Bonding over a misunderstood masterpiece, just as our gay guy forebears intended, this all begins with Showgirls. Back in June, I saw it in theaters with my new friend Michael. We’d never met before but we’ve followed each other online for a while and when he reached out to offer me his extra ticket to a movie I’ve always wanted to see, I happily said yes. For Michael, this was far from his first time. His very favorite film, it’s not just monologues he’s committed to memory but entire dance routines. Some light cues, too. And meeting up at a bar beforehand, once we got to talking about this 1995 cult classic, Michael said, “And don’t forget, it was originally supposed to be Drew Barrymore playing Nomi Malone, not Elizabeth Berkley. Which is, like, okay, wow, sickening. But also? For Cristal? Before Gina Gershon got it? Madonna.” To trust Michael’s knowledge of Showgirls pre-preproduction was a given. But more than that, and I don’t say this lightly, “...this doesn’t happen to me everyday…,” I also knew to trust his knowledge of Madonna. We’re fellow disciples, Michael and I. Two boys led by some ultimate stroke of fortune to the same foothills of a most Madgestic mountain where we heard the good word and believed in all its teachings. They weren’t written in stone and, given our age, they weren’t lathed in vinyl. Given Michael’s even younger age, they weren’t burnt on CD-ROMs either. For us, they were mp3s. But still we understood them as commandments. And with an hour left until Showgirls began, Michael and I got to worshipping.

Growing up in Bensonhurst, what this native New Yorker lacks in a Brooklyn accent, he makes up for in Brooklyn esprit. He’s fast talking and clever and warm. He is the real deal. Right away, I was so at ease with him. Like my very own Debi Mazar who, go figure, kind of looks like Carlos Leon. Finding so much soul in his round, brown Sicilian eyes, with these long lashes that also had me thinking of Clarabelle the Cow. The ultimate compliments, in my book. We began to properly introduce ourselves. Telling each other about our parents and siblings, where we work, the boyfriend Michael lives with and the ex-boyfriend with whom I once called home. But we never made it more than a couple minutes without bringing her up. Madonna was giving us so much to be excited about. That previous week, she performed live in Times Square one night and debuted a longform music video at Tribeca Film Festival the next and Michael and I attended them both. Not together but in the same crowd nevertheless. With all of this leading up to July 3rd when Confessions II would finally come out. For the first time in seven years, the world would know a brand new Madonna album. And like the sweetest cherry on top, gifting me something greater than he possibly could have known this soon into our fledgling friendship, Michael said, “Are you doing anything the night of the release? Me and Jonny are going to C’mon Everybody, they’re playing the whole album at midnight. As soon as it comes out! Come with us!”

I just needed to keep myself alive until then. Because during those two weeks between seeing Showgirls at the movies and hearing our number one showgirl at the club, I was dog sitting in Clinton Hill. It’s where I used to live, where I once called home with said ex-boyfriend. An ex-boyfriend who is, once again, my ex-boyfriend. We found our way back to each other after almost a year apart and it was like all my prayers had been answered. Like my prayer of prayers was answered. But then on some old familiar path, we got lost. After almost a year back together, not to mention all the years that came before that, we should have known the way. But we just couldn’t figure it out. I’m more clear-eyed about things this time around, I guess, but my heart is in my guts not my head and all the clarity in the world, in the world I’m living in at least, couldn’t ease the agony. Coping with this anywhere would be painful enough. Coping with this in an apartment building three blocks away from his was torture. It was absolute torture. But the owners were relying on me and it was the kind of money I couldn’t afford to turn down so I did it. And there came a day, a Saturday morning, when something occurred to me. Stopping short in the bathroom as I was getting ready for work, I was almost shocked by how suddenly, and clearly, I understood. That you kill yourself to make the pain go away. It was like a light just went on in a dark, dark room. Of course. Of course that’s why. But then there came another voice, quieter and wiser than my own, speaking in third person, and so softly. It is so sad he feels this way. It was like I was seeing myself from further away, or further up. A divine witness from somewhere over the rainbow. And yet despite this safe distance, or perhaps precisely because of it, I sat down on the dog owner’s couch and I cried and cried. There was grief in those tears, and longing, and so much love with no place to put it. And there were other feelings too. Feelings too scary to admit and even scarier to put into words.

As I waited for a text back about which apartment number to buzz and condensation off a window unit fell on our shoulders like rain, Michael said, “So, there could be, like, five people at this party or, like, twenty-five people at this party?” He was nervous. Tonight was the night, after all. Come midnight, C’mon Everybody was playing the new album. But first we’d been invited to a gay guy get together. And as much as I wanted to set Michael at ease, I really had no business guessing what this party might be like. Up until that afternoon, I didn’t even know Theo’s name. His Twitter handle, yes, and the fact that he loves Madonna just as much as we do, but not the name of this tall and gorgeous blond boy who messaged me that afternoon to say, “I’m hosting a pregame if u wanna come by. Making cosmos.” Turning to Michael as the buzzer sounded and I pushed open the door, I said to him, “I have no idea.” Dismissive as that might sound, I intended just the opposite. I knew exactly how Michael was feeling. Parties have never come easy to me. Sunk into many a living room couch and crammed up against the wall of many a narrow hallway, alongside so many people who made being young and alive look like the simplest task in the world, I’ve so often felt like such a failure. Close enough to reach out and touch whoever I might like, just one step away from joining a crowd, only to never move an inch. I couldn’t know for sure if Michael has ever felt this same way, our friendship still too new. But the worry I heard in his voice sounded like a perfect echo of mine. So when I told him I have no idea what’s ahead for us, I promise I meant this as an invitation. Knowing how badly I always want an anchor at a party, someone who will ground me and guide me back, I made a decision. Tonight, I would try and do that for Michael. “There’s, like, four shots in that,” said Theo, handing each of us a glass of his homemade Cosmopolitans, decanted in a Le Creuset crockpot on the counter. If Michael had a preference on the matter, if a party of five would’ve felt more or less intimidating than a party of twenty-five, he was lucky enough to have it both ways. It was just Theo and his boyfriend and two other guys sitting around the kitchen table when we first arrived but, by the time we left, it was wall-to-wall revelers. Everything getting hotter and louder as “Borderline” and “Bye Bye Baby” and “Shanti/Ashtangi” blasted through the TV speakers. And cloudier too, just as soon as the fog machine in Theo’s living room got turned on. Fanning the air before us, we headed out. There were still another couple hours until midnight but Michael wanted to get to C’mon Everybody as soon as things started and I was fine with that. Besides, the most fun I had at this party full of people was with just Michael.

With drag queens keeping the time, we were running late. It was a couple minutes past 12:00 on Friday the 3rd of July but there was still some housekeeping our emcees needed to attend to. Namely the spelling out of Venmo accounts from the stage. A woman’s work is never done. But a new day had begun and we were ready for it. Me and Michael and, by then, his friend Shayna and his boyfriend Jonny. I met them both for the first time last week, when we all went out for Pride. Shayna has this great laugh, showcasing something so open, and so truly tickled, every time any of us made a joke. And recognizing something very familiar in his quiet reserve, something so tender and affectionate, when I hugged Jonny goodbye that night, I made sure to tell him, “You are so sweet.” But at last, they cut the spotlight and the queens left the stage and someone somewhere pressed play on Confessions II. “...Thanks for coming…” And like a dance floor of Bernadettes, primed for the sublime in this shimmering grotto, here we were to witness and receive. And here was She. Good God.

My faith never wavered but it did go through some phases. Not unusual, I suppose, for a 20-year-long relationship. I’ve known Madonna all my life, or at least it feels that way, but it was a series of Cicconean events circa 2005 that sealed my fate. I was 12 going on 13 and, like a bar mitzvah, I was becoming a man in Madonna. Hearing “Hung Up” on the radio and watching I’m Going to Tell You a Secret the night it premiered on MTV and catching Evita one afternoon on one of the movie channels. All these new expressions of a feeling for her I’d already known. When I was little, every time I had the chance, I would sneak into my oldest sister Jillian’s bedroom and look at all her things. Smelling her bottle of CK One and poking around the contents of her Caboodle and, most of all, looking through her CDs housed in a tower twice my height. Not that I ever listened to them. I had my select titles, my personal favorites, but all I wanted to do was look. Finding enough excitement in the cover art alone and more than enough meaning. Even as a kid, I understood them as something mystical. Like icons of the saints. Tarot cards in jewel cases. Tragic Kingdom, and Honey, and the one that changed it all, the Marian apparition all my own, Madonna’s Ray of Light. I saw something in her. Something I loved and, in ways I’m still coming to understand, something I needed. To lose my faith? No way, no how. And with no match for my devotion. Not the grillz on her teeth, not “Killers Who Are Partying.” But again, I’ve known my passing phases. Faltering moments when I wondered if she still had it in her to write something special. If she still finds herself sleepless in bed, all alone, and waiting, filling up her diaries with lovelorn verses to pass the impossible pains of time. I don’t want her to be sad but I know she is and so I dreamed, with crossed fingers, that she might make something good from it. But I couldn’t have imagined this. Not even in dreams would I have let myself believe Confessions II would sound this good. That she’d give us something this close to perfection. Without realizing it, and without meaning to, as I listened to these brand new songs from a woman I can truthfully call my oldest friend, my hands were clasped in prayer.

While every other part of me danced. Just like its older sister, Confessions II is mixed like a DJ set with one song bleeding right into the next. Not stopping or starting, but moving. “...No end and no beginning…” During every transition, the four of us would put our heads together, trying to remember the name of the next track. And time and again, Michael and I would lock eyes with our jaws dropped to celebrate some particular stroke of genius. That deliciously long intro to “One Step Away.” The eerie sample in “Betrayal” that I figured was, like, Portishead when it was, in fact, an Erik Satie composition from 1893. Or the immense blessing of Madonna singing the words, “...Get on the elevator, I run into Debi Mazar…” But just as often, over the course of those 64 nonstop minutes, it was just me. That was my fear, of course. When we broke up, back in the first week of May, I was so sad to be reacquainted with all that old sadness. Dreading, already, all the restless nights spiraling over where he was and who he was with and all the fun he was surely having without me. But there was something else to mourn this time. Swallowing my anger and wiping away my tears, forced to accept that this was the end, I was still sitting with him in his bed when I thought, Who’s gonna go with me to hear the new album? It was like I got robbed of some promised treasure that I never even had the chance to hold. If I wanted to go out somewhere and hear Confessions II as soon as it was released, I’d have to do it alone and, knowing me, I’d never do that. Thanks to Michael, I didn’t have to worry about it. And while I cherished the company I had tonight, and was so happy to know it was near, I was just as happy to realize I didn’t need it. I like to dance, I always have, but never did it very often. Entire years of my young life went by with just one or two nights spent on a dancefloor. I’m easily self-conscious. But tonight, she delivered me. I was here, ecstatically here, but also I wasn’t. In my body but out of my mind. “...a new persona, a different identity…” Shifting a couple degrees on its axis, I felt a new world under my feet.

