People are coughing half a world a way.

The market falls.

The talking heads talk about the 2% that die.

Our leaders say nothing that makes sense.

The roads empty.

Vacations are cancelled.

Chinatown is peopleless.

The mask replaces the face of humanity.

Ironically, this thing that keeps us from being with each other may get us to finally think about how we really are together.

You dream of what you still have left to do.

And we all grasp at life like it is a thing you can touch, but when was the last time you held a breath in your hand?

The way she tells it, I put my hands in the salad.

The way she tells it, this gets a big laugh from a library full of people.

The way she tells it, my charms aren’t enough to overcome this fatal flaw that is revealed at a diner outside of Bryce Canyon that we had stopped in for dinner.

Her crowd agrees. I am a Neanderthal.

My later sin — not telling her that I have dated an old friend of hers that she introduced me to when helping me find an apartment in NY — helps them find the self-righteous harrumpf of disapproval.

I am heartless and selfish too.

They don’t hear about the cold loveless summer in San Francisco that came after. Or the refusal to work on the frozen moments that came unexplainably in the dark. Or the love that was offered to dumb tears and a closed mouth. Gagged pain I so deeply wanted to relieve.

They just see the polished surface, the white white teeth of a lemon shaped smile.

And that’s all I see in the small YouTube window where she is frozen in the way she tells it.

We’re friends now on Facebook. She plays piano and has albums and shares my notes about my kids when I write eloquently enough. She seems to be living a clean, good life.

So it’s hard to reconcile the last time I remember seeing her, in a car, when we were near the end of high school. She was driving and I was there with a friend who was rolling a joint.

And she looked at me in the rearview mirror and smiled to show me her braces.

“This is some good shit,” she said.

The silence you leave on the phone in the wake of your anger is hot. I move my ear from it. There’s nothing I can do and so I say, I love you. Why don’t I call you back? And your voice drops with the weight of a dead stone. Fine. I’ll talk to you later.

And that’s that.

The day after, I stand in the kitchen remembering your laugh as the sun fell through the trees. The three of us were trying to stay in the light’s rays to stay warm in California’s late February chill. In the memory, I see myself turning away from you after a sour attempt at humor.

My innuendo falls flat. I’m not funny. Or cute. Or clever. Just mean and out of tune.

Leaning against the stove I say to you, I’m jealous. I’m sorry about that. I really am.

And the ice melts between us.

The bookstore was busy, so Amy, the bird-thin day manager, had come up from the back to help and took the call.

Letty was ringing up purchases. Normally, she was downstairs doing books. The heavy foot traffic that started at lunch had lured her away from her financial duties. She took a kind of joy calculating sales in real-time. But now she was irritated that Amy was paying attention to a customer who was not literally and physically lined up at the counter. The phone was on the inside wall of the front desk. When Amy hung it up, she shook her head and squinted.

“Does David Mamet have an account here?” she asked.

Letty who was from Hong Kong was curt and cutting. “David who?”

Speed the Plow with Madonna had closed just a year or so before and so Amy said, “David Mamet. He’s a playwright. He used to live in here in Chicago.”

Letty handed a customer a bag full of Thomas Merton. “Never heard of him.”

Amy rolled her eyes. “He wants a copy of Homage to Catalonia and Psychopathology of Everyday Life. His assistant was calling from the airplane.”

At the time this was a big deal — and not just because it was David Mamet’s assistant. See, phones on airplanes were a new idea. They built them into the back of the chairs and you needed a second mortgage to afford a minute on one.

“I know we’ve got the Freud up here,” Amy said and then looked at me. “We keep the Orwell downstairs in fiction even though it’s not. Can you go down and get it?”

Now, it may sound odd that we were keeping the non-fiction Orwell down in the basement with the paperback fiction, but this was Stuart Brent Books, a store that had been run by a man of the same name for the last 40 years on Michigan Avenue. A charismatic but idiosyncratic 80 year-old, Mr. Brent — as we all called him — was part curbside Jeremiah and part old school charmer. He considered himself a Chicago legend with no shyness about saying so loudly and often. He spent most of his time at a big round oak table in the back with a manual typewriter on it. When he wasn’t sitting back there entertaining minor local literary celebrities like Studs Turkel or Victor Skrebneski, he was in the stacks de-alphabetizing books so, as he said, “People actually discover something new in themselves by discovering something they didn’t even know they were looking for.”

He wouldn’t accept that maybe people were just lost.

