On a Saturday morning while watching the kids play soccer, I’m suddenly struck by the thought that it all may not work out. That the hours of therapy and 6 am meetings and midnight confessions and kitchen table amends will come to nothing and I’ll be left with the consequences of myself, which, like gasoline I will pour on myself while looking for a match. There will be no reason not to create the spark. Because really, it will be clear that nothing matters really at all.

And just then I look up and one of the kids scores a goal, but I don’t know who because while I was staring at the figures running across the field, I was looking at something else. And I know that I’ve been told that not missing this moment is supposed to be reason enough.

But is it? I really don’t see how because as the lady sings when she sees the house afire: “Is that all there is my friend? Then let’s go dancing.”

The neighbor had put a pool in the side of his yard and it glowed and shimmered in the night like a radioactive kidney bean. His just-graduated-from-college son had come home from the bar with a woman and they were swimming together in their underwear. From across the street I couldn’t tell if she was attractive or not, but her hair was pulled back in a pony tail and that made me like her. In the shifting blue light, their pale skins glimmered as they came together and kissed. I watched thinking of Cheever stories and Holden Caulfield and all the girls I’d never had. And I tried to breath quietly, afraid they’d hear my stirring lungs even from 200 feet away, as they made love like strangely unattractive animals. It was over in moments and I wondered how she could be happy with that having offered him everything and gotten so little in return.

Even the lightest unexplored anger brings me hours of nothingness. Unsatisfied. Unheard. Unable. I lay upstairs hoping a change of venue will work but also because I know it will poke her unfairly and give me an attention I want. It’s stupid because it will be an angry attention and drive us further apart until I can claim justified isolation. But for now I’m just up. Working old wounds like they’re all I am. And I feel that shame too. Nothing’s working at all except the clock.

From the bottom of the well, I realized that I had become something that was not what I thought I was. And not what I ever wanted to be. And the only way forward would be to leave what I had become behind to be something I could not even imagine.

She came over in fuck me boots and lip gloss, jeans painted on and skin tight. When she stretched herself across my floor, the yearning deepened and became hard and pulling, imagination running between her thighs with a firm hand and stiff fingers. We’d been out before. And back in her apartment she talked about being cummed on and told me she knew I’d thought about cumming on her face. But she didn’t want to kiss. And she told me she didn’t want to betray C even though she knew we were divorcing. But that was before and now she was in my apartment with the Ritz Carlton looking on through the window from across the street like a dirty wedding cake. We ate the spaghetti I’d made while sitting on the floor and each swallowed a fistful of Irish Whiskey. There was no laughter or joy. No love. I just wanted to forget myself forever and bash my self hate out on her, give her everything I had no courage to show to anyone before. “Let’s go,” she said and we went down to the Owl Tree and then the pool room on Market where we drank the colorless poison sambuca without questioning where it could lead. And then we were in the cab and she tried to fuck my mouth with her tongue and we went upstairs to my apartment and staggered around with our naked crass desires, only to wake with headaches and no desire to ever see each other again, only my self-loathing for comfort and the realization that I was lost and could go no further as I was.

She lived in an apartment that had been converted from an old store front. Next door, a martial arts studio stayed open for business, but she put blinds in the bay windows that bowed out to the sidewalk so there’d be no confusion: Nothing to buy here. Nothing to look at. Nothing to stop for.

The front room stretched forever from the door with nothing in it but a secretary’s desk and an oriental rug her father had given her. We slept together in a room further back — what would have been the office. It was empty except for the bed that she’d pushed to the wall. In the mornings I’d wake up feeling smothered and suffocated by closeness to that wall, groggy with a hang-over and listening to the boy’s Karate class being held on the other side.

HiYA!

HiYA!

HiYA!

All morning long the sound of them bled through the wood and paint into my attempts to sleep just a little more. She was rarely there in the bed when I woke. It grew to feel like I was living in an abandoned dream.

It’s hard to let go of the story I tell myself and have soaked in for so long that it feels like it is what every fiber and atom is made of. But what happened happened and it lays behind me powerless and done unless I turn back, and like Lot’s wife, am turned to a pillar of salt. It calls to me and tries to keep its grip by telling me what to look for on the road that does not exist yet: The future. The past is past and there it must remain if there is to be any hope for tomorrow at all.

