. Once or twice I even manage to hang out with her — in group settings, mind — outside of class, assigning new dimensions to the role and broadening its potential.
Like every story, however, every class must end. The narrative I’ve been crafting meets with a shocking twist: Kate is changing schools next year. With no more shared context in which to ground our story, I have no tools for charting a path forward. We sign each other’s yearbooks, she offers a polite “let’s hang out sometime”, but now what? Actually call her? Ask her out? No, no, that can’t be right.
I find my footing by retreating to my usual modus operandi, telling myself that if there’s any actual interest on her part surely she will call me — so when weeks turn to months and that call fails to arrive, I decide to respect what I’m certain is her preference and leave her alone.
In the past, my crushes have always waxed and waned as the girl in question entered and then receded from my life, but this time another twist arrives: Kate remains stuck in my head for more than a year. Despite having vanished materially from my life, her ghost lingers, crowding out anyone new who might potentially fill her space.
After a year of pining for the ghost I finally gather the nerve not to reconnect with Kate, ask her how she’s doing, but to blather my feelings into an email in a desperate effort to evict her from my brain — an instinct which will rear its ugly head again many years later. I never hear back, unsurprisingly, but before too long that lack of a response becomes the extra data point I need to move on. Did I ever stand a chance? Could a more relaxed approach have kept Kate in my life, at least as a friend? I’ll never know.
My brain processes this evolution in my experience of romantic interest and eventually outputs a hypothesis: am I in love? Is that what this is? Is love, then, the same basic phenomenon as a crush, different only in degree?
I will operate under this belief until I meet Elaine.
As the boy lurched and scrabbled toward manhood, occasionally he would lose his footing, as boys do. The chasm would reveal itself to him, and he would have no choice but to step back, lest he plummet into the abyss. In this way, the boy slowly came to recognize the limitations the chasm had imposed on his life.
Everything the boy learned about the other side came from the stories he heard. In stories, people just like the boy seemed regularly to flitter across the chasm with ease, or at least learned to by the end. Stories weren’t real life, the boy knew, but maybe they could teach him a trick or two?
Using the stories as a map, the boy began building narrow, delicate paths across the chasm. With the confidence that came from knowing how things were supposed to go, the chasm itself almost seemed to recede.
Carefully, experimentally, the boy began to venture forth.
II: ON DATING [1999–2014]
As the last remnants of Kate’s ghost evanesce from my mind, I spend the summer before my senior year helping out at my uncle’s coffee shop. One of the regulars is a girl named Nora, an affable redhead with a goofy sense of humor. The type of girl people usually volunteer is a good match for me, which is a coded way of saying we’re both nerdy. Unlike most of my crushes thus far, Nora doesn’t go to my school; we have no regular routine for me to build on.
Also unlike the others, Nora actually likes me back.
It’s not an incomprehensible notion; I’m fully aware that a certain number of people find me attractive. My problem, especially at this age, is an almost complete inability to recognize it in the moment. Leaning in and fluttering your eyelashes simply does not get the job done. If you’re a woman and you’re interested in me, ideally I’m going to need you to write that down in bold lettering on a wooden placard and then hit me over the head with it.
In all honesty, Nora may like me more than I like her — but she has the advantage of being slightly more self-assured than I am, and I have no template for this experience in my repertoire so I leave our slow, fumbling, teenagerly progress mostly in her hands. Some tentative hand-holding here, a quick peck on the lips there. The kinds of things a typical teenage boy might take as invitations to go further, but I’m as unprepared to make those moves as she is, perhaps, to make them herself. As I grow older, most of my romantic successes will come to me thanks to women like Nora, who aren’t going to let traditional gender roles keep them from a guy they like.
In normal life, someone being friendly is not on its own a sign that they’re attracted to you; it doesn’t necessarily even mean they want to be friends. On dating websites, which started to gain traction around when I finished my creative writing degree, there’s no such ambiguity: interaction of any kind is a tacit admission of at least mild interest. Appending this technology to my attempts at a love life is like donning a prosthetic limb; suddenly, my missing component has been compensated for and I can move past its lack and on to experiences previously unavailable to me.