***

It was Friday night in New York City and I didn’t have any plans with anyone but, for once, that was all right because I had a date with Madonna. I just saw a screening of short films at the Museum of Modern Art, each of them in their own way about newcomers making sense of their new life in America, and the night was still young. It was the weekend and I was alone and while that should’ve had me feeling all my old angst, plagued as ever by the hell of making plans on Friday and Saturday nights, instead I had something to be excited about—and then I walked outside. It was pouring rain. And for a moment, I really thought I’d have to head home. Single and solo on the weekend. And not even 9:00 yet. But storms don’t last for long this time of year. Something to remember, I suppose. And now, something to hear. As life altering as Confessions II had already proved to be, out in the world now for almost 24 hours, I hadn’t really listened to it yet. Taking to the Internet that morning, I demanded that every individual I’d ever met personally reach out to me with praise for her new album. But like a poser, like some sort of phoney, I still hadn’t heard it for myself. Not properly, at least. From start to finish with my headphones in and my attention undivided. Enter Midtown. Not exactly my go-to place to walk around but there was something about this starting point that felt, aptly, cinematic. Madonna was about to sing words that I might as well have never heard before, catching maybe 10 percent of her lyrics on last night’s dancefloor, and I was about to do this on the streets of New York. The two great blessings of my life. My luckiest stars. Walking further east on 53rd Street and turning right on Lexington Avenue, bound for downtown, I set out on my walk and pressed play on the album.

Ten, 20, 50 years from now, in that perfect world where we’ll still be dancing, I really believe that anytime Madonna’s “I Feel So Free” starts to play, everyone everywhere, everywhere that matters at least, will know its every word. It’s her “I Will Survive,” this opening track of Confessions II. Her “I Feel Love.” Her “Believe.” A 21st century dance song that deservedly joins the canonical likes of “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “I’m Coming Out.” And all because it contains that crucial element of our kind of anthem. Joy born from sorrow. Who better than Madonna to know the freedom of the dancefloor, that “...ritualistic space where movement replaces language...” But this language she’s hearing, those words in her head, sounds more like prison. “...Sometimes I like to just hide in the shadows…It’s really hard for me to trust people, can you blame me?...I never know why people like me…It’s dangerous with just one person, that’s not a nice feeling…” And while she can’t explain it, she hardly needs to, not when it sounds like the realest thing in the world to hear her sing, “...I feel so free…” Sometimes the loneliness is so brutal it hurts and sometimes we can’t tell where one body ends and another begins. Lost instead in the sweaty crashes of beautiful strangers touching down on all the same twos and fours. She says it’s good for the soul.

With puddles in the potholes for disco balls, each one a fractured mirror of all the tail lights and billboards passing me by, I entered “Danceteria.” No matter that I was twenty blocks and a couple avenues away from where it actually used to be. Let alone that it’s been closed since 1995. Now, Danceteria can be anywhere. That storied Manhattan nightclub that seemed to operate more like a theater in the round, only better, because it was real. It was a place that existed with people who lived. And people who died. Martin Burgoyne, Haoui Montaug, Mark Kamins, Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring. All gone. Quoting the song’s refrain, it was Hari Nef who said, “‘Everybody get up and dance’ being an ecstatic and mournful call to the dead.” And Madonna remembers them. These ever-young figures of her youth, like the wretched street children in a Jacob Riis, their hungry hearts growling just as fiercely from inside the very same tenements, they get to be immortal now. Even the Puerto Rican boys who made her crazy, with names she never got the chance to know, will live forever. Like a work of art. Like angels with dirty faces. Like “...Greta Garbo and Monroe, Dietrich and DiMaggio…” Like the Chrysler Building getting smaller and smaller in my wake, even though I knew that wasn’t true, that it would always stay just as it was. A thousand feet in the air.

And out of the sky, rain was still falling. But for the first time I can remember, scarred as I am by my years of dog walking in every kind of weather, I was happy to be outside for it. The rain pelting my brow somehow making Madonna’s words ring all the louder. Like prophecy. And in her voice, in “Everything,” I heard the mightiest force I can imagine, and the most fearsome. A mother’s rage. I know it well and, when her blood begins to boil, I know just how it sounds. And I think I understand where it all comes from. Drawing upon every last drop of her inner wrath, she wants the world for us. Because when she looks at the children of these modern times, too scared to go outside and speaking words without meaning, it blows her mind. “It’s not okay,” says Madonna, “I DON’T FUCK WITH IT!” It was like I was listening to Cassandra. Or Joan of Arc. Or Jesus Christ himself, just as soon as she promised that we’ll find the greatest light wherever there’s the greatest darkness. “Baby, come and get with me, there’s something that I gotta do” (Confessions 2:08). There’s a mission ahead of her, and it’s daunting, with so many wrongs to make right, and it’s all to do with us. And still she reaches out her hand.

Everything got more familiar once I crossed 14th Street. Walking past Village East, I thought about all the movies we saw there. Rope, The Testament of Ann Lee, Licorice Pizza, 2001: A Space Odyssey. And Casablanca on that one particular Valentine’s Day when we weren’t even boyfriends yet. Still, our knees were touching from start to finish. Peering down side streets, I looked for Tile and John’s on 12th, for Bibi and The Immigrant, for restaurants where I got dinner with friends and bars where I had first and last dates with boys. Shoulders I cried on, lips I kissed. My dad went to a Catholic school on the corner of 2nd and 2nd but it’s not there anymore. Now it’s just a leveled lot of gravel and dirt behind a chain link fence. But still I looked for it. “...They’re a reminder of your history…” And in this final stretch of the album, there was so much for her to look back on. Songs about the stepmother responsible for some of her oldest wounds, and the firstborn daughter who healed them, and the husband who just might remain her one great love all these years after their divorce. So much has changed in the 20 years since the first installment of this album. And, as everyone loves to say, Madonna has gotten older. There’s a brace on her knee now, with some odd hesitance in her dance moves, and a backtrack that sounds louder than ever. But all of these things are miracles. She’s still here, and this is how, and here’s what she has to say about it. These are her confessions.

First thing this morning, as I nursed myself back to life after a night of so much exertion on the dancefloor and so little sleep in my bed, I sent “Fragile” to my sisters. “This truly left me clutching my heart last night, knowing I was hearing a song from a sister to her brother,” I said to them. “To her gay brother! Her gay, younger brother!” Responding almost immediately with different teary eyed emojis, Jillian said it gave her chills while Lindsay reported full body goosebumps. “...my sisters and me, my sisters and me…” And then I sent my mom some lyrics from “The Test.” It’s the song Madonna sings with her daughter Lourdes. And the words I kept returning to, the part of the song I kept on rewinding, belonged to Lourdes. “...her hand tenderly reaching to me, you are my reason to be, or what I want, or look like, what I wear, all the clothes on my back, and what I attract, I trace the line of what you have sewn, keep my own design, make it a landscape, make it alive…” She’s speaking for herself, of course. But in praising the attributes of this foremost titan in her life, and celebrating that influence, this child of Madonna speaks also for me. “...You made me whole when I was broken too and I hope and pray I can do the same for you…” For so long, Madonna wanted this. To look in the eyes of someone who would love her for life and feel healed. She looked all over the world for it. Chasing after someone, something, anything that just might last. And after everything I’ve learned about my own mother, everything I’ve come to understand about her as a person, and as a woman, I don’t think that ever goes away. All my life, she’ll run and run.

It was the Lower East Side all along. As I traveled those fifty-something city blocks with these 16 new songs for my soundtrack, through the rain and the heat, past the shopfronts and synagogues, the deliveristas and the drunken bachelorettes, it was always my destination. A couple years ago, I learned that my great-great grandfather William Henry Burns was long active in politics on the Lower East Side. That’s what his obituary said. And according to the draft card he signed at 18 years old, my grandfather George Francis Burns grew up in a tenement on Broome Street. Before she was famous, Madonna lived in a tenement on Broome Street. And every day that I go to work at The Tenement Museum, and tell the stories of real New Yorkers come and gone, I walk down Broome Street to get there. And I only know all these things about who I am and where I came from and how I got here because of Austin. For a birthday present one year, he bought me access to my ancestry. It was the perfect gift. Like all of his presents, it was perfect. So much will change, so much already has changed, and inevitably everything I know will disappear. Every place and face, every street corner in this heavensent city, and every person I love so completely that I stopped being able to see them, appearing to me instead as a glowing aura of sound and color. One day, this will all be gone. But I know that everything Austin ever gave me is mine to keep. I have it all, still, wherever I’m at home. And just as “L.E.S. Girl” began to play, I turned onto Orchard Street.

