In Between Days

We pass by each other on the street, which never happens. We don’t tend to run into each other without deliberately scheduling these things. And it’s strange that it doesn’t happen more often because we’re both always so active, always doing something, always out. Usually alone.

But you run the night shift and I run the day shift. So it’s rare that we cross paths.

I’m eating a mealy apple, so my face holds that disappointed look, but then I see you, tall and wiry with a Mohawk that adds three inches. Your eyes look dark and sleepy and you’re squinting at the sun. You’re so cool, I think, and I almost say it out loud.

I think you see me before I see you, but I’m not sure because you don’t smile. You’re not usually the first to smile.

“Hey!” I say happily. It’s hard to say which is more exuberant—my personality or my outfit, an ensemble made of colors that are hysterically neon. Nothing I own occurs naturally. It’s all synthetic, from the polyester sweatband across my forehead to the plastic jellies on my feet.

You wear a Hanes t-shirt and denim and Chucks. Cotton and cotton and rubber soles. Everything is tight. And you’re so lean. You look like the kind of person who jumps on two feet, straight into the air, bobbing up and down until you sweat away the permanent marker X on your hand. Rubber souls. Until your Mohawk falls down after a valiant battle.

“Where you headed so early?” you ask me.

“Aerobics class.” My shirt hangs off the shoulder playfully, but aerobics is serious business.

“Ah,” you say. As opposing counsel in Sunshine vs. Moonshine, there is a palpable tension between us.

I throw my apple to the curb. You look at me like I’m nuts. “If you love something, set it free,” I say.

This changes the whole tune of the encounter. We’re friends again, and I still wonder where you’re coming from but lost the window to ask. We decide to get together tonight, but I’m going to be late to class and you need coffee.

The day is filled with thunder and lightning.

Then, just like us, the humidity breaks, and it’s the kind of summer evening that snaps me to attention. We meet at our Italian restaurant. Of course we do, where we talk about our good friends Brenda and Eddie, and about how hungry we are—for dinner, for something different, for the ability to reach our boundless potential.

We sit in a booth facing one another, just talking. We’re so different. My bubble gum wardrobe burns your retinas and I think your black shirt on black jeans with black boots is a bit humdrum. Punk vs. New Wave. If we didn’t know each other so well already, we’d never have even tried to meet. Visually, this doesn’t make sense. But we know better. We are just so different.

We keep a lot of secrets, but we do share the bread on the table and our lust for life. Our slutty, oversexed, libertine lust for life. It’s insatiable. We want it all, right here, right now. As hard as you can.

After dinner, we pile into your car and drive the city with nowhere to go. You sort through your center console and find a white cassette in a sea of clear mix tapes. You don’t ask for my opinion or consent, so I’m expecting something cacophonous, something I’ll have to fight through to think straight, to communicate clearly. I usually love music, but with you, it’s a noisy frustration that fills space you otherwise wouldn’t.

Trying to communicate almost feels like a game with you.

But I don’t know the rules and the stakes are asymmetrical. And yet, I’m all in—trying my hardest to communicate with you, overexplaining in the interest of clarity, lest you misinterpret something. In the simplest terms, I always want you to understand me because I always want to understand you.

I don’t know that I understand you. Or rather, I know that I don’t.

I’m pleasantly surprised when the speakers, tinny with treble, speak in the lonely and affected voice of Robert Smith. The Cure, a band we can agree on. It’s their newest album, The Head on the Door, and we’re both unfamiliar with the words to the songs since it just released a few days ago. Of course you have the tape already.

It’s better off that we’re in your car so we can have the kind of conversation where you don’t have to look someone in the eyes. It’s better off that we’re in your car so we can pretend we have somewhere better to go. As we talk, we stare straight ahead, at the headlights and the taillights, the traffic lights and the street lights.

I start the conversation because I always start.

You can’t start. You need to know the table stakes before you throw in your ante. “You know what’s weird?” I say. “I don’t know what you don’t like about me.”

I want to announce something or ask you a question, but I don’t have the audacity to just say it outright. I always start with some boring disclaimer, like “you know what’s weird,” or a generic introduction that reduces the stark impact and takes the edge off. I hedge. I take comfort in the appositive. I give us both an exit even though I don’t want either of us to take it. It might be stupid, but who are you to criticize? You would stand outside if I didn’t open the door.

It’s quiet because you’re thinking, because you’re an introvert who is careful about what he says, even to me who only wants one thing in the whole world, which is to know everything about you. But because it’s quiet, I can’t help but fill the silence by rethinking and rephrasing my statement.

“I didn’t mean to suggest you don’t like me. I meant to say that I’m sure there are things about me that bother you, but I don’t know what those are.”

“Why would that be weird?” you ask, slyly redirecting. I sent you a Trojan horse—a seemingly innocuous question to get inside the city gates—and you declined delivery. Return to sender.

Your crafty evasion is a minor setback; I’ve clipped a hurdle but not fallen. But I’m off-balance, and it takes focus to regain that three-step stride to clear the next one, focus I don’t have because I’m staring at your hand as it holds the gear shifter and vibrates with the transmission at this stoplight.

I remember how that hand used to hold a baseball and trace letters on my back in the dark.

Always—but especially right here, right now—I wonder if you remember, or if you’ve pushed our moments deeper into those quiet abscesses that never see the light. I wonder if there’s salvation or liberation for the words and feelings and thoughts and memories you hold, or if for you a moment lived is a moment gone. I wonder what that would be like. We are just so different.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because we’ve never really had a falling out.” I say it because my mouth is connected to my brain and it fails to remember that you don’t feel pressured by silence. I do.

I’m leading the witness then laying down bread crumbs. Maybe you’ll follow me where I want to go.

“Is that a bad thing?” you ask.

I want to scream out loud. I want to tell you how empty it feels to give and give and give until there’s nothing left. I want to tell you how exhausting it is to ask and ask and ask and never know. Just a bunch of questions in a discard pile. A trivial pursuit.

But more than anything, I want to tell you what I hate about you, which is that I love you.

Instead, I say, “Ask me a different question,” hoping you’ll take me where I want to go. Hoping that you’ll actually put in the work. Hoping that you want to open me up the way I want to open you up.

You pause for a long moment and turn up the volume. “Can this be our song?”