The first woman for whom I’m officially cast in the role of “boyfriend” comes via one such site. Her name is Laura. I’m twenty-five years old, and she’s twenty-eight, which perhaps explains why we got as far as we did. Our first date begins at a coffee shop, migrates to a deli across the street, then to a playground a few blocks away where she finally coaxes me into kissing her with the kind of intense delicacy you’d use to offer food to a deer. For the next two months or so I manage to embody the rough outline of a normal boyfriend — we go to movies, I help her move, we sleep together every so often with no major logistical problems. When she eventually breaks up with me in an email, she says it’s not my fault, and at this point I’m naïve enough to believe her.
Five years later, I gauge my recovery from Hurricane Elaine by my gradual willingness to return to the site I’d met Laura on. The year that follows will mark both my highest and lowest points as a participant in what you’d call normal dating.
First comes Noelle. Noelle’s expectations are both clearly telegraphed and progress in a linear, predictable fashion — hug on the first date, kiss on the second, her place on the third — and because of that I find that I’m largely prepared to meet them. As we sit on her couch fumbling with each other’s clothes, she stops to specify that she’s not looking for something exclusive. Any disappointment I might feel at that is lost to my relief that she’s saying it to me with actual words instead of expecting me to intuit it somehow.
The role I adopt for Noelle is as grounded and safe as an eighties sitcom subversively titled Casuals; even the problems are routine and low-stakes so as not to alienate mainstream audiences. We go out for about four months, and honestly, it’s the most comfortable relationship I’ve ever been in.
About six months later, I’m at the theater, helping out with another play by tending the bar in our reception room. I could never hack it as a real bartender, but here, I thrive: it’s not too loud, the orders not too complicated, and I usually know at least a quarter of the guests already. I know every question people might ask about the building, and plenty more things they’d be interested in but don’t know to ask. Our interactions are more template than script, rife with openings through which I can weave with verve and wit, expand or condense as the moment calls for. Most importantly, much like that first response on a dating site, I recognize that if someone lingers after I give them their drink it means they actually want to talk to me. If “funny guy in English class” was my first draft of a man who could be appealing to women, this role is my magnum opus.
Knowing this, I invite my latest match to attend the performance as a pre-date of sorts. Kristen is an apprentice architect, and an all-around impressive person: sharp, vivacious, gorgeous — as close to my aforementioned “type” as I’ve actually gotten — and I’ll need all the advantages I can get for my first impression. Which isn’t to say that I’m particularly nervous: having known so many performers over the years the mystique of the beautiful woman has by now worn off on me. They’re not unicorns; they’re no more or less unknowable or infallible than anyone else. I might not be the biggest stud out there, but at least once a month I see a beautiful woman at the grocery store accompanied by a man I’m absolutely certain is less attractive than me. The way I figure it, those guys are just better partners than I am.
Kristen lingers at the end of the evening, is very much interested. After another hour or so of bombarding me with every signal in the book, she finally gives up, leans in, and asks [do you want to kiss me?] I very much do, and even more so for her asking.
Our relationship will last three weeks and change.
III: ON BREAKING UP [2000–2015]
I never technically break up with Nora, my high school dalliance. Our shared narrative culminates at my senior prom, where an uneventful, chaste evening is enjoyed — enjoyed? Experienced. Experienced by all. After that, with my departure for college looming, things just sort of wind down. Was she fine with it by then? Devastated? I never thought to ask.
Near the end of my time with Nonexclusive Noelle she discloses that she has in fact started seeing another person, and in the moment I honestly don’t think I care. Just the same, the energy starts to taper off soon after that. One night she says she’s not feeling well and asks me to take her straight home after dinner. For once, she leaves her true meaning unsaid, and for once, I actually pick up on it — or maybe I’m just on the same page myself. I drop her off with a suggestion that she reach out when she’s up to getting together again. She agrees, but we both know this is probably it.
By a wide margin, this is my most pleasant breakup experience.
It’s six years earlier, and I’m meeting Laura, the Older Woman, at the music store where she works to go out to lunch. As we sit together at the casual Chinese place across the street, she says in a tone that to me seems comparably casual, a perfect inflectional match for the spring roll in my hand, that she’s experiencing a nervous breakdown.