So we kept the Orwell downstairs for a very practical reason: By grouping everything by Orwell in one place and putting it with the fictional work most knew him for (1984 and Animal Farm), we were not only more likely to sell it, it was likely to be findable because Mr. Brent only went downstairs to yell at Glenn, the shipping kid, when lunch was late.

When I came back up, Amy handed me the Freud. “Have it delivered to the Drake, where he’s staying, okay? I’ll write up the account slip.”

Letty was non-plussed. “I don’t have any David Whatever-his-name-is in our account book. You make him pay cash.”

Amy wrote the bill up as a house account. I put the books in a bag addressed to “David Mamet, Drake Hotel” on the delivery cart next to the front desk.

A few minutes later, the bag was gone. I thought nothing of it, confident Glenn had picked it and was already on his way to the famous building just a few blocks north of Water Tower Place.

“No wonder we never make any money,” Letty said, looking at the receipt with a frown and clucking.

Whoever David Mamet was, she was sure he was a heel.

***

Snow fell that night in heavy, wet flakes. When I opened the store the next morning, Michigan Avenue was a frosted cake. It was slow, so when a man in round glasses and mustard-colored duster came in with a young woman in a pixie-like haircut, it was no secret who he was.

The woman (who I later learned was not really his assistant but Rebecca Pidgeon) wandered over to the books on kitchen decorations and he came to the front desk.

He put his forearms firmly on the counter. “I’m David Mamet. I’m wondering if you have my books?”

Had I simply missed them yesterday on the delivery cart next to the counter wall? I double checked to be sure they weren’t there — they weren’t.

​I looked back to the stern, unsmiling Pulitzer winning playwright. I thought they had been delivered to the Drake I explained.

“I checked with the concierge. They’re not there,” he said calmly. In the background, Pidgeon flipped through a book about modern interiors.

“Let me see if I have another set of copies you can take now,” I said.

“Okay. I’ll wait.”

The Freud was easy. The store was known as having one of the best psychology libraries anywhere and we always had multiple copies of Freud’s work on hand.

I thought the Orwell would be just as simple. But when I went downstairs there was Animal Farm, 1984, Politics and the English Language, Burmese Days…. you name it.

But no Homage to Catalonia.

I went back to the shipping area hoping that maybe Glenn had simply forgotten it. I clearly saw it sitting perfectly in the bag I’d wrapped the books in on the work bench. But no such luck.

I took another pass at the shelf. Were any books behind the row with the spines out?

Nope.

Crap.

I took a deep breath and went back up to the man who’d written Glengarry Glen Ross, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and American Buffalo.

​He hadn’t moved from the counter.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Mamet” I said. “I have the Freud here, but not the Orwell for some reason. You can take the Freud now if you like, or I can have it delivered, but I’ll need to track down the Orwell for you. I’m sure it’s here, but I need to look a little more.”

Pidgeon joined him at the counter. “They don’t have it,” he said to her.

Her eyes grew.

“I’ll take the Freud,” he said.

A few minutes later he was gone.

Shit. SHIT. SHIT! Where the fuck was that book?

I went back downstairs. Not on the shelf. Not behind the books. Not behind the counter down there. Not in the shipping area.

I called Glenn at home. “Uh. I don’t know,” he said. “If it was on the cart, I delivered it.”

​I called the Drake. “I’m sorry sir, but nothing has been delivered for Mr. Mamet here.”

​Fuck. I looked at the clock. It was just after lunch.​

Desperate times required desperate measures and that’s when I thought: If it wasn’t here maybe a store nearby had it. Yes. I could buy it from them and just send it to him.

Even before I called the Kroch’s across the street, I was congratulating myself on this brilliant plan.

“Who’s George Orwell?” asked the clerk who answered at Kroch’s.

“Uh, he’s a depression era English author. Wrote 1984.”

“Let me check. Fiction?”

“Maybe you should check both,” I said.

​It was not promising and over the next hour I discovered that no bookstore in the Chicago area that I could get to had a copy of Orwell’s tale of political disillusion during the Spanish Civil War.

Not Barbara’s. Not Rizzoli’s. Not Crown. Not nobody, nowhere.

It was just a cold town full of snow to me at that moment.

I called Amy at home.

“We have a problem,” I started. “David Mamet’s books are lost.”

She listened to the story. She was amused at the number of clerks in Chicago who didn’t know who Orwell was, but it gave her an idea.

“I can’t remember if I have copy of it in my library. Do you have one?”

​I had no trouble spotting it in my imagination. Right between Lorca’s Blood Wedding and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.

​Then she said, “I see mine.”

About 30 minutes later she was pulling it out of her purse and I was writing a note apologizing about its shopworn state as well as its late arrival. I put it in one of the Stuart Brent book bags and walked up to the Drake after closing through the drifting Chicago snow.

I left it with the concierge thirty minutes after 6.

***

On Monday, Mr. Brent came in early. He did not wait to say why.

“You,” he pointed to me. “Lunch. Now.​

“Mr. Brent, it’s only 10.30 in the morning.”

“Now.”

***

Mr. Brent was a good-looking man. He’d run a bookstore on Michigan Avenue for nearly 30 years, and before that a shop around the corner on Rush Street called the Seven Stairs. He was a fixture in the post-war Chicago literary scene and had become famous for selling a 1000 copies of Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm when it first came out. He also claimed that Algren and Simone de Bouvier had carried on an affair above the store at one point in the ‘50s.

Even if an author was contracted to tour one of the book chains eating into our business nearby, they often stopped in to chat with him, sign books, and say hello.

This is how I met Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, Tim O’Brien, George Will, Oliver Sacks, Irvin Yalom, Robert Coles, and many others.

He also had a reputation for a fast and cutting temper, but sitting at the darkness of Riccardo’s, he looked anxious and sad, like he could see some tragedy lurking in my future.

“Tell me, my boy, what happened this weekend at the store?” ​

I thought he was going to cry.

I did not wonder why. I simply told him the story of David Mamet and the missing books.

When I was done, he took a deep breath and looked at the glass of water in front of him.

“My boy, when we sat down, before you told me what had happened, I was going to fire you. I still may. He was over at my house for dinner last night and wanted to know what kind of knuckle heads I had working at the store."

In that moment, I saw him with his wife, in his home, sitting at his dinner table with David Mamet and Rebecca Pidgeon, hearing for the first time that in the age of airplane phones, the people at his book shop were like the people at any book shop in town: Bumbling fools that could not find books or make simple deliveries.

I could see that he was wrestling with himself, trying to calculate if his sense of pride would be restored by sacking me on the spot versus keeping me on and accepting that his store was nothing more or less than the people standing inside of it.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I did the best I could.”

“Next time something like that happens, tell me.”

A moment passed and he ran his fingers through his gray, but still boyish hair.

“I’m really am sorry, Mr. Brent.”

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

And I knew he did know. But more importantly, I knew what kind of man he really was, then too. And I was glad I worked for him.

​But I had one more thought too: David Mamet didn’t just have any old copy of Homage to Catalonia in his library. He had one with a real story to it.

***

CODA: The David Mamet Ending to the David Mamet Story

A few days later, the snow had melted and only blackened piles of slush remained. It was lunchtime and there was a rush on when a tall, thin man came to the counter.

“I’d like to return some books,” he said.

“Sure,” I said. But the moment I opened the worn bag, I realized the books he was returning were no ordinary books: Nice crisp copies of The Psychopathology of

Everyday Life and Homage to Catalonia flopped out onto the counter like shiny fish on a boat floor.

I paused and looked over at the shipping cart. Of course. On a busy day, a clerk puts a bag of books in a place that anyone can reach. Then that anyone comes by and picks it up, not knowing what’s inside or who it’s for, but just thinks it’s an easy score even if it turns out to be just a few bucks.

I smiled and turned my eyes up to the man looking at me nonchalantly.

“Do you have a receipt?” I asked.​

“They were a gift,” he said.

“These two books by Freud and Orwell were a…”

Before I could finish, he’d swiveled and was in a full sprint toward the door.

Letty looked at me. “No wonder we don’t make any money.”

I’ve been finding my mind turning on my therapist for the last few weeks.

We’d gone through a formal “Termination” session, but while it had started with a sincerity about this session being the last, there’d been an anti-climactic disclosure about something we had in common (anti-climactic because I knew it without asking that the source of her knowledge of my problems was a shared source), followed by an odd ending with an over-emphatic “I will miss you but I’m sure we’ll see each other again.” said in the doorway.

There was no hug or handshake. Yet it seemed more intimate than either could be because it struck at my secret hope that I mattered to her and that I would see her again, It struck at the wish that my relationship with her was not dependent on a $140 for 50 minutes of conversation.

It was not helped by the fact that I’d given her a selection of writing I’d done that, while publicly available, was deeply personal. I had not talked to her about its origin or nature. In particular, that it was not written for her, yet it could not have been written without her. It was a sign to me of the success of our weekly and bi-weekly sessions over the last 3 years.

Though at the time I was only vaguely aware of this river moving within, leaving the room, it simply felt odd and wrong.

Then, in the following weeks, she’d appear to me mentally in the oddest ways out of the blue. I’d show up at this place or that wondering if this would be where I’d see her. I’d meditate or listen to something and think, this is something she’d like, I wonder if she’d approve.

Most of all, I wondered what she thought of what I’d written — whether she’d understand what it was, or if was too much. I regretted either way that I’d not set out my framework for it, as if that could give me some control.

I began to think I should find another therapist soon just to rid myself of the hold I’d developed around E.

Then the water main broke and H and I were thrown into chaos. The world of moving became even more chaotic and after a few weeks, I realized I needed help to work out what was happening to me. I was overwhelmed.

I turned to the couples counselor.

And I turned to E. I wrote her a note and asked for help. Shortly afterwords, she called me back and we set up a phone appointment.

Almost immediately the grasping thoughts began to subside. And our phone appointment was exactly what I needed it to be: a session sharply focused on direct skills to make handling my own anxiety better, but also trust that H would take care of hers

Still, I wondered: Why was that last session so odd to me? Why did I look for E in places where she would not be? Why had I not said to her: I’m glad I’ll be missed, and I’ll miss you. But really, I’m not likely ever going to see you again.

Who was she really to me that I did not do this?

And I realized tonight, as the plane descended toward the moonlit Santa Barbara coast — I realized after a weekend spent being with my wife and trying not to fix everything but wanting her to make me feel special — I realized that I had turned E into everything that I wanted a woman to give me.

She was the mother who had 3 others to care for and that I always wanted to be seen by.

She was every girl I’d broken it off with when I found I could not lose myself in them because they did not make me feel special enough.

She was, most strikingly of all, the woman who’d made my 7 year-old self feel special in the darkness of a room where nakedness smelled like pencil shavings and I was embarrassed about the erection I had from the touch of her breasts.

(“Someone’s gotta teach you,” she said. And I did not know better. )

How subtle and terrible and powerful that such a need to please to be seen, to be made real and whole only through the approval and happiness and pleasure of another, could be planted so long ago that it wound itself invisibly into everything, warping the way I saw and felt and experienced relationships with every woman I wanted intimacy from.

And just as it propelled me toward every relationship at a certain angle, it repelled many who sensed it under whatever charms I may have offered.

And they rejected me.

Which in turn only deepened my loneliness and strengthen my desire to find someone who I could be special for.

Sometimes, late at night, when everyone is asleep but me, I wonder what happened to B and K and A and A and M and K and R and that one I kissed for an hour and half in front of a keg who told me she was a lawyer and I later learned was called Prob after her Indian name Prabha.

Why am I wondering about the lives I didn’t live with them?

What is it about my life as it is that I am wondering about them at all?

My eyes ride the light of the social sites as my wonder turns to actual searching that leads nowhere and tells me nothing, but nonetheless makes me feel like a cheater in my own bed.

Of course, I’m not a cheater at all. Just curious looking over old wounds and versions of myself that I decided long ago to shed like the skin of a snake.

I turn the phone off and shift.

You breath in the dark and murmur in your dreams.

I wonder if you ever think about your old lives.

But as I close my eyes and feel the heat of your body and the faint scent of your strawberry shampoo finds its way to me, I feel so glad I made the choice to be in this life, with you.

Love breaks over me like a summer storm on the midwestern plain.

I am driving L to the playground and the shadows of the leaves from the trees above move in slow motion over the waxed hood of the car. But the emotion is swift. Relentless. Flashing.

And I know where it’s come from.

H and I have been having trouble working out the details of a move south: All of our plans have floated away like jetsam in the current of a water main break. I’m on the verge of calling my old therapist, but am reluctant to not be jumping with arms open toward the sea of a new life from the cliffs of this one. Still, we’ve called the old couple’s counsellor who seems happy to see us.

I realize I am wrong about the summer storm. It’s maybe even more powerful than a sky that cracks open the humidity without apology from a moody curtain of dark clouds; it is strong with the sweeping rains that move in wave of fury and relief over the land.