It’s the one I love the most. Easily my favorite off the whole album and right up there with her very best written songs. Certainly among her truest. And I can barely listen to it. “Because it’s perfect,” I explained to my therapist Liza that following week, through so many tears. “It is perfect.” As ruminative as Confessions II proves to be, this moody and mournful record, it is still a dance album. A throbbing piece of work that aims to shove us all out the door, pushing us out of the house and into the here and now—all of which could be gone tomorrow. Madonna knows this. Losing her mother at five years old, perhaps she never had much choice in the matter, never unaware of mortality in the room. But Madonna herself almost died a couple years ago. This time it was coming for her. I won’t accept it, I can’t, but perhaps she has: this could be Madonna’s last album. And with that, she takes us back to the beginning. What Madonna sings last is a lullaby. Telling us the story of a young girl with an unusual name and a broken heart. Once upon a time, she lived on Avenue B and she was starving. Hungry to rule the world but hungrier still for someone who would love her, and see her, for someone who’d welcome her home. And for a time she had that, finding it in a boy who played guitar on St. Mark’s Place, with painted nails and bleached hair and a Marlon Brando face. But then they lost each other. “…she wears his leather jacket out in the rain, sleeps to forget his name, Polaroids are taped to the wall, can’t forget that boy at all…” These memories are 45 years old. They’re a lifetime ago. But in her heart, that bruised and battered thing, that’s only yesterday. This beautiful boy, this muse’s muse, is always with her. Even though it burns, Madonna keeps the light on. And soon enough, there were fireworks too. Tomorrow was the Fourth of July but some people couldn’t wait to set things off. I could hear them but it wasn’t until I got to Broome Street that I saw them for myself. And as stars exploded from heaven, I waited for the taste of gunpowder to kiss my lips.

***

“I can’t make any promises of what it will look like but—you will have a good view of her.” That’s among the last things my friend Noah said to me at this hotel bar in Jersey City. Knowing just who he meant, but refusing to let myself believe it, I had to ask, “Who’s ‘her’?” And after pausing for the requisite dramatic effect, like a pro hitting his mark, Noah said, “Mother.”

And still I chose to leave.

The Queen of Pop was coming to Queens. Taking to Instagram on Wednesday night, Madonna posted a promo poster for something happening that Saturday. Club Confessions. New York. Knockdown Center. 11th of July at 11:00. Sponsored by Mistr and Absolut. With sets from Sam-E, Junior Sanchez, Fcukers, Honey Dijon, Stuart Price. And Madonna herself. Come Saturday, she’d be in my neck of the woods. But with zero information on securing admission, no one had any idea how to get in. Knockdown Center had a couple events already on their calendar for Saturday night but none of them mentioned Madonna and they were all sold out. Just in case, I put us on some waitlists. “Maybe it’s unticketed? Like, there’ll just be a line outside or something?” I said to Michael to which he replied, “That won’t go well.”

Seeking answers, I read some tweets. My feed has been in a chronic state of “Madonna Psychosis” all month, a digital chorus collectively celebrating an album we all wound up loving so much. But this was something else. And as every scroll revealed a new plea from a new gay guy fiending for a way inside Knockdown Center, something was becoming clear. Entry to Club Confessions would require an invitation. It would mean knowing the right person. And the thing about living in New York City is that even our hermits are friends with the odd “right person.” If Michael and I had any hopes at all of a plus-one, let alone -two, our golden ticketholders would need to really like us. And what do you know? That night, messaging me directly, my friend Noah asked, “What is your email address?” And when I didn’t answer him fast enough, he said, “Brian. What’s the quickest way to contact you? Text?” Smoke rose from my fingers as I typed out my number. My heart was racing, and I told Noah as much, but otherwise refrained from showing my cards. I didn’t want to seem too eager or presumptuous. Most of all, I didn’t want to jinx anything. Because my friend Noah? He likes me. And Noah? He knows Madonna.

A jack of many trades, it’s Noah’s expertful beating of mugs that brought him into her world. He worked in the makeup department on The Celebration Tour. A show I saw twice. First at Barclays and then again at Madison Square Garden where super agent to the stars Bryan Lourd sat directly in front of me. And near the end of the show, at the very edge of the stage, she came to a standstill right before us. Sticking out her microphone and urging him to sing along, all command and playful petulance, Madonna said, “Bryan.” I knew a couple other people at the show that night who knew exactly where I was standing and they all thought I was personally addressed by Madonna. That is truly what they believed. That Madonna didn’t just recognize me in the crowd but called out to me by name. No matter, I wouldn’t go unnoticed by production. That night, Noah said he saw me on one of the monitors that had a camera feed of the audience. Head and shoulders above the rest, there I was, one Brian after another, backstage at Madonna. And now he’d returned to embarrass me with further riches. “Did you get an email?” asked Noah. There in my inbox, I read, “You’re invited to Club Confessions.”

I only got a single ticket but that was fine because Michael managed to get one too, thanks to a friend of his named Bradley. Almost 15 years ago, in the general admission pit at the Boston stop of Madonna’s MDNA Tour, I met Bradley. “...life is a circle, life is a circle…” And just when I thought I’d been spared the anguish of leaving my sweet new friend in the dust, Noah put it back in drive. Telling me that he was recruited to do makeup for a girl named Ivy. And that Ivy is one of Madonna’s dancers. “You and I will meet up somewhere near the hotel and have a proper catchup over a drink,” he said. “And after that, you’ll come with me and hang out while we do glam.” And just in case I was the type to look a gift horse in the mouth, Noah also assured me I had options. The ticket was in my name so, if I wanted, I could always just go on my own. And I know he really meant that. There was no pressure for anything at all, no token of gratitude I needed to cough up, no lackey’s gimmick to perform. All Noah seemed to want from me was that I have a good time. Opting for the obvious, I said yes to his proposal. And thanked him about a hundred-thousand times. Less obvious, however, was just how quickly I started second-guessing myself. Suddenly thinking about the logistics of traveling from another city in another state to get back to Queens and the agonizing hesitation I might feel parting ways with people who get to live in Madonna’s world. Starved for a witness, I finally clued Michael in on all this. And echoing all my same concerns, he said, “I would be so nervous. What are you thinking? You should just meet me at 9:30 at Knockdown Center and we’ll go in together. You’ll be so far away. Not leaving Jersey City til 11:00? That’s crazzzzzzzzzy late.” We were like two wailing nonnas, clutching the collars under our shawls, lamenting the sudden possession of too much of a good thing. And the second I wised up to this, I made the fool’s decision. I would try to have them both.

“I’m so turned around,” I said out loud, lost in the Financial District and looking for something, anything, that might guide me to the PATH. I was going to New Jersey. Just as soon as I figured out where the station entrance was for this podunk commuter rail, I was going to New Jersey. One stop and I was there. It cost a little more than three bucks and took a little less than five minutes but still I found myself thinking, So close but so far away. As soon as we spotted each other across the hotel bar, Noah said, “What a dump!” It’s never been my bag to wear a Madonna shirt to a Madonna event so instead I was wearing this vintage tee of Bette Davis looking like Warhol’s Mao with the quote Noah just quoted, famously, printed in big bold letters. I was taller than he imagined and he was older than I ever would have guessed. False assumptions we could both accept as compliments. Making sure he knew this was my treat, that it was the least I could do, I got a dirty martini while Noah honored Our Lady with a lemon drop. I recall him having great posture. Exuding this almost aristocratic air that, as he explained, could be an inherited adaptation to a colonized India. “He pulled himself out of the mud,” Noah said, more than once, about his father. One of six siblings, his dad was the first in his family to attend school in English and was eventually one of twelve total students in the country to be selected for an engineering job overseas. “And you know how many people are in India,” said Noah. Later on, with intermittent apologies for doing so much of the talking, Noah took me down all the roads that led him to working for Madonna. And after hearing all these accounts of his drive, his ambition, I said to Noah, “There’s your father.” And in his mother, there’s Madonna. Thirteen letters long and derived from classical Sanskrit, reading like a mantra, Noah has a phenomenal last name. And he told me a story about the day his mother wrote out that married name for the very last time. Signing off on the divorce papers and putting the cap back on the pen, his mother said, “Just when I finally learned how to spell that goddamn name.” Boys like us were born to love women like her.

If Noah thought I was a fool for turning down the chance to hang out with him and Ivy, he kept it to himself. Saying instead, like a mother bird nudging off its young, “Well then—you should get going.” And as soon as I left the hotel, I started thinking about turning around. I was fully back in Manhattan and still I was considering whether or not to text Noah and say I wanted to join them after all. There was no time to lose but, for every bit of a minute, I couldn’t move. Standing stock still in the Oculus, there in that dead mall, I was paralyzed. But then I heard it, the voice, that wise and quiet thing, here to tell me that there was no going back. Two steps at a time, I ran up the nearest staircase. It took me an hour but, at last, I got to Knockdown Center. And it was then and there that another voice, much louder now, had something to say. I fucked up.

There were about a million people waiting on the sidewalk to get inside Knockdown Center. Club Confessions had begun but I was at the end of the line and the line was five blocks long. I fucked up. I wasn’t hanging out with Noah. And I wasn’t hanging out with Michael, who was now long established on the dancefloor, claiming a spot right up by the barricade well over an hour ago. In trying to have both birds in the bush, I wound up empty handed on Flushing Avenue. I fucked up. And inside, Michael was worried. Worried for me, yes, but also worried about himself. It was nerve wracking to be standing alone at a place like this, surrounded by people like these, and I understood that completely. But if I got one more message from him with a question about my ETA, I was gonna kick his ass. Coming to his rescue without even knowing it, I opened up a new text from Krista. Responding to this dilemma of mine, she gave me something to hold onto. “There is no such thing as a wrong decision!!! God is with you. Tonight can’t go wrong.” And finally, after another hour in this different form of transit, I got to the gates and walked through a custom inflatable. It was huge. This humming colossus of Madonna’s legs in purple go-go boots, splayed wide open to straddle a speaker. To start the party, we had to step inside her boombox. If I know anything at all about Madonna, it’s that she thought this was fucking hysterical.

“I told them you’re my boyfriend,” said Michael, as I finally joined him up by the barricade. “That my boyfriend was joining me soon and I wanted to save his spot. I’m sorry! I just didn’t think ‘my friend’ would cut it!” Playing my part, I kissed him on the cheek. At 20,000 square feet, Knockdown Center is massive. Initially built as a glass factory back in 1903, it eventually housed a company that invented this special kind of door known as a “knock-down frame.” It allows builders to construct the walls first and install the doors later. Note to self. Once I got to the dancefloor I had no intention of leaving so, when I finally got inside, I raced around looking for a bathroom and a sip of water. And everywhere I looked, I saw familiar faces. Gay guys I follow online and fashion people I’ve heard on podcasts. The editor-in-chief of Interview Magazine and that very online New York City Council Member. An up-and-coming actor who was my inaugural first date last year and that new girl on SNL with the really hot boyfriend. “I should introduce myself,” I said to Naomi Fry, “You changed my mother’s life.” She writes for The New Yorker but, more important than that, she’s the reason John Mayer got wind of my mother’s failed attempt at getting a photo with him in 2005. To make amends, John Mayer wrote a song just for my mom. Throwing out her arms for a hug hello, knowing just who I was, Naomi said to me, “Kristine!”