It was hot and muggy when we pulled up to the brownstone at 73 West 71st Street. My cousin, L, helped me lug my suitcases and backpacks up the winding stairs to the top: Apartment 3A. The long narrow room was just small enough for me to touch the walls when I stretched my arms out. Tiny does not even begin to describe it. A sink. A four burner gas stove. A butler refrigerator whose top was the room's total counter space. A loft bed whose ladder kept you from opening the front door all the way. A shrunken bathroom that made you step over the toilet to get to the shower. A small square of linoleum just large enough to open a butterfly chair in under a floor to ceiling window that looked over King Gyro below and then south to all of lower Manhattan. 

Among the things you left behind (that you could not carry to Atlanta where you would play a German tourist in a Tennessee Williams play): A pocket collected works of Shakespeare, a stereo I would break when I sent it to you in the mail at Christmas, and a laminated piece of paper with the rent on it that I would lose before I sent the first check.

It was a move that changed my life forever and that was changed more by all that happened in the world the next day.

But from the get-go, I felt we were roommates even though you were never home.

You glow like a white fire. A fierce presence that can be anything and take me anywhere. You can bring laughter to a 1000 souls and tears to a 1000 eyes with a blink or a smile. You are dynamite and always at home in this place where you make choices with certainty from infinite choices. And we all are spectators you invite inside yourself.

We kissed in the tiny apartment for hours. It was like I couldn't get enough of her and there would never be enough of me. Her taste was pure, sweet, clear water that quenched some deep dry place within and dissolved time around us so that when we parted the clock was a measure from a land we did not even know we had left.

The next day my lips were sore and the thought of the reason made me laugh. And I wanted to go back for more.

You haven't lived until you've turned the lights off in the bedroom and heard the voices of a 7 year-old boy and his 11 year-old brother sing "Blackbird" in the dark. You really haven't. 

Her paleness competed with porcelain and sometimes I wondered if I could see her blue veins working. She had feathered her blonde hair because Farrah was still a thing. (Had she dyed it and worn a straight bang, she would've been a blue eyed Karen O 30 years before Karen O.) Once she wore a pair of pants that zipped from her belly button all the way around to the end of her spine. She was an outcast from the preppy world we were all trying to be in and she didn't care. I liked that about her, but I wasn't sure either: I didn't know enough of myself to know. And I wish I had. She was a rock and roll girl through and through.

One night we took the train to Chicago and walked around laughing and being us. It was a late autumn night, just warm enough to let you forget how vulnerable you are to the elements; just cool enough to remind you that you are alive. We got pictures in a photo booth at Northwestern Station. I still have the picture somewhere: Two pale teenagers looking wide-eyed at the camera, a pimple at the corner of my mouth. When I see it, the thoughts I had then are still sharp: Does she like me? Does she see my blemish? Do I like her? Is this a thing? How far will this go? In the car outside her house, she told me her older sister was dating a black guy. "She likes black dick," she said. I didn't know what to say back. Then we kissed and I thought, "Oh, Jesus, this is a good kiss."

Her tongue was a scalpel that carved my desire out and laid it neatly back in my mouth. 

We kissed for hours in the front of the Chevette. She was tall and skinny and though she came across calm, I knew there was a pile of nerves in her thin frame coiled and waiting. Afraid. Somewhere in the middle of necking, with my mouth wide like I was afraid she would not know where my tongue was if I didn't give her an obvious sign, I opened my eyes and saw she was looking back. Hours later my jaw was sore but I went to bed licking strawberry lip gloss from the corners of mouth.

I sit with her in an unfamiliar room and she feels unfamiliar to me. She is far away as if on a dais and the echo of the room makes her hard to hear and I cannot peel my own voice away from itself to even know if I have been heard by myself. Around us the room sits either in transition or ruin. Boxes and empty shelves. A statuette of a woman with bared breasts stands like a totem that is too proud of itself. This is a foreign land that I have paid $12 to get to through an app that turns everyone into a cab driver. I hate this place and time. Her pale blue eyes do nothing. A week ago I needed to be here, but now I don't know why I came at all. Why I should ever come again. This is not the 4th dimension I find comforting. This is a dry box of nowhere in a neighborhood I haunted once when I was someone else. She folds her sweater over her breasts in a motion that walls her off to me. Today, when I look at this therapist, someone I have told all to, I feel like I am a check book to her and nothing more.

The rest of the afternoon is a countdown to sleep and I think, I will not go back again to that place.

