Nixon

Being just after midnight, this is now ten years to the day from the day I found out how JP felt about me. This is ten years to the day from "coffee", from that whispered conversation about the balcony and how he used to dream of me, wearing that miniskirt I used to wear to those parties; how he used to dream of taking me out there and putting me up against the wall. And I remember looking around that living room, the edgy squalor of Humboldt Park circa 1994, when the only ones who lived there were the real hardcore artists--I remember looking around that room and thinking it's a shame I'll never be able to come back here again... I remember him saying "all right, then...one kiss. One kiss and I won't mention it again..." And even though I knew better--I was married, after all, and he was temperamental, mercurial, out of my reach, the same man I hadn't spoken to for over two years, who pushed away my every attempt to reach him--even though I knew better, I let him kiss me. And then it wasn't "letting" him do anything; then it was ohhhh shit...this might have been a bad idea, you know?



I promised myself when I left that I would never go back.

I promised myself that despite what I'd promised him, I wouldn't call. I promised myself that I would go home and be with David and do what was right; I would look for a job and cook and clean, pay the bills and support David and work to help him set up his business. And if I wanted friends, I'd hang out with Carissa, or Gwen from work, or something.



That lasted a week or ten days; I remember locking myself in the office behind the media center at the school and calling him. I remember him being angry at me for not calling--I didn't know I was the last slim thread holding him away from Susan--and I remember him wanting to see me. I wasn't going to go--I swear I wasn't--I knew it as I left the house that saturday to go to hang out where Carissa was housesitting....conveniently about ten minutes from the Humboldt Park apartment. I wasn't going to go, and then I was suddenly there. And ever since then, for ten years now, he's been the center of everything--the love of my life, the ghost in my closet, the rationale for all my hope--and his absence has been the rationale for all my silence and my cynicism, my nihilistic shrug-and-change-the-channel little cocoon.



I loved him, and he's gone. We had made a million plans, and they died with him. He was the only other human being who has ever seen me as the person I dreamed of being, instead of the flawed little wreck I was. We knew each other, he and I; could finish each other's sentences, could speak for hours with just long looks or fingertips grazing flesh. He made me laugh and he made me think, and he made me want, too. And in the end, he made me stronger...maybe. I am not the person I was, nor have I been since the day he died. I am not the person I dreamed of becoming; though I have a life and it's a good one, it's not the life we should have had.