In time, hard experience will earn me a somewhat better understanding of how you’re supposed to respond to a statement like that from a partner. Now, at twenty-five, it strikes my ears as if spoken in a foreign language. A woman looking to her boyfriend not for tangible solutions but for emotional support is at this moment an utterly alien concept — and anyway, what tangible solution could I possibly offer her? Echinacea? It is here, now, that I first witness the true limitations of the stories I’ve been crafting for myself. Here that I first witness the chasm’s precipice as a grown man, and fully appreciate the distance between what I think I am and what I know how to be.
Eventually I manage to say something vaguely supportive sounding, ask a couple superficial questions, but what I don’t do, what I’m completely unprepared to do, is offer instinctive empathy. When her email ends things a couple weeks later she doesn’t mention that lunch date at all, instead apologizing for [not being a very good girlfriend]. As disheartened as I am, I have not yet developed antibodies to the assertion “it’s not you, it’s me”, so I see no reason to doubt her. When people tell me what I want to hear, I believe them. Why wouldn’t I?
Six and a half years later, a common refrain in my relationship with Kristen the Architect is that we’re both busy adults with lives of our own and we’re not going to expect too much from each other too soon. As we enter our fourth week, I find myself with a major deadline looming and a new play that needs a lot of attention, so with said refrain in mind, I make it clear that I have a full plate and won’t be able to see her until the weekend — and at first, Kristen appears to understand.
This status quo survives until Tuesday, when Kristen has a stressful day at work and asks me to come over. Given that we’d already reached an understanding on this point, her request represents an error in the continuity of our narrative — one I’m not prepared to remediate. To put it mildly, this is not the response she was looking for: the next morning brings a litany of angry messages that reaches its crescendo with [you’re lucky I didn’t go get drunk and sleep with someone else], then concludes with another text-based breakup.
While Laura, obviously, was dealing with some sort of mental health issue that I had been blind to, by the time Kristen’s ultimatum comes along I’m experienced enough to recognize it as manipulative, either consciously or unconsciously — a way of leveraging my nascent commitment to her to assert control over my life. A couple days later she confirms this somewhat by apologizing, and hinting at some issues of her own, yet not going so far as to renege on the breakup. Perhaps even now she’s hoping I’ll try harder, offer an apology of my own to make things right. If so, I disappoint her once more: for all the promise she’d held mere days ago, I am now quite simply scared to death of her.
Whether or not Kristen’s demands are unreasonable, the decision she’d placed before me — between her narrative and mine, between the needs of a partner and the rest of my life — is a novel and enlightening one. After all this time being single, all my failed attempts at a lasting relationship, surely keeping this one would be my highest priority?
And yet, it isn’t. I choose my life.
With the stories as his guide, the boy made several careful journeys across the chasm. Like surveys of a foreign land, each venture taught him a little more about the other side.
But his paths were always limited, his footing tentative. The boy could never fully enjoy his progress. Some part of him always knew a retreat was inevitable.
Only once was this truly put to the test. No journey was ever quite like the others, but only once did the boy, now a man, truly believe that the chasm had been defeated for good.
IV: THE SUN [2011]
After years of effort and experience crafting narratives both on the page and in my personal life, it’s perhaps ironic that the most compelling story in my repertoire is the one whose telling I felt the least control over.
Some facts about Elaine: she lives in Philadelphia, three hundred miles away. The weekend of our first meeting, she mentions a girlfriend back home. Physically, she’s lovely but not really my type — she’s not even a brunette. If you consider the data set independent of the woman, it’s simply unthinkable that I would develop more than a casual, passing interest in this person; something forgotten within days of her leaving town.
I think of the experience as being in love because nothing else comes close to explaining it. Even after the initial rush fades away, my brain seems to be wired differently. It’s harder to sleep, harder to read. I’m more prone to crying at sentimental movies. Music sounds…stronger, somehow, more profound; not just Tom Waits, but anything with lyrics I can even flimsily associate with my situation. Anything that doesn’t grip my attention in a vice quickly recedes into the horizon, a fleeting ripple in an endless sea of her.