It used to be when I looked up at night, I thought: with so much up there, it's impossible to be at the center of it; there's clearly something larger going on. But lately, I've been looking up and thinking, what a miracle it is to be here considering all the quadrillion zillion bajillion things that had to happen just right to bring all things to this present moment where I am looking and thinking just that. 

The boys are like water elves. They walk in ankle deep clear water and climb the mossy limbs and roots of the trees that lean like protectors of life over the creek. The stone bridge arches in the shade. The sun breaks through the green spring leaves when the breeze turns them like hands waving in unison. Long shafts of light halo G and L and bring out the blue beauty of their eyes. They are brothers in happiness and more. I am their father in all things. For this moment, everything is good and my mind feels at rest.

I sit down at the piano with the music teacher and find myself full of this morning's anger. I don't even recall what's set me off. Toast. Teen Titans Go! A bad cup of coffee. It's probably something absurd, but I'd like to yell at everyone. But I listen politely to the metronome set by the teacher as it taps out a rhythm that is meaningless and empty except for the note I plunk along with it. And somewhere in the middle of my fumbling horribleness, I hear "This Land Is Your Land." It's hardly recognizable, but it's there in a tortured, innocent way. And I think, I'm making that song. If my wife hadn't insisted on buying this piano, I'd just be alone and tuneless. I should shut the fuck up and play some more.

When I close my eyes the world does not go away. I hear it rustling and moving around me. But within a river of voices rises and floods the dark. I argue with people who are not there. I stand and offer my speeches. I am right and righteous. Thinking. Thinking. Thinking. And the river ebbs and I realize, it's not a river at all I am carried on, but a tide that I am sometimes lucky enough to float above and see. And from that place I can study the curls of water, the sometimes furious white crowns of thought that swell within it, the easy lulls that curve like glass, the wet sky that smells damp and ready to break with rain. I am here. All here.

The kids gathered on the lawn bed poking and teasing one another in the dark. The movie they'd set up on the outdoor screen was just an excuse for laughter and excitement. His eldest was 11. And there would be no holding back his happiness.

After they looked at the house, the first thing she said in the car was, "If my mom sold her house and lived with us, maybe we could do it." She was turning in the cul-de-sac and going back down the oak lined street. The house was beautiful, but they'd known that before going. Their friends, M and B, had lived there once. They'd been a perfect couple and everyone loved them. In fact, when his own mother had met them four years ago, she'd made a point of saying what a great couple they were. "I really like them. That's a great house," his mother said like she was comparing two things without naming the second thing. But now M and B were divorcing. M had gotten her breasts enlarged and she called his wife regularly to debate going "hard wood" with waxing jobs and to regurgitate her dating stories that sounded horrible and attractive at once. His wife would sometimes tell him these things in bed at night, leaving him unsure what to say. Every once in a while, when they made love, he'd picture himself licking M's long legs.

He glanced at the paper he held in his lap that the realtor had made in advance for potential buyers. It outlined what the house would cost per month with 25% down in fixed rate loans of 30 years and 15 years, as well as a 5/1 ARM. It was the kind of spec sheet realtors passed out when they don't want to crap around with the unserious. 

"Is that really what you want to do? Live with your mom?" he asked.

She drove with a strange smile on her face. A deep shadow fell over her as she guided the car through the highway underpass. Then they were in the bright sunlight and she turned the wheel onto the road that went through the little town where everyone seemed to know everyone and the Audi was the unofficial car brand of choice.

"It's such a beautiful house," she said. "If we could get what Zillow says we could get for our house...."

When she had said she wanted to see the house earlier that day, it had been with a breezy voice. A lark. He'd loved the house himself when they'd been there before, in better days, when M and B still smiled at each other. But this quick mapping out of a path to living in the house took him by surprise.

He shifted and swallowed. He was still coming to terms with the house they were living in for the last two and a half years. It was a first house. It was a million-dollar house. It was a house that he was still discovering the meaning of. He thought she understood how much he was committed to getting rid of the second loan they had on it. He thought she understood how much more than money he felt he was putting in the mail every month with the mortgage check. The job that had recently begun to leave a residue of resentment on everything; the anger that seemed to come out of nowhere at his children; the legs that were not hers that parted in the darkness of his mind at night as she lay sleeping next to him.

They drove on in silence, putting miles between themselves and the ever-expanding open house.