I want to pull over and cry, but L is waiting to put on his skull-and-cross-bone adorned helmet and zip across the black top on his razor scooter.

My breath evaporates and I can’t even sing to the Weezer song blasting through the radio.

I know I’m not supposed to succumb to this. The therapists and counselors say it is too co-dependent. But I indulge anyway. The loss of myself is a way back to what’s important and it is sublime.

At the dinner table on Sunday, I let go.

The water that flooded the front of the house loosened my grip, but it was the constant drone of the driers afterwards that finally got my hand to open.

Sitting across from you, I felt free to ask not “What happens next?” but to say: “I wonder what will happen next” knowing the difference in the words would change the way I saw the answer.

The horizon was opening for me again and I felt lighter than I had since the water came down and shifted the banks of our life.

For you the distress was still a snake within, wrapping itself around your lungs and throat and heart.

I looked into your brimming eye and wanted to say come here.

You were blind and deaf though, so I waited and hoped you’d see how it could be.

So I was afraid to point at the moon and say Look, it’s beautiful because I did not want to be told it was just a barren rock.

in your mind you were disappearing beneath the surface, overcome by tasks of contractor estimates and men who will crawl under the house to emerge with bad news and phone calls to unsympathetic utility district people — along with kids who need to go here and there and are unrelenting in their asks while your husband drives in the dark to an uncertain job in the South.

But my mind does not see what you see. My mind sees you. And while I know your hands are still clenched around yesterday’s idea of tomorrow, I say: Come over here. I promise you there is joy here, even if the circumstances are the same.

The inspection had been done the day before.

A sump pump had been replaced in the corner of the yard.

We’d cleaned the counters of everything you’d use in a day (and all the unopened mail we’d been too busy to examine).

The floors were polished and smooth.

And we were making plans to put it all in a truck and head south with the spoils of our investment to a new life.

But under the pavement, up on the hill, other plans waited to wash away our designs for the future.

With a bang in the dark, it burst from the root veined ground next to the redwood that charmed us so when we first came to this cul-de-sac and whooshed down the hill to boil against the wooden sides of the home where we slept.

From the door I watched the clay colored waters rise and invade the garage.

“I’ve seen worse,” the clean up men said later. But it was bad enough to drown our ideas of tomorrow and force us to finally let go of any ideas of what should come next.

Fucking water main.

I find my way to the beat up shoe box with a Union Jack cover that I’d put in the back of the closet four years ago but had been dragging around for years.

I open it in the den and begin looking.

The first thing I find are the rejection notes. Playboy. The New Yorker. The Crescent Review. There were more than a few, I recall, but these are the ones I that still lay sleeping in their envelopes. They are single sided. Single spaced. Typed. They bear the mastheads of the magazines I hoped might change me.

One is perfunctory, but on it, in handwriting, is a personal notation. If the piece were a little shorter, we’d have taken it. I post it on social media with the caption, “I was too proud to edit.”

The Playboy missive is from one of the magazine’s better known columnists. I sold books to him on Michigan Avenue and I remember his face immediately, the warmth of his smile. His kindness. Though I did not know at the time he’d been a Marine, I’d sensed even then that he’d been in the military from the way he walked. He took time to write carefully about what I’d sent him. It was a good piece with plenty of potential and a good build. An invitation that I did not take up to submit it formally.

The last note is from an editor at the New Yorker who I’d met through a brilliant cousin, L, in New York. His note is long and you can see how the keys of his typewriter struck the page. Manual. A labor of mind and hands. I’d recently seen his name in a thank you section of a Pulitzer-winning book, but now here it was in his own scrawl as a signature you couldn’t read if you didn’t know it. He was more critical, but no less encouraging. The story might’ve been too easy because of the age of the protagonist. But thank you. Keep going.

Reading them together, I am struck by the sense that these three people each were responding to something that was worthy and good, something I had made. I’m reminded of who I was and wanted to be 30 years ago. It brings a twinge of regret, but not anger. I might’ve done things differently, but I didn’t. So now I’m father to two boys. And today I know better than to think someone else can change me by just saying, “Yes.”

Then I come across the letters from friends, siblings, parents. I am amazed at the penmanship and the subject matters. The cursive and printed sentence tell about books and reading and relationships. One is from a friend who became CMO of a large chipmaker. He tells me about his struggles with prostitutes. I open another note from a writer-colleague in the Peace Corps. He mentions his desire to see an ice cube when he comes back to the states. Then there’s the one from a woman who’s gone on to write for a well-known comedy magazine and website: She tells me about all the new music she is discovering with a sense of awe and bubble gum.

Many of these envelopes contain snapshots and newspaper clippings. Almost all end with a bit about me needing to write, to keep going. It’s sweet and kind and I feel lucky to have known these people. And I am surprised by how much I was surrounded by people who believed in me — and equally surprised at my blindness to them.

Then I come across the letters from the women I knew. The girlfriends. These are harder to look at. They bring up the deepest story I told myself when I was younger, a story of damage that I began for myself when I was just a little younger than my 8 year old son is now. One of these women I hurt when I rejected her in drunken shame. Another laments the end of our time together but assures me it was the right thing to do.

But it’s the woman who writes to me of a lie she told me that is the most difficult. It’s an awkward, fumbling note — a letter of amends. Though I know I have read it before, it’s like the first time I have seen it — and I realize why: Whatever the words said literally, I was too certain of my own broken nature that I couldn’t read it for what it was: An absolution that had I taken for face value might have led to a new path and new view of myself.

The relationships these letters bring up are all years apart and while none of the writers ever knew each other in any way (except abstractly through me), they all also carry a theme about the way I saw myself that is related to this flash of understanding about myself that I see now.

Be kinder to yourself. You are good. Go gently.

The clarity of the story I once told myself is astonishing. I am amazed to see it mapped out so neatly in the past by the hands of others. I know that the feeling of unworthiness I carried kept me going. I used it to drive the work by which I hoped to prove it wrong.

I’m also amazed to know that something strong lived side by side with it, another voice that the authors of these letters also heard. A goodness that wanted (and wants) to live.

I am fortunate to have been guided by that, too. It lets me forgive the twenty something kid that got these letters because he did not know, but he did not give up, either.

It’s led to a life that could not have been planned. A life with a dog and two kids and a good, full-hearted woman who, on meeting him almost 20 years ago, told her closest friend that she saw a man who was truly kind.

Some of the letters I keep. Some I throw away. But I’m glad I looked them over. And while I wish I’d been able to do it sooner, I don’t regret any of it. It’s all mine. And it is part of getting past my past.

And it oddly makes me feel more ready than ever to learn to surf next year.

We get to the hard part and it seems like a surprise. We’ve been dreaming separately, living in the overlap. But now we can’t find that place. I know I am hanging on to things in the part of the ven diagram that I didn’t even know were there.

All we can do is tell each other what it is we think we cling to; try to recognize the gravitational pull we believe pins us down even if we were to let go.

It’s a tough place to be for both of us.

And so we slow down and try to look at each other and feel the gravitational pull that drew us together, and say, Yes, I see you. And more importantly, Yes, I know you see me.

I love the smell of the newspaper when I open it up over coffee in the morning.

I think of seeing Ben Bradlee striding across the newsroom when Barry was caught in a seedy hotel with a crack pipe; the deaf typesetters signing to each other in paste up; the roar of the press under the gaze of men with inky hands. I think of the bundles of papers still warm off the rollers.

Early edition. Late edition. Black star edition.

Paper and ink mixed together like a bad temporary tattoo, the world in my hands, touching... easily tossed under the Christmas tree as blotter, but filled with stories more likely to be remembered because they rubbed off on your finger tips.

Oily grit that had to be scrubbed to get off — a true measure of the realness the words described.

I once cut an article out of one and gave it to a therapist who laughed like she was receiving a strange gift for the past, which indeed it was.

But it was truer than a phone app.

Occasionally, a memory or a thought comes out in the third person. The boy. The man. He.

I suppose you can reason it away. The thought is too close to the bone. The memory needs a proper distance to be heard and seen and felt.

The theories are all almost reasonable since the writing is almost always an unconscious motion. Appearing like a flash in a non-editing state when it marks itself out on the white page.

But I know better. Everything I’ve ever written is an “I” — all the He and She and You that I’ve ever told a story with.

It is I, I, and more I every time.

Because I know that just as everyone in every dream is a version of yourself, so is every pronoun.

(I’ve heard of some who would go so far as to suggest that every person you meet is a version of yourself, though that can only be true up to a certain point.)

I am always the subject. First person, singular.

Which I know leads to problems: A separateness that seems real because my feet are not attached to the ground, but that is nonetheless false in the same way that Watts pointed out an apple is part of an apple tree even if you don’t find it on the tree.

And so is He and Him and She and You and, even, Them.

You never really notice what you do. You just do — and hope you did it right. And when someone points out it’s wrong, you hope to God you have the grace to see it how they do, and the mind to pause and look, and understand if you are wrong, and fix it if you are.

But mostly you just hope you helped.

And then one day you go through a door and you say goodbye to one thing as you are on your way to the next thing.

In that moment, if you are really lucky, the people you’ve been with turn and say, hey, thank you. This is a good moment and you should stop here long enough to let it realize itself. It’s a real passage. Missing it is to deny something in yourself and those around you that is important. A recognition of who you’ve been together.

And you should say thank you back with everything you have.

Because you all have been lucky.

And that’s a good thing.

Next week, traffic will stop and everything will happen. Sidewalks will be clogged with men and women wearing lanyards and ID tags. It will be impossible to get a coffee without a 30 minute wait.

And today, Friday, the whole day has been full of the nervous anticipation to get it all done, finish it all off.

Now, at a quarter past six, there is no one left and the office is empty and darkness of evening has fallen.

I should’ve gone home long ago, too, but I’ve hung out to see the ends of things. So now I stand at the table with an art director who has spent the last 9 hours on last minute requests. I ask if he needs help. He tells me he needs to fold a brochure by hand because it’s too late to get to CopyMat.

“I don’t trust them anyway,” he says.

In two weeks, after the traffic has restarted, and the lanyards have been taken off to be hung on the corners of cubicle walls, and you can get coffee again in just 5 minutes, I’ll come through these hallways for the last time because I’ve agreed to help others in another office for another company. All day people have noted it, wondered why I’m in the office. They’ve laughed a little at the absurdity of my presence. “Short timer, “ one says snarkily.

But I can’t help myself. I’ve spent too much time helping these people get to this point, trying to create the space to help them see what they can do.

And that is what I am thinking about as the evening closes in and I help the art director fold the brochures.

One fold, then another. Then another. A neat little pocket guide that will mean 2000 folds, all by hand.

We both know that it’s unlikely that the brochure will change the course of the events trajectory. It’s even more unlikely that it will ever be remembered that we folded this paper by hand, simply because the art director doesn’t trust copy mat.

Do I have to be here? No, not really.

But it will help the art director get to a dinner he wants to go to that he’d miss if he were folding alone. And then the brochures will be done and that will help others on Monday let their focus go somewhere more important, too.

So I ask, do I have to be here? And I know I couldn’t be anywhere else, right now.

I stand in the garage feeding the paper shredder old tax returns. Numbers committed to paper more than ten years ago that were so important back “then.”

Old addresses and jobs rise like ghosts from W-2s. I am amazed at how little we lived on for some of those years. Then I come across a student loan statement. The numbers were crushing.

I recall going to a lawyer named Kessler with you to make sure if we got married and one of us died, the survivor wouldn’t pay the debts of the dead.

I still remember your smile and charm at the oak table in the office. You were funny. And kind. And fearless.

Seeing the numbers in the autumn light in a room where we keep our cars, a room attached to a house that is thousands of square feet bigger than the apartment where I fell in love with you, I realize just how much we faced together.

It would’ve been easy to melt under the weight that our dreams laid on us financially. It would’ve even been excusable to give up and walk away from each other.

But we didn't.

Your laugh was too good to let go of. Your bright voice called forth too much in me to walk away from.

The numbers said we’d never make it. We’d eat ramen in our old age and ride buses forever.

But with you, well, we said we didn’t care.

So now I’m shredding those statements. And we had a good time anyway.

Listening to your voice in the dark, I hear how happy you are down there in the Southland with your people.

There is a song in you that you are singing, finding notes you haven’t touched in so many years. It’s an old song, but it sounds new and fresh and returns me to who I am, too.

It is good to hear you swimming in the goodness of you. It is good to hear you open a door you haven’t opened in years to see what may still be there for you.

There is a there for you, I want you to know. But I can not say it because it will put too much weight on it. And it will take away from the discovery that can only be yours.

But I can tell you I am happy to be part of the reason you are considering the threshold.

Let go.

I’ll be here waiting no matter what.

Lately I’ve been feeling good. The desire to write has waned, slowly being overgrown by inertia. And television.

Should I stop writing to honor the inner director? Or should ignore that lazy bastard?

Perhaps I should write twice as much.

Probably.