By sheer happenstance, a recent play of mine has been selected for a one-night-only performance at a small venue in Philadelphia’s Fishtown, a couple months after Elaine’s visit to Pittsburgh. She’d expressed interest in my writing, so I invite her to attend, and we make plans to get a drink afterward. What exactly she thinks of me at this point I have no idea, but much like the predictability of a classroom, the defined span of time before I’m able to see her again — nine weeks, to be precise — turns out to be something of a life raft I can cling to in her absence, a string of measurable intervals I can feel my way along while blinded by the sun that’s growing inside me.
I pass the time in part by putting another polish on my script before it needs to be locked for the company in Fishtown. Knowing that Elaine will bear witness to the finished product compels me to put everything I’ve got into it — to let the sun out in a controlled environment, and fashion the efflux into something that expresses, in the vaguest possible way, just a little of what’s happening inside of me. For the first time in my life, I am wholly committed to a single path: Operation Get Elaine To Like Me. The sun may be inconvenient, but it’s also a resource; a mechanism for mustering every drop of my potential in pursuit of a single goal.
I send the new draft off, then resume counting the weeks.
Five weeks later I fly to Philadelphia. The theme from Love Actually — you know, when the little white child leads security on a merry chase through a post-9/11 airport — plays in my headphones on repeat as the plane lands. To an outside observer I’m functioning in my normal manner but my mind is a maelstrom of directionless romantic energy. I expect nothing and everything at the same time.
The theater only seats a couple hundred people, and before long I’m able to spot Elaine from backstage as the audience filters in. The curtain rises and I do my best to simply watch, to judge the performance on its own merits rather than the pitiless dictates of Operation Get Elaine To Like Me. I may actually be proud of it but who the hell knows.
Afterward, I linger and socialize only so long as feels absolutely necessary, offering my genuine thanks and congratulations to the company before finally making my way through the milling crowd to Elaine. With a final wave to the director — to whom I’ve explained the broad strokes of this commitment — we venture out into the cool November evening.
We end up way in the back of a busy but unassuming bar somewhere nearby, the kind of place where you think you’re at the end of it but then, like a descent into Wonderland, you push through a doorway and it keeps going. Around its midpoint is an old-timey popcorn dispenser, shrewdly enticing patrons to drink more by plying them with free salt.
Seated there at a corner table in the dim blue light, we talk, and talk, and talk. Most of it will be lost to my memory. Knowing Elaine, and knowing myself, we likely dig further into the details of our respective creative endeavors — the musical and choreographic aspects of her painting, the scientific and philosophical aspects of my writing. Without knowing or intending it, this woman unmoored me two months ago, and being with her again, the maelstrom encompasses me fully. The next thing I know, it’s two and the bar is closing.
I may not be great at signals, but Elaine having sat and talked with me for four-plus hours seems like a good sign, no? Further enhancing my unmoored feeling, tonight is the daylight savings changeover, meaning that somewhere in there time actually rewound an hour. I have a flight home in six hours — or is it seven now? This could not be further from my mind.
As the bar closes and we make our way outside, the bubble of unreality collapses, the night wind a harsh reminder that the moment is nearly past me and I’ll soon return to the almost-life I’ve been living since summer. And this time, who knows when I might see Elaine again? The evening has gone well, and a rough impression has been communicated that her partner is no longer in the picture, but to my stunted perception nothing clearly romantic has taken place. Just two friends shooting the shit while one happens to be in town.
The shit-shooting continues, though, as we walk to a trolley station. I don’t know the area well, and what Elaine seems to explain to me is that we’ll need to take one route together, then exit at another stop and take separate routes from there. The clock is ticking on our parting ways, and I’m feverishly calculating the length of the wait, then of the first ride, then another wait: the remaining time granted to me by the universe to do what even I know I have to do. The thing I’ve never done, not really. Not like this.
We board the first trolley and sit down, still chatting like normal, like anyone would do if their sanity wasn’t hanging in the balance. A few minutes later, with no prelude whatsoever, Elaine stands. This is her stop. Not ours — I’m supposed to stay on this one. A quick hug goodbye, a quick promise to hang out again sometime, and then she exits the car.
I misunderstood.
I thought I had more time.
It’s the middle of the night.
I have no idea where I am.
I have no idea if there’ll be another trolley.
I have a flight to catch.
While I’ve dressed this story up in lots of fictional details, I feel compelled here and here alone to stress that this actually happened. If it was complete fiction it would be unforgivable. But no.
I get off the trolley and run after her.
I catch up to Elaine as she’s ascending a wide set of stairs to ground level. I touch her arm to stop her and when she turns around I pull her into another hug — a real hug this time.
What, did you think I’d kiss her? Let’s not go crazy here.
She returns the hug, voicing dismay at how long I’ll now have to wait for another trolley. I pull back, our arms still together, so I can look her in the eyes. “I’m crazy about you,” I say. “This is me telling you that I’m crazy about you.”
Her exact words back to me are lost to the maelstrom, but I know they’re something to the effect of [I like you too], because she’s smiling at me now in a way that even I can recognize as attraction. I’m finally able to see without ambiguity that this person actually reciprocates my feelings, at least somewhat.
I ask, “I can kiss you, right?” She nods. I do.
Somehow, with no template to rely on, I’ve written myself into something that feels like an actual love story — in which the protagonist overcomes their doubts and insecurities and does the things a protagonist is expected to do. Getting off the trolley, declaring my feelings, these are the actions of a different category of person. They’re audacious. They’re irrational. But here, now, they work.
For a few moments my world is just her mouth and body against mine. Eventually, we stammer a few more words to each other. Having stepped off the cliff and remained aloft, I don’t have the faintest idea what happens now. When can I see her again? How can I see her again? Her family lives not too far from Pittsburgh — she’s coming home for Thanksgiving. We can get together then.
Elaine’s position at the center of my mental universe is suddenly justified, tangible. In the days to come, the circuits that had been devoted to Operation Get Elaine To Like Me will repurpose themselves toward figuring out how a relationship with her could actually work, up to and including serious consideration of a move to Philadelphia. Where normally I wouldn’t even begin to consider getting involved with someone from out of town, a single successful date with this person has made transplanting my entire life seem like a reasonable option.
Improbably, the universe wedges itself between us again in the form of another trolley mere minutes after the one I’d fled. She insists I take it.
Three weeks. I’ll see her again in three weeks.
One day, as the man approached the chasm, he felt something strange inside his chest. As if a void he’d never noticed had been suddenly filled, and yet in his fullness he was lighter.
It wasn’t just fullness though, it was warmth, and energy, and clarity. It was a sun, growing inside him and spilling out of him and lighting his path more clearly than ever before.
But the brightest lights cast the darkest shadows, and the sun shone so brightly that anything not in its path was impossible to see. So absorbed was the man by his progress that he became blind to anything not directly in front of him.
And anyone the man might have found on the far side of the chasm could not see him at all.
V: THE END [2011 — ?]
It’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and we’re back in my apartment at the conclusion of our second date. As Elaine is getting dressed to leave, the maelstrom, swollen in the rush of its success, at long last breaches its containment. The final step in integrating this other person fully into the narrative I’ve constructed is simply to describe it to her, and there’s no body language, no euphemism, in my vocabulary that could begin to capture it. There’s only that word.
I tell her that I’m in love with her.
She doesn’t seem to reject the sentiment, exactly, but she can’t bring herself to say it back. Of course she can’t. We’ve been on two dates.
When I see her again the next day there’s a shift in her demeanor that even I can register. She lets me hold her hand, but doesn’t hold it back quite as firmly. Certainly doesn’t lean into it. After a friendly lunch I kiss her goodbye — our first indefinite goodbye — but it’s curt, almost formal. Obligatory.
Oh, I think, there’s the chasm again. It had been there all along, of course.
Suffice it to say, things cool off after that. I visit Philadelphia once more that winter, she returns to Pittsburgh that spring. We text here and there, and at some point she spells it out for me: she’s more comfortable just being friends. I don’t hear that, though. What I hear is [let’s slow down a bit]. Sure, that’s understandable, I tell myself. I recognize that my confession was an error in judgment but I don’t yet believe it was fatal to our prospects — she’s not there yet, I think, I just have to give her time. She hasn’t stopped liking me completely.
In the rest of my life, I’m adrift. I’m functional but part of me is absent, wandering, still focused on this other person I’ve never known better and never understood less. As the months drift by, the darker voices in my head whisper darker thoughts: she really doesn’t like me anymore. She’s just being polite. Why be friends with someone after all that? We have a couple mutual friends who live in town, and at my lowest I become fairly shitty with them — treating them as nothing more than sources of insight and apertures into which I can vent my frustration. The more uncertain I get, the more I withdraw from whatever friendship Elaine and I have managed to maintain: when in doubt I will always, always err toward offering up too little of myself rather than too much. Too much is poison.
That summer, Elaine visits again and we go to a museum together (she brings another friend, as is now standard practice). Afterward, the three of us lounge in a nearby parklet for what feels like forever, chatting and taking turns on an old tree swing. It’s, honestly, a wonderful day. Even with the line of friendship clearly drawn between us I can’t help but love spending time with her. Can’t help but love her.
I can’t do this anymore.
A couple weeks later, I deliver an ultimatum of my own: I’m no longer capable of just being friends. She surely still has feelings for me, I insist, in a callow attempt to project the kind of confidence that, in most stories, would power through a moment like this. If this is all we can be, I tell her, if I’m never going to be free to kiss her again, then I have to walk away. The year since I met Elaine has been a string of wholly new experiences, and this will be the final one. One last attempt to align our narrative with a pattern I recognize, a course I can follow.
Two years later, Kristen will present me with a similar choice: between my own narrative and hers. And I’ll choose my own, just as Elaine does now. And so it ends.
As I crawl from the flaming wreckage of my time with Kristen, something shifts in me. I resume browsing dating sites before too long, but I can now see, or at least I believe I can see, the red flags and sticking points that will eventually come between me and most women — women I might have taken a chance on once but who now no longer feel worth the effort, lest they become another Kristen. Years pass, and I keep browsing, but almost no one prompts any real interest.
The truth, I come to accept, is that I’ve never really wanted to date anyone. Dating was just the byzantine choreography of a dance I was required to perform in order to get to the thing I actually wanted: stable companionship. Someone so fully integrated into my normal life that no ritual is required for us to spend time together: she’s just there. And when I need time to myself, to see to other obligations or just for solitude’s own sake, she understands and wants the same. When I fantasize about being with someone what I picture is not the hot rush of a new infatuation; it’s that. Buying groceries together. Bouncing ideas off each other. Coffee on the couch on Sunday morning.
Eventually I begin to consider a new narrative: an aunt of mine has been with the same man for my entire life, yet they never got married, and they never moved in together. They’re no less committed to each other than any other couple would be after four decades; their physical and legal separation is a matter of maintaining their own independent lives rather than hedging their bets. I begin to wonder if a version of that isn’t my own best-case scenario, if I can but reach it.
And yet.
It’s 2018. I’m still with the theater, and new shows are always coming through, accompanied by faces both new and old. As was bound to happen, one day Elaine reappears in the audience. We haven’t spoken in six years.
In that time I’ve come to see what happened as akin to an allergic reaction: an autonomic chemical process that I’d been powerless to control. For better or worse, nothing I did, nothing I said, could have happened any differently. Regrettable in some ways, but unavoidable.
Elaine lingers after the performance, mingling with the cast and other guests. She must realize I’m present but doesn’t make any obvious effort to approach me. Which, of course, is exactly what I’d asked of her.
I’m pathologically averse to small talk, and often as not I’m happy to sidestep old acquaintances rather than go through the motions of politely catching up — but I quickly decide that whatever Elaine is to me now, whatever she thinks of me, I will not spend the rest of my life avoiding her. So I approach, touch her arm, and we chat.
[Are you working on anything right now?] she asks after the formalities have concluded.
“Well I’m actually, uh…I’m writing something about us. A prose piece, autobiographical fiction I guess.”
She blinks once, seeing right through me as usual. [That’s not true, though.]
“What?”
[You weren’t writing this in 2018. This conversation didn’t happen.]
“Well, a conversation happened. This meeting happened. We just didn’t talk about this stuff. Our…history.”
[So what’s this really about?]
“I’ve been trying to put out more short-form writing, and I just…it’s a good story. I always figured I’d write about it eventually.” This is true enough but in reality the writing won’t begin for another four years.
[Okay. But why this? Why add an imaginary conversation at the end?]
“I wasn’t ready to say all this to you back then, even if I’d thought you wanted to hear it. For a long time I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to say about it. Shaping it into a story has helped me make sense of it. Like art therapy, I guess.” I pause, and she remains silent, anticipating the rest of the thought. “I was still…unsettled about how I was with you. I should have listened more. Been less presumptuous. But at the time…none of it felt like choices I was making. Even years later, I didn’t really regret any of it because I hadn’t accepted responsibility for it.” Another pause. “But that’s bullshit, I think.”
[You don’t need to beat yourself up about it. I’m sorry we couldn’t stay friends but you made the choice you needed to make; I don’t hold it against you.]
“That’s the thing — I made all the choices. Love or not, I don’t believe in magic. I don’t believe the universe reached down and hypnotized me one day. I confessed my feelings that night because I wanted to. I got off the trolley because I wanted to. I…fell in love with you because I wanted to. And maybe a little bit because of Tom Waits.”
She smiles at that, the mood lightened ever so slightly. [You barely knew me that first night. How could you have been in love?]
“I think…some part of me, deep down, just decided it was time. I’d been going on all these dates and trying to fit myself into the usual story of how people get together, but I’m just not that guy. I don’t speak that language. So I tried a new story. And it worked, sort of. It showed me that there was a different guy within me.”
[The trolley was very romantic, I can’t deny that. So why not be that guy with Kristen? It seems like you were really into her.]
“At the time I thought I was. But the thing is, if you’d had a bad day and wanted me to come over I’m absolutely positive the rest of my life could have gone straight to hell. So when I contrast that experience with ours, what I’m left with is that whatever feelings I had for her just weren’t enough.”
[A good partner wouldn’t expect you to just toss your life aside like that. That shouldn’t be your bar.]
“I get that, I really do — but the point is, I would have. That’s unhealthy in the wrong relationship, but isn’t it also what love is supposed to be? Valuing someone else over yourself? I’ve only ever come close to that feeling with you. If it wasn’t love I’m not sure I want to know what is.”
[You do know I’m married now, right? Not now as in 2018, the actual now?]
“Of course I do. Actually, what scares me the most about this is that if you end up reading it somehow you’ll take it as me still being hung up on you, or trying to win you back or something.”
[…you’re not, right?]
“I’m really not. I got to know your future husband that night — the two of you make sense in a way we didn’t, but that’s part of why our story is so compelling to me. I don’t want to revive it, I just want to understand it. For future reference.”
[You want to fit it into a narrative.]
“I guess so.”
[Real people are complicated, though. Not every feeling can be explained with a character arc. Maybe telling ourselves stories about each other, as imperfect as they might be, is the best we can ever really do.]
“Do you really believe that? Or am I just putting those words in your mouth?” I am, of course — that’s what the brackets are for.
[If you are, doesn’t that just prove my point?]
Our actual conversation that night is brief, friendly but not too familiar. I talk art and politics with her boyfriend for a while. Eventually the theater closes up and we say our goodbyes outside, standing in the exact spot where, seven years earlier, I’d concluded that I was in love.
Stories are about communicating abstract ideas through representative events. They take real life — raw, chaotic, irrational experience — and sculpt it into messaging. Through storytelling, the messenger traverses the chasm between his mind and another’s and, hopefully, leaves something of himself on the other side.
The message of my story is this: love is an engine. It channels everything that you are in one direction, toward one cause. The same intensity of feeling that eventually dashed me against the rocks also brought me a measure of reciprocation I never would have received without it.
I’m left to wonder what else love might be capable of. I can’t wait to find out.
In time, the sun burned itself out, as suns tend to do. When its blinding light had faded, the man looked around and saw that nothing had actually changed. Its power over the chasm had been an illusion: a trick that only worked as long as he’d believed in it.
The man considered this, long and hard. Why had it happened to him? What had the sun been for if it couldn’t change anything? And what the man concluded was this: the sun had simply been him, all along. It had appeared because some part of him had decided it should.
And if the man had created the sun through his own choices, that meant he’d had power over it after all. It hadn’t controlled his actions or pushed him beyond his capabilities. It was simply a story he’d chosen to tell himself.
Which meant he could tell it again.
Next: Something much simpler, like capitalism.