A little past one in the morning, Stuart Price took over the DJ booth. And with a 120 decibel whisper, we began to hear Madonna say, “Are you ready? Are you ready? Are you ready? It’s motha.” And it already felt like history. Like I was witnessing the legacy of something that wasn’t even over yet. Already imagining the conversations I’ll have with twentysomethings twenty years from now, looking at me all wide-eyed in envy as they say, “You were there?!” Kids who will feel so certain they aren’t having nearly as much fun as everyone did in the past. Just like everyone has always felt. But, really and truly, never in all my life have I had quite as much fun as I did at Club Confessions. Try as she might to make her live shows feel like a night at the club, turning off the air conditioning and not taking the stage until almost midnight, there’s so much else at play that prevents her concerts from transcending the arena. Namely, the Long Islanders in attendance. But this was different. This was otherworldly. Taking her spot beside Stuart to sing along to the tracks, Madonna looked absolutely divine. Resplendent. So healthy and so strong. And so alive. Thank God she’s alive.

From our spot by the barricade, I could see where this evening almost took me. Up there on the stage, to either side of the DJ booth, were the VIP areas. Exclusive confines filled with beautiful faces and beautiful bodies. And there were plenty of people having fun up there, I could see that. Witness to their ecstatic expressions and their thrashing around as Madonna sang along to “One Step Away” and “Love Without Words” and “Thief of Hearts.” But I also saw just as many people who weren’t moving at all. An arm’s reach away from Madonna with their hands at their sides. Too cool for “School.” Eventually noticing this one gay guy in the VIP area who was literally on Facetime. The most famous woman to ever exist was actively performing just a couple feet away from him and never once did he angle his phone in her direction. Airpods in and gabbing away, I guess he had something more important to discuss. Looking at this guy, I felt truly disturbed. I was repulsed. And I thought to myself, Krista was right. I didn’t make the wrong decision. I made a choice.

For a very long time, the choice I made about Madonna was to keep her hidden. Knowing she wasn’t what 12-year-old boys were supposed to enjoy, she became one of my many secrets. With every song I listened to, every interview I watched, every artist she taught me about and turn of phrase she introduced me to, I was getting this model of how I wanted to be. But if I shared with the world just how much I loved her, if I told this to my classmates or my teachers, to my mother and father, I feared I’d be admitting something else about myself too. And that felt dangerous. Growing up, during the few occasions when I let myself be big and bold, when I found myself shining my brightest, the most glorious expression of self, it was all to do with Madonna. And that embarrassed me. For far too many years, I was all alone with her. But tonight, at my back and by my side, was a swelling sea of thousands and I was dancing for my life with every last one of them.

***

It was past 11:00 on a Saturday night and I was only just leaving my apartment to go out and dance. Earlier, I got together for some drinks with some girls from the museum. And before long, conversation landed on me and my breakup. Sara and Erica already knew basically everything but Cat and Laura were only aware of the broadest strokes and it was Estefania who asked, “What happened?” It was astounding, the way they all looked at me as I told this story, the way each of them listened. These brilliant, beautiful women, paying such careful attention in hopes of having something to offer. Some way to help. And they were all of the same mind. A resounding chorus of how I should feel about all this and the strength I should maintain going forward. They weren’t telling me what I wanted to hear, not exactly, but I didn’t let on. Delivering the performance of a lifetime as I nodded at all their wisdom while otherwise thinking, Right...right…whatever you say. And another thing I kept to myself was tomorrow’s anniversary. On that night last year, Austin and I reunited.

I had plans that night too. It was my roommate Rachel’s birthday and she was celebrating at a bar in Bushwick. As far as I remember, I had fun. It was a successful weekend night spent somewhere close enough to my apartment that I could’ve just walked home. But instead, I went to see my ex-boyfriend. Getting on the train and going to Clinton Hill where I walked down the street I once called home, telling myself that if the light was on in his bedroom, I would give him a call. His light was off but I called him anyway and, when it went to voicemail, I couldn’t feel too upset. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, I got back on the train. Breathless already, winded from scaling all those steps at Broadway Junction, I looked at my phone and saw a text from Austin. After making sure I was okay, and then reading my half-lie about being in the neighborhood after some birthday drinks, Austin said, “I would love to see you, truly. I actually told multiple people today that I miss you.” He said he was on his way home and, fully lying this time, I said I was still in the neighborhood. And turning right back around from Broadway Junction, I might as well have cartwheeled down those 100 steps. Getting back to our apartment before Austin did, I waited for him on the stoop. “...I’ll stand out on the mountaintop and wait for you to call my name…” And when Austin let me in, it felt like a miracle. But as time went on and we discovered what had changed about us, and what hadn’t, and when the old arguments began to resurface, it appeared the door was shut. There’d be no letting me in. What a shame. It takes two and I am far from easy but, still, it’s such a shame. It is so sad.

And once again, almost exactly a year later, I was going out to celebrate my roommate’s birthday. “...I go round and round, just like a circle…” She’d extended the invitation to join her and her friends to TV Eye where a DJ was playing new wave music all night long. I love new wave. And more than ever, I love to dance. Madonna Psychosis remains in full swing and at least once a week every week since Confessions II came out, I’ve gone out dancing. At C’mon Everybody and Club Confessions, of course, but also at this DIY venue in Greenpoint. I went with Kelly. My neighbor for years and years, Kelly and her boyfriend still live on the top floor of that Clinton Hill brownstone. And when I was dog sitting in the neighborhood last month, she and I got together one night to go on a walk. I’ve always had the sense we were a lot alike, that we exist out in the world, and in our relationships, in a similar fashion. But this was our first time hanging out one on one. And before long, Kelly was telling me how much she loves to dance. It’s changed everything for her, and for the better. Her relationship with New York, and her body, with strangers and with solitude. And I completely understood. Mostly because I was hearing all this from someone who is, indeed, pretty similar to me. She told me I should join her to dance practice. “It’s, like, club kids go to yoga,” she explained. Ding ding ding. That week, amidst a very Bushwick crowd of young people, I joined Kelly to practice. But on the G train to get there, seated right across from me, there was this girl who I noticed immediately. A cool blond girl radiating something so special, some special strangeness. Headphones on, and under her breath, she was singing along to the music in her ears. Little did I know, we were going to the same place. And when the DJ set began, and Kelly and I made it clear, in our own implicit ways, that we didn’t need to stick too close to each other, I found myself dancing beside that cool blond girl. She was one of the best dancers there. So erratic and angular, so inspired, and so beautiful. Like a Kandinsky or something. As far as I could tell, she was alone. And as I danced with her, making shapes I’d never made before, I felt so chosen.

Screaming at the sight of me once we found each other at the bar, Rachel said to her friends, “Everybody, this is my roommate! Brian! He loves Madonna!” C’est moi, I suppose. And then I heard one of her friends say, “Wait. Did you go to Club Confessions?” I don’t think this friend was expecting I’d say yes, given her subsequent shock and awe. If we were anywhere else, I might have felt inclined to tell this girl all about it but I could hear the sound of songs I love playing from the next room and that’s where I wanted to be. Shaking my head, with all the wonder I could muster, I smiled at her and said, “It’s a long story.” Paying the cover in cash and holding out my arm for a stamp on the wrist, I pushed open the swinging double doors and stepped into the lights. The crowd was already in motion but I found my way in. And at first I stuck around Rachel’s friends, placing myself on the fringes of their circle so that I wouldn’t be alone. And I didn’t like it. Feeling more aware of the straw in my drink as I chewed it to a pulp than the music blasting all around me. So I left. Stepping away from these friendly faces whose names I never bothered remembering, I set out on my own. And for the next three hours, out there on the dancefloor at TV Eye, I danced all by myself. Never in my life had I done such a thing. Never in my life had I even considered it. The idea of going out dancing, and doing it alone, even just a couple months ago, would have felt so pathetic to me. So sad, so scary. Out of reach and certainly out of character. “...Music can be such a revelation…” Because when I finally called it a night and walked down the streets of Ridgewood at three in the morning, I was laughing my head off. Laughing for feeling so good and so powerful. And laughing because I felt so very, very young. Again, for a person like me, that’s a very new consideration. Back home, as I peeled off my socks and underwear all soaked in sweat, I found myself saying, “I had so much fucking fun.” Saying these words to no one but me, again and again, and right out loud. The song was brand new but the lyrics were already stuck in my head.

I fell in love that night. Love or something like it. There was this boy at TV Eye and, try as I might, I couldn’t look away. Far too enamored by the way he was looking at his girlfriend. They struck such a perfect match. My same age or just a couple years older, they reminded me of the people I used to meet at Allston house shows. The guys who scared me and the girls who thrilled me. I was obsessed with my friend Cam and Cam was in a band and, as foreign as this world felt to me, I wouldn’t have missed a show for anything. That was ten years ago now. More than ten years ago. And I thank God that, in so many ways, I’m still that same boy. Watchful and lovesick, and learning so much. Alright, Brian, enough, I kept thinking to myself, forcing my gaze away from this couple on the dancefloor, this girlfriend who was so cute and her boyfriend who was so gorgeous. He had this chin that jutted out just a little and these high sloping cheekbones and lean little arms that looked all the better, all the more honestly muscular, in his punky t-shirt that read Death Metal, Florida across the chest. And he was an amazing dancer. So effortlessly inside himself and giving so much of that, and just as effortlessly, to this person he loves. Always knowing just what to do with his arms and his hands, a smooth rock for “Life’s What You Make It” and a wild springing on “Bizarre Love Triangle,” letting himself be goofy at times, but boyish always, and all of it was just for her. Theirs was a love I could remember. A love I could take with me when I go. And as they looked at each other right in the eyes, leaning in closer and closer, face to face and singing every word, it felt like I was watching a mother with her baby. What they were feeling, this love sensation, must be exactly how it was when we were young, too young to even remember, and feeling so scared, hungry enough to wail out loud, only for some beautiful face, bigger and brighter than the sun, to come along and make us feel better. And after struggling at first to figure out who was who, with enough time, I could see it. He was both of them at once, mother and baby alike, and so was she. Seamless transitions in perfect rhythm. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, forever.

There was a lot I had to do before the day got started. Before Jillian and Lindsay and Lindsay’s husband Cody and their four-year-old son Vincent pulled up to the house, before rubbing the turkey down with butter and throwing it in the oven, before assembling the charcuterie board on the kitchen island after my mother said, in a beleaguered huff, “Okay, I need to get in the shower,” there was writing for me to do and a walk for me to go on. Never one to take a day off, not from my unpaid obligations at least, this day’s 6:15 alarm was just a matter of course. But evidently I wasn’t quiet enough when I crept outside to take some shitty pictures of the sunrise. Before my first sip of coffee, let alone my first written word, my mother and father were both awake. And as my mom grabbed the remote and my dad swung open the dishwasher, the house came alive with the sounds of Good Morning America and clean knives and forks getting lobbed at warp speed into the cutlery tray. Brian Eno’s droning ambience blasting in my headphones wouldn’t be enough to counter the distraction. I used to be a person who could write at cafes or the library, memorably unbothered by the goings on around me, but I’m not that person anymore. Instead, I’ve become someone who writes from the militantly controlled silence of my bedroom desk. If there’s a dog barking in a backyard three houses down the block, not only do I hear it, I’m sticking my head out of the window to deliver a shaming “Shh!” Seated at the kitchen table, smack dab in the proverbial heart of the home, I couldn’t fault my parents for starting their days too. It’s just that there really isn’t anywhere else in the house where I can write. Despite my mother’s ongoing obsession with furniture flipping, traveling far and wide in pursuit of gorgeous, authentically midcentury pieces that bozos on Facebook Marketplace give her for free, I guess there’s never been much thought to this house needing even one single desk. So with necessity proving, indeed, the mother of invention, I hauled a chair from the kitchen table into my mom’s bedroom. And after moving aside some perfume samples and rolled-up ankle socks, and reading a post-it or two written in her signature plain print, I set myself up at her dresser. Spreading my legs as far as they’d go to scoot in as close as I could, I wrote for maybe 45 total minutes as the entire town of Gilford, New Hampshire passed by the house. Old ladies with coffees in hand and parents pushing strollers and college homecomers in their dad’s jackets, participants, all of them, in the annual Turkey Trot 5k. Joining my mom in the living room, the picture of creature comforts in her slippers and terrycloth robe, she flung the readers off her face the second I said a word about the neighbors. Narrowing her eyes at the family just across the street, cheering on all the racers as they passed by, I asked if the one standing next to Lisa was James’s girlfriend. “It’s one of his sisters,” said my mom, case closed. “No way,” I said. “It can’t be. This girl, look—she’s blond!” I don’t think I’ve said a word to James since approximately 2009 and we can barely remember the names of those sisters much less identify them from a hazy morning distance. And yet, we were riveted.

Like a vaudeville act sticking his neck out of the velvet curtain, Vincent slid open the back door and poked his head inside, looking all the way up at his applauding, adoring masses. In a chambray button-up with a cardigan over the top, and these little blue jeans, Lindsay herself would later say that his entire outfit was a size too small. Which, of course, just made it all the cuter. Up until dinner, when I changed into a more presentable sweater, I was wearing a t-shirt that had the city’s circa 1976 skyline gleaming dewy on the fruit of knowledge. I’m Crazy About The Big Apple, it reads. “That’s not the real thing? If I know anything about you, it’s that you only wear the real thing,” said Cody, shocked to hear I didn’t have actual vintage on but a bootleg. First seeing it years ago in an old picture of the actress Sylvia Miles, I could never find the shirt anywhere. All my usual vintage channels turned up dry, as hard as I tried. But then, meeting up with Austin for a movie just a couple weeks ago now, on a specific day that’s always meant a lot to us, he surprised me with something. Untying ribbon and ripping open paper to see that Big Apple I know and love, in all its craziness, printed on a shiny and new cotton tee. Just for me, he had it made. And already it had so much more story than the original, wherever it might be, could ever have. “But I don’t have anything for you,” I said that night to Austin who replied, without a care in the world, “I know.” And to Jillian, Cody said how nervous he was that he’d swoop in from behind at some point today and give her a kiss. “You’re wearing your jeans just like my wife,” he explained. That’s just like Cody. In both of his comments, to me and Jillian alike, he’s showing his attention. Something he does so well. Cody and I have known each other for almost twenty years. Much too soon, it will be twenty years since he started dating our middle sister. Here was Cody, a born and raised New Hampshire boy, welcoming himself to a New Jersey family just as they started realizing how very different this new home would be. An outsider among outsiders. And at such a fraught time in my life. Fourteen years old, I had all this rage inside me, all this sadness, and I was a total prisoner to it. Lashing out at almost everybody while saving the very worst of my hostility for anyone who dared be kind. For far too long, I could only be mean to Cody. I still remember how it felt, the sweet shock of it all, every time Cody laughed at something I said, at things I myself didn’t even recognize as funny yet. But to accept him would mean accepting New Hampshire and that was something I just couldn’t do. Thank God, I can love him now. All the moments when I catch him shaking his head, his asides I’ve come to cherish, and the way he sees our family, as maybe only an in-law can. He’s our witness. And Cody doesn’t miss a thing.

“And then Nana told me, ‘A good man is hard to find,’” said Jillian, telling our mother about a recent phone call with her mother. Nana had already met him but, this past weekend, Jillian introduced her new boyfriend Tyler to our Aunt Patti who promptly reported back, with flying colors, about our family’s newest cast member. And Nana made sure her granddaughter understood just how lucky she is. I don’t know the half of it, and I’m not sure I want to either, but for far too long, I know that Nana was married to an awful man. And while she planned to divorce my grandfather just as soon as her youngest child was out of the house, that empty nest coincided almost exactly with his debilitating stroke and for the next twenty years, Nana didn’t just remain his wife, she became his caretaker. A twist of fate so cruel it makes me want to weep. Something that would be too sad for words if it weren’t for a man named Stan. Not long after my grandfather died, my Nana started seeing this old Jewish guy who drove a convertible and collected coins. He had a tattoo of a sexy lady on his arm and a constant toothpick in the crease of his mouth. For almost a decade, an active and able-bodied decade just as those things were becoming less of a guarantee for both of them, they had each other. It’s secondhand news, never hearing this directly from her, but I believe what I’ve been told—that Nana considers Stan the love of her life. He’s been gone for sixteen years now. In the kitchen, after pouring champagne into enough flutes for everyone but Vincent the four-year-old and Cody the non-drinker, my mom raised her glass and told a story from work. “So, I was telling the pharmacist about the plan for the weekend, how you’d all be here, sharing a little this and that about all of you, blah blah blah. And she said, ‘Everyone’s happy! Right? Everyone’s got something good going on!’” A devout believer that a mother is only as happy as her unhappiest child, our mother has known unhappiness. She’s carried our sadness. Knowing our heartbreak, suffering our grief. I’ve called her crying many times this year only to hear, in a second’s time, the catch in her throat of my same teardrops. The way she understands life, and the pain of it, that’s something I wouldn’t trade for the finest counsel. Raising our glasses, I heard that familiar catch in her throat as she tried to share in something good here, the happiness of knowing her children are happy. But for me, it was almost too much to bear. Suddenly compelled to change the subject and look away, to cast my gaze at something else, anything else, that was any less enormous than the thundering love in our mother’s heart.

Walking down the street in between me and my father, Vincent held my hand. Down on the corner, my parents have a neighbor with three goats penned off on the side of their old farmhouse. At this point, Vincent spends most every Saturday night at Lovey and Poppop’s and the seeing of the goats is one of their many weekendly traditions. Cripplingly homesick as a kid, I can’t even imagine this but Vincent seems to enjoy these sleepovers just as much as my parents do. Anytime I call my mom only for my dad to answer, it’s all he talks about. Abandoning her phone to the living room while she’s down in the garage, my mom will be sanding her latest piece of furniture and breathing in every last gulp of its noxious antique particles while my dad tells me all about the latest visit with their grandson. At wit’s end, Vincent recently said to them, “I’m not Bub!” Short for Bubby, shorter still for Bubbala, all my life my family has called me Bub. And looking at one little boy while evidently thinking of another, my parents keep calling their grandson by a thirty-year-old term of endearment. They usually catch the error and correct themselves pretty immediately but I love it when they don’t. When I get to listen to a story about Vincent only to hear my father call him “Brian.” They have something special, my dad and my nephew. Vincent who also adores Cody so very much. And given how good both these men are, both these fathers in his life, that’s something to celebrate. But still I’ll hope it’s just a phase, just some passing thing that’s recently prompted Vincent to say he doesn’t like girls. Or as he says, in his shockingly strong New England accent, “guhhhls.” The first time that afternoon that Vincent so much as hinted at this, I said, “Uh uh! No! Girls are amazing! Girls saved my life!” And like a cat to the sound of a command, he merely looked at me. Announcing himself with a sing-song “Look who’s here!” as he ran up to the pen, Vincent carried a plastic bag filled with enough carrots and celery sticks to feed the flock but he was insistent about something—the daddy goat needed to eat first. Boasting some pretty buxom udders, what Vincent thinks is a buck could very well be a nanny—but that’s beside the point. Because as I tried making this into a teaching moment, willing Vincent to understand that lady goats are just as deserving of sad, wilted vegetables, I heard my dad say, “It got out.”

Carabiners that usually lock the gate in place were unlatched and during the general distraction of keeping an eye on Vincent, let alone lecturing him on equal rights between the sexes, one of the goats slipped out of the pen. It wasn’t our fault but it was suddenly our responsibility. And as Vincent kept on shaking his bag of food at the expectant goats, attracting them ever nearer to the open gate, a gate that needed to stay open if we had any hope of herding the escapee back inside, I suddenly imagined having to knock on the neighbor’s door and say, “Hi, hello, I’m Brian and Kris’s son? Brian and Kris? From down the street? Yeah, well, we—oh, happy Thanksgiving to you too, yes. Yes. So um, we were down there with your goats just now and uh, well…it’s gone. The goat. Your goat. Your goat is gone.” Thankfully, it had basically cornered itself outside the gate, quivering in the middle of a triangle formed by the fence, an old trailer, and a snow plow. But goats scale mountains. I knew it wouldn’t be too difficult for the thing to sniff out some means of egress and dash off into the woods never to be seen again. Picking Vincent up and plopping him twenty or so feet away from us, I demanded that he stay perfectly still while we tried to get the goat back inside. But for a gently parented child, an order is really just a suggestion. So I just had to say a prayer that Vincent wouldn’t run into the street while I was busy playing the wolf in sheep’s clothing, so to speak, circling around that old trailer to nix at least one of the potential exit routes for this increasingly skittish animal. Gently, but assertively, like the best of shepherds, I crept closer and closer, urging it towards my dad who was still manning the gate. It bolted forward and after a dicey moment where my dad had to lodge the beast in place with his still-recently replaced hip, the goat returned to its rightful quarters and we snapped the carabiners closed. “We just avoided a disaster,” I said, all nervous laughter, finally feeling the throbbing pulse in my neck. Of course, my father was just as aware of how disastrous this could have been. And while his heart was surely beating right out of his chest, just like mine, he looked as cool as can be. Then, and every moment leading up to this, he just did what needed to be done. The good man in a storm. My father.

“How can you sit on the floor like that at 32 years old?” asked Cody, as I colored with his son. I was helping Vincent fill in the flora and fauna of a huge prehistoric scene, less a coloring book than a coloring tapestry, and laying on my side to do it, resting all my weight on one hip. Cody is six years my senior and, by the sound of it, the days of this kind of flexibility are long over. And while I guess I should just be grateful that I can still get up and down with ease, instead I replied, “I’m so out of shape.” The phenotype passed down by my Irish and Polish forebears, by these potato-tilling men of big bones and women of even bigger hands, is decidedly that of a serf. But within my family, as tall and broad as I’ve always been, I’m comparably pretty thin. My mom has spent most of her life on one diet or another and my father was the only one of his brothers who needed his Catholic school uniform in a size “husky.” But with reliably good yearly bloodwork results, they’re both active people who are—thank God and knock on wood—in great health. Living proof that the number on the scale doesn’t mean everything. It’s just that I’ve recently come to know my own number. Never one to own a scale, knowing exactly how damaging that would be for me, I’ve historically relied upon my own yearly physicals to get any idea of how much I weigh. And for many years, give or take a few pounds, I never fluctuated. And beyond my daily walks and nightly Jane Fonda calisthenics, staying trim never required much in the way of over-exertion either. But it seems the time for exerting has come. Because maybe it is my 32 years, or maybe it’s my prescribed SSRI, but after stepping on the scale during a recent weekend on Cape Cod with my friends from college, I could suddenly qualify with a number what I’d otherwise been ignoring in the mirror. “I’m my heaviest,” I said to my family. They didn’t exactly rush all at once to dispute my remark but no offense was taken. Suspecting this had less to do with my actual appearance and more to do with l’esprit du jour of not commenting on bodies. Letting me feel however I wanted to feel right now and, for that, I was thankful. But not for long. Because just as soon as we took our seats at the dining table, my dad took one look at my dinner and said, “Now, that’s a plate.” And finally joining us from kitchen after putzing around just out of earshot, my mom said, “Dang, Brian…” Through gritted teeth, and resisting the temptation to throw my meal promptly into the trash, I told both of them to not tell me that. In their defense, what I was hearing from, I wouldn’t call it judgment. Neither of them ever the type to police what or how much their son was eating. How their daughters feel about this same thing, well, I won’t pretend to know. But what I do know is that at the end of every visit to New Hampshire, I can’t leave that house without my mom sneaking jars of peanut butter and loaves of homemade banana bread into my duffel bag while my dad says, “I love having you around at home and watching you write. And watching you eat!” Though that sentiment from my father usually gets saved for the text message he’ll send me a day or two later, once I’m back in New York and it’s months and months until my next visit home. For that reason alone, I know it’s the truth.

“Who moved the candle?” asked my mom, returning the burning tea light from the center of the table to the empty seat beside me. It was me, I moved it, but I didn’t say a word. I figured it was just a mistake, that my mom set the table intending for this candle on a saucer to be some subtle little centerpiece. So when I first sat down and noticed the flame, barely thinking, that’s where I put it. But now I knew. That seat beside me wasn’t empty, it was Mia’s, and this candle burned for her. This Thanksgiving, Mia would have been five years old. Nothing was ever the same for us, losing her. The grief, this kind of grief, the grief of losing a child, it’s terrifying. That might be the only way I can sufficiently describe it. Terrifying in scope and in impact, in its immense injustice, and in its cruelty. How Lindsay survived this, how she did it, how she continues to do it, how she can make it through even a single day without climbing to the rooftops and screaming her name so loud that every person on earth could hear it—I don’t know. I don’t know. Holidays aren’t easy. But holidays for any parent with a four year old son aren’t easy. Lightly bribing Vincent with a trip to the bookstore if he took ten bites of food, the ploy went to pot just as soon as he said, “I don’t want to go to Barnes and Nobles.” Just wanting to be helpful, my father couldn’t resist concocting forkfuls for his grandson. And as more and more tension gripped my voice, telling my dad to just leave Vincent alone, I suppose I just wanted to be helpful too. But after Vincent reached for his water cup only to knock it over for the third time in a row, all the while refusing even a single bite, Lindsay grabbed him by the wrist and took him to the back of the house to have a talk. It’s a fierce love that Lindsay has for every person in her life, and for her son most of all. But in moments like this on days like today, when the demands on a mother’s patience has to supplant the pain in a mother’s heart, I wondered how it must feel for Lindsay to mourn a daughter while caring for a boy who keeps saying he doesn’t like girls.

For the moment or two that it took me to turn on the lights, stepping into the guest bedroom to take his Facetime, Austin could hear me but he couldn’t see me. “Of course it’s pitch black in that house,” he said. There’s a streetlight right in front of the house but that can only do so much with nighttime in New Hampshire. It’s something else. The night sky so black, so black that it stops being black and becomes more like blue, or green, like a roll of Kodak 400. And in my mom’s defense, guests or not, she does always leave a light on. A lamp in the living room that, guests or not, I always turn off. Visiting a couple years ago now, Jillian woke up the whole house with the sound of broken glass. “I was just trying to find the bathroom!” Jillian told us, adjusting the band-aids on her feet that next morning. “Literally had my arms stretched out in front of me, slapping my hands against the walls. You can’t see shit up here! And then suddenly I ram my foot against something heavy on the ground and the whole thing shatters all over the place. And I still can’t see! Who the hell keeps a vase on the floor?!” It takes getting used to, I guess. Anytime Austin joined me up here, he was just as disoriented by the dark. I told him about my day and he told me about his. That he just got off the phone with his mom and his youngest sister and that I was mentioned at some point, that I was asked for. Moving on to what he’s been watching, half-joking in online speak, Austin said Stranger Things is good as hell “when u don’t got a bitch in ur ear saying it’s not.” Like an incantation, Jillian suddenly appeared. If TV raised us, and it did, it was Jillian who turned the channels. It isn’t the parents who create the culture of a household, it’s the oldest child. That’s my belief. The movies and shows that Lindsay and I watched, the music we wanted to hear, the sitcom sarcasm we each perfected by age five, it was all Jillian. She does it first and then we follow suit. It’s only natural that Jillian was the first to speak to Austin. Seven years ago when we got together at a dive bar in Brooklyn so she could meet my new boyfriend. And once more, here and now, just as soon as I turned my phone around so they could see each other. Excited enough just to talk about Stranger Things, rounding the corner into the bedroom just as he said the show’s title, one happy expression became another as Jillian realized who I was talking to. With such pleasant surprise, her voice like a happy hiccup, Jillian said, “Hi, Austin.” She wasn’t interrupting anything and there wasn’t too much more we had to say either. I saw him three nights in a row to start off this week. At a bar in Ridgewood for my Saturday night birthday party, and again on Sunday to give me my gifts, and finally during some of my last couple hours as a 31-year-old when we met up at the movies on Monday. Gay guys seeing Wicked 2, we were in a predictably fragile state afterwards. But before we went our own ways, before I woke up that next morning to my birthday and its many hours of traveling, I had to let him know something. “For Good” was long over but with just as many tears still in my eyes, I tried to acknowledge the moment. Austin told me not to be upset and I told him I wasn’t. “It’s just,” I said, “Very emotional.” This was a trying year. I almost died, I think. So to have this night at the movies with Austin, to be brought here after everything that’s happened and discover that this is where it was always going to end, it’s almost surreal. Sometimes, I actually can’t believe it. But it must have rang true, so true I can still hear it. Loud and clear, in that voice of his that rings like a bell, Austin looked at me and said, “I’m happy.”

Lindsay said “How about you give Uncle Bub his birthday present?” and her son listened. Lugging something so heavy he was teetering from left to right, like a man on a wire, like a wino, the gift was still wrapped when Vincent said, “Here’s your suitcase!” Lindsay and Cody saw it in a thrift store in a town called Derry and thought immediately of me. Circa the 1950s, per the tag on its handle, it’s a sturdy and handsome weekender that made me think of Julie Andrews leaving the convent. “When the Lord closes a door,” says Julie-as-Maria, at His feet but in the dark, “Somewhere he opens a window.” And stepping then into the sun with her luggage in one hand and guitar case in the other, she begins to sing. Me and Sophie saw The Sound of Music in theaters back in the spring. It was a sing-along screening at an Upper West Side theatre which proved, at times, just as torturous as it sounds. Redeemed at first by an old woman next to us who said The Sound of Music was the very first movie she ever saw in theaters. And then promptly almost ruined by the guy one row behind us who scoffed, “Real cool, ELON!” at the first sight of Nazi-aspirant Rolf. When our audience gave him the satisfaction of their laughter, I almost stood up from my seat to hiss. But when this same guy came in a moment too early on “Do-Re-Mi” just to bark those doh-doh-dohs from the beginning of “Uptown Funk,” thankfully he wasn’t as warmly received. Moving as far away from him as we could during intermission, we were able to enjoy the rest of the film mostly in peace. It’s so special, The Sound of Music. Like a story out of the Bible. A gentle testament to the kind of virtues mighty enough to break ground and move mountains, and all of it housed so neatly within Julie Andrews. When she first gets to the Von Trapp house and runs up that lane, darting at a sprinter’s pace, with a suitcase just like mine spinning all about—it’s wondrous. “I have confidence in sunshine,” sings Maria. “I have confidence in rain. I have confidence that spring will come again.” It was March 22nd, this night at the movies with Sophie. And March 22nd was our anniversary. That day would have been six years together for me and Austin. But we weren’t talking at all at that point. Months had passed and months were still left to come with barely a word between us. Not that that kept me from holding my breath as I checked my phone after the movie. I was barreling downtown from 96th Street with all the same forward motion and all the same uncertainty as Maria’s exit from the abbey—but there was nothing to see. It’s all right that I didn’t hear from him that day. Perhaps that’s exactly what needed to happen. But I did have somebody who reached out to acknowledge it. Sending me a screenshot of Austin’s Instagram Story from that evening, a picture of Barbra Streisand projected on the wall of a living room I knew so well, my mom asked, “Is she singing ‘The Way We Were’ here?” Babs isn’t exactly Kristine’s cup of tea. She wasn’t making an educated guess, asking this, she was saying a prayer. Somewhere inside of her, and somewhere inside of me, just alike, we hoped.

It was time for bed. After giving goodnight hugs to those of us he deigned to hug goodnight, Vincent followed his dad’s lead. Willing to spend the night up here but only if Cody was still the one to tuck him in, the twin slaps of their identical feet got quieter and quieter from the hall before they shut a bedroom door behind them and he’d try to go to sleep. But at the table, we were still together. Usually there’s a child present or significant other, an aunt, a friend of our mom’s from the gym, somebody who gets tacked on to our party of five. Sometimes they’re the buffer and sometimes they’re the foil but, more often than not, I’m just grateful they were there. But here and now, and so unusually, it was just us. Knowing this wouldn’t last forever, I asked them to help me figure out where we used to be. “I was trying to remember,” I said to my family, “Where we sat for dinner. I don’t even know what got me thinking of it, it was a couple weeks ago now. But I started thinking about where we all used to sit at the table.” At first in pieces, and then all at once, we figured it out. “I was to the side of the kitchen,” said Lindsay. “And I was to the side of the TV room,” said Jillian. “Back yard,” nodded my dad, “The sliders behind me, out onto the back deck—that’s where I was.” And our mother, in on her own joke, said, “We always sat in the same places?” This dinner scene wasn’t lost from my memory after all, just lost in the dark, and here was my family to turn on the lights. If anything came as a surprise it was that only half of them remembered where I was sitting. Or, really, how I managed to sit there at all. Built for four, not five, we were too much for the table. So if we wanted to eat as a family, I had to drag my own folding chair into the kitchen. “And that thing was heavy,” said my mom, laughing so hard her eyes were watering. “With the leather upholstery? Right? They were solid wood! Grandma Rita gave ‘em to us, I remember it now. That was good quality shit…” Every night, I parked my seat between Jillian and my father. The corner of the circle with the most to teach me. How to listen, how to take care, how to be the biggest fan. They had so much music for me to hear. But then I got older. Before I knew it, I got older. And while I still have so much left to learn, I think I need to hear it from the mothers now. All the things I didn’t know until they told me, it will fill a book. After dinner, the chair would need to go back where I found it, crammed once more into this narrow, shadowed corner where our colossal television unit almost met the wall. But before the seat went back, I’d go first. If this gap was two feet wide, it was a lot, but there was space enough for me to wedge myself inside, like one of the cows in that Temple Grandin contraption. And once I was in there, I’d stick out my arms to either side and brace them in place with all my might. One arm pushing against the wall and one against the TV unit. I counted to thirty and then, just as my sisters taught me, I stepped forward. And like leaves falling from a tree but in reverse, like getting to rewind the tape and see every flash of gold and red perfectly tuck itself right back into the branches, I took flight. Freed at last from all that old resistance, my arms would soar up in the air. An understanding of whatever isometrics might actually mean could probably make logic out of this. But now and then, I understand it as magic. Like a miracle that was waiting for me every time I stepped away from that humming cabinet of images where I’d been pushing in the dark. From there, all I remember are smiles.

I was too nervous to focus on First Love. With a 45 minute long commute still ahead of me, despite my day at the museum beginning in a half hour, halfway out the door I remembered I needed a new book to read. Craning my neck to browse my shelves, like I don’t already know every book I’ve got, I put off The Oppermanns once again, and decided The Poisonwood Bible will make for a good first read of the new year, and accepted, at last, that Alice Munro is simply too “Canadian” for me. Finally opting for Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, the irony of this choice—somehow, someway—flew high over my head. Perhaps some part of me, the deepest, wisest, most sadistic part, knew what I was doing, picking a novel with a title like that on a day like today. Setting down that book in my lap, too on edge to finish a single page, I looked around at my fellow M train riders on this Halloween morning. I suppose October 31st is just another day for the people of Bushwick and Williamsburg, already spending all their lives dressed up in a costume. Because other than some half-assed cat whiskers adorning a couple cheeks, nobody was going all out. Not yet, at least. Falling on a Friday, this year’s Halloween was primed for an impressive turn out. Not twelve hours from now, the streets and subways of New York City would be a parade of Labubus and Elphabas, of showgirls and shoguns, each of them making their way to a good time. Myself included. And yet, with everything I had, I wished it was already tomorrow. A Friday night plan would usually be a win, let alone on a holiday as high stakes as Halloween. “Suicide hours,” that’s how I’ve been known to describe weekend nights without a place to go or people to be with. But praise the Lord, I had a party to attend tonight where most of the attendees were people I already knew, and knew well. Intimately, even! Because throwing the party in her new apartment was my old roommate Kiera. And sharing in her hosting duties for the second year in a row was none other than my ex-boyfriend Austin.

I lost it this time last year. If it was my heart or my mind, it almost doesn’t matter, just that something broke. And it was all to do with a party. He didn’t have any plans for Halloween, that’s what Austin first told me as we took our seats for Sunset Boulevard last fall, during the strange and daunting season when we tried so hard to stay in each other’s lives. Only for him to reveal a couple days later that he and Kiera were throwing a party at their apartment, the apartment that, two months prior, and for several years before that, I’d called home. He didn’t know how to tell me this in person, but he also didn’t want me to find out from anyone else but him. I would like to believe that, even then, I could see this for what it was. That one way or the other, in keeping it to himself or in sharing the whole truth, Austin was just taking care. Shielding me from the furthest extremes of my own feelings. Surely I could see that. But I couldn’t believe it. So instead I screwed up my eyes at this disbelief and willed myself to see it some other way. In the break room at work, standing in a conference room that isn’t even remotely soundproofed, I called him on the phone after learning about this inaugural Halloween bash and, as always, Austin answered. I was furious. Captive to this torrent of emotion, like mothers with a baby in peril who suddenly find the superhuman strength to lift a two-ton car. But I wasn’t saving anybody with this phone call. Quite the opposite. Desperate for an answer to my question, an impossible answer to an unfair question, I said, “And you’re gonna have fun, that’s the thing. You’ll throw this party tonight and you will have fun. How? Please explain this to me because I can’t even begin to imagine it for myself. How will you have fun?” Hanging up the phone that day, Austin and I gave up the ghost. Barring some brief back-and-forths here and there, and one or two phone calls, and a single face-to-face meeting months later, all contact was halted. We stopped seeing each other and we stopped talking to each other. The party was over.

And despite being a year removed from that breakroom meltdown, things were feeling no less impossible at the museum today. Tongue-tied and hot in the face, I wasn’t just tripping over my words, I was falling all over them. Sentences slipping right out of my hand, sentences I’ve repeated enough times that, if I’m ever an old man with mush for brains, I’ll still know word for word. There’s no phoning in a tour. Or really, there’s no enjoying a phoned-in tour. The work proving so much harder when the energy’s off—and it was. My visitors were bored, I was scattered, and the minutes dragged. None of us, not a soul, wanted to be there. Though, really, where else would I rather be? “I get why people turn to drugs,” that’s something I’ve said a lot this past year. On the days, the many, many days, when solace was nowhere in sight. Days when there was nothing I could do, no one I could speak to, and nowhere I could go that would actually make me feel better. Taking to bed and sleeping it all away not even an option for me, what with the fact that I’ve always skewed more anxious than depressed. So instead, like a fool, a deeply paining fool, it took me thirtysomething years to understand the appeal of unconsciousness. God, how good it must feel. Too good to be true.

With a taste of my own medicine, Jarod said, “Isn’t it all about a change in perspective?” That’s a line I hit him with a lot. Because with Jarod, there always seems to be something. Always with the blocks, the hurdles, the saintly tests of spirit and soul, and one right after the other. And instead of easing his plight with some warm in the eyes sympathy, I’m usually suggesting it’s all his fault. We’ll be on the clock and, in a deservedly fireable offense, I’ll be insisting his life would be so much simpler if only he believed in God. Either that or I’ll tell him, for the umpteenth time, that we teach people how to treat us. That just as soon as he cultivates an expectation that the world will take care of him, it can be life on easy street. A no less offensive notion, I’m sure. Climbing up the stairs to our breakroom, I saw Jarod over by the computers, slumped into a rolling chair and looking at his phone, all gangly angles, like Bugs Bunny with a carrot. And in the time it took me to sit down beside him, Jarod’s face knew a hundred expressions. Whether or not he deduced the one particular person who would also be at this Halloween party, I don’t know. But aware of my plan for the night, and quickly gleaning my emotional state because of it, in typical Jarod fashion, he spared me no sympathy. Saying that if I want to have fun tonight, have fun. That if I fear playing the wallflower, well, then don’t. Ready, set, hello, I’m Brian, how do you know-so-and-so. “Well, yeah, duh, that’s half the point,” said Jarod, hearing my rebuttal that parties so often feel like nothing more than a meat market. Like everyone’s just some side of beef behind a plate glass window, ready to be cut up for their sexiest, cleverest, most gainfully employed and undeniably desirable parts. And I watched Jarod’s face change one more time as he heard me say, “I just feel like I have nothing to offer.” It wasn’t the furrowed brow of disbelief I saw before me, or some clenched frown, nothing pleading or pitying on his face. Rather, I looked at Jarod and all I could see was his attention. Undivided, probing, and true. And when I covered my face, he didn’t reach out to touch me, to comfort me, didn’t utter a single word to dissuade my tears from falling. I couldn’t see him but I knew he saw me. How frustrating I must be. Better than almost anybody, Jarod understands I have something to offer. And he tried. God bless him, he tried.

High up in the air in a Financial District office building, down on Maiden Street, a street name I’d never heard before that’s now, and ever after, a personal favorite, I roamed from booth to booth with Sophie and Sara. This was a couple weeks ago now, near the start of the month, when Sara asked us to join her to this book fair. The coolest girl we know, her invitation didn’t disappoint. “Madonna,” said Sophie, within seconds of us getting to the first booth, directing my attention to her 1985 cover issue of SPIN with a $100 price tag. All told, that was on the cheaper end for this huge array of art books and magazines. All of them phenomenal, all of them out of my budget. But browsing was pleasure enough. Sophie told us about applying to graduate programs and I felt a new pang in my heart with each announcement of every faraway school. Asking Sara if she’s got anything cooking, she shared her idea for a photo series of some men we all know, hard at work. And then, meeting their equally expectant looks, it was my turn. Both of them knew what was going on. That Austin and I are back in each other’s lives. After almost a year of no contact, of boundaries compromised then respected then compromised once again, Austin and I are speaking. Once or twice a week, we even hang out. In the most literal sense of the term, we are seeing each other. And Sara was among the very first to know. She had to be. Now, and then, and every other moment that came before, she’s been rooting for this. Or, I suppose, rooting for me. But knowing what’s in my heart, knowing who was in my heart, there’s really not much difference between the two.

Standing still amidst this downtown crowd, in this carousel of big pants and tiny sneakers, I told Sophie and Sara about the tests that lay ahead of me. On Halloween at Kiera’s, but first at a housewarming that very next week, Austin and I would step back out into the world, together, kind of. I feared true panic would pierce the eyes of all my fellow partygoers at this housewarming just as soon as Brian the Crazy Ex-Boyfriend came a-knocking but Austin said not to worry. Assuring me most everybody there was already in the know. Whatever that “know” entails. Not planning to show up together to these parties, Austin and I, in every way imaginable, would be coming from two different places. And even once we were crammed into those one-bedroom house parties, for all I know, the two of us still might feel as far away from each other as Ridgewood from Clinton Hill. Just two people with a lot of history, sharing in a tentative present, all the while averting our eyes from that still uncertain future. With the stakes further heightened by the setting of these outings. Parties. Our perpetual argument, in the way that most every couple has a perpetual argument, always had to do with us being out for dinner with friends, or at a bar, or at parties most of all, where I felt like he was shining so brightly without ever noticing that I was retreating, silently and sullenly, into the darkest reaches of myself. I had a lot to prove this month. With experience all her own, and with so much care, enough care to bowl me over, Sara said, “Okay, what you need? Is a gameplan. Every possible scenario, write it out. Like, pen and paper write it out. He spends the whole time right next to you, or he talks to other people all night, or he leaves you for a little bit but keeps making his way back, whatever, write out how you’re gonna deal. How, no matter what, you’re gonna stay cool. Even if it’s just telling yourself, like, I hear you, sis, but we can’t go there right now, okay, so let’s just talk later.” And as Sara did the talking, Sophie spoke volumes. Sophie, miraculous and reverent Sophie, had the weight of the world silently on her brow. Which isn’t to say I felt judged, or that I was disappointing her, not at all. Looking at Sophie looking at me, it felt like a prayer.

All finished by three in the afternoon, it was a short day for me at the museum. Getting scheduled so few hours isn’t exactly rare these days but, for once in these lean times, I was grateful for it. And before I left, I talked to Sara and I talked to Sophie. Leaning against the break room lockers, Sara asked, “So, what’s the gameplan?” She didn’t realize this, what with her back turned to where he was sitting, but I knew Jarod was right around the corner from us. And as I side-stepped her questions, answering as briefly as I possibly could, I wondered who I was really fooling here. The night before, as they watched the documentary Harlan County, Sophie helped one of her closest friends clean her clothes. A kindergarten teacher, she dropped off a load at her local laundromat, forgetting completely about a couple crayons left behind in a pants pocket. The wax, in the industrial tumult of the wash, got all over everything before the scalding heat of the dryer perfectly set the dye. One brown and the other purple, almost every outfit she wears to school was now covered, seemingly, in shit. But after enough research, and with enough effort, using a dollar store toothbrush and dabs of Dawn soap, Sophie lifted the stains. That’s how she shows up and she knows it. Just like me, Sophie doesn’t think she’s the best version of herself at parties. And as hard as I’m trying to accept that it doesn’t need to be one or the other, both of us know that what we want is depth, not breadth. Nodding her head, I knew she understood precisely why I was so nervous about Kiera’s party tonight. And yet it sounded purely a matter of fact when Sophie said to me, “She wants you there. They both want you there. I think it will be a really good time.”

Stepping out of my bedroom and joining my roommate Hannah in the kitchen, as both of us fixed dinner for ourselves, she said, “I was hoping you’d come out of your room already in costume.” Still another couple hours until the party started, I may have spent the day preparing for battle, but I hadn’t yet donned my armor. As Hannah already knew, I was dressing up tonight as Joan of Arc. Seeing visions, even if these visions were just Chloe Sevigny’s “Bigmouth Strikes Again” take on the saintly subject matter, I knew how I wanted it to look. Joan feared nothing for God was with her, so she said. And in those last couple days leading up to Halloween, God was with me in Ridgewood. At the first thrift store I went to, within seconds of getting there, I found a dress made of thick canvas material with these vaguely medieval pleats and stitching in the bodice that had it looking like a bonafide cuirass. And best of all, it only cost me $16. And then, shimmying down barely maintained foot-wide paths through the aisles of a mom-and-pop hardware store, not so much stocked with merchandise as buried underneath it, that aforementioned pop helped me find a fifty-foot spool of rope to wrap around my middle. Outside this same store, at some point last spring, I saw a little girl contently reading a book as she sat criss-crossed on top of a pallet stacked 12 feet high with mulch. And finally, just last night, using cut-up cardboard boxes and reflective silver packing tape that he knew one day would serve a purpose, Austin made me the rerebraces for my shoulders. Giving me, happily, the protective shields I needed for the night. And while it would require the sacrifice of their strict status as house shoes, I already had my Birkenstocks to complete the look. That and some embers for burned-at-the-stake finishing touches. Jarod half-joked that this ash I planned on smearing across my face might read a little problematic. “She was French!” I said to which Jarod replied, “Um, there are Black French people!” Et voila. At work that day, and again tonight at a friend’s show, Hannah dressed up as a clown. Affixing these little black pompoms to a white button-up and white culottes, if it weren’t for the perfectly understated face make-up, I would have just thought she was trying out a chic, if whimsical, new look. And chic it was. We laughed as she told me about the Bushwick teens who walked into her workplace, took one look at her, and said, “Okay, aura!” Back inside my bedroom, with my door closed and music playing, I’m so happy I heard it when she said, “Bye, Brian!” Hannah always calls me and Rachel by our names, something that I love so much about her, but I can’t recall another time when Hannah announced her departure like that. That was a first. One of five siblings, I know she has a couple younger brothers and maybe I’m just projecting here but still I can’t deny the familiarity of my feelings. That night, Hannah felt like my sisters.

Getting on the L, I sat across from a guy in a prison jumpsuit who looked at me and said, “You Jesus?” I explained who I was and he didn’t know the reference but that hardly mattered. Because boarding our train car at the very next stop, and choosing to stand right beside me, the hem of his skirt touching the hem of my own, was a man dressed up as Jesus Christ. Of all the things I love about New York City, it’s looking around at people on the train that I love the most. It can be banal, the things I see, and it can be wretched, my heart soaring during the very same commute that otherwise turned my stomach. This subway spectacle, this “porno” of, yes, humankind but really humans of the very best kind: New Yorkers. With Halloween night offering, predictably, amplified entertainment. And while I did look around from time to time at all these people and who they chose to be, Jesus among them, I couldn’t entirely give myself over to charm. Much too preoccupied, instead, with figuring out how I’d have some fun tonight. Some might argue I’d already called upon Jesus that evening, long before he got on at Dekalb Avenue. But Catholic as I am, when I say my prayers, it’s Mary I’m speaking to. Really, I only pray to God for the smaller stuff, for the more trivial pleas and requests of daily life. Often thinking to myself, as if Mary was my mom, “No…she’s busy…I won’t bother her with this…” At breakneck pace, muttered like a mantra, I said one Hail Mary after the other. And to cover all my bases, I came up with affirmations too. Written commandments of how I was going to be. My gameplan. And on my walk from the train, two hours late to the party’s eight o’clock start but taking my time nevertheless, over and over again, I listened as Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark sang, “If Joan of Arc had a heart, would she give it as a gift?”

Before I saw him, I could hear him. Just before I pushed open the door and stepped into the party, I heard Austin laugh. In theatres on Broadway and at bars in Brooklyn, on the platform at Delancey-Essex and from my seat in Regal Essex, I’ve kept an ear out for that unmistakable sound. And here it was. A year in the making. Cleaving a path through the crowded kitchen to praise my costume and kiss my lips, so happy to see me, Austin welcomed me to the party. Needing to lay some burdens down, we went into Kiera’s bedroom where I could stash my coat and Austin could ask me, “Do you want a Xanax?” I said no but not because I didn’t want it. Recently made aware that one shouldn’t mix booze with benzos, I told Austin I already had a couple drinks while I was getting ready for the party. “With your roommates?” he asked, knowing I was never one to drink at home, let alone by myself. No, not with my roommates. Under a strawberry blond wig, wearing a blush pink dress and a tiara so tight it gave him a headache, dripping head to toe in blood, Austin was Carrie on prom night. He was tormented and I was playing the martyr. Go figure. In a brilliant showcase of his ancient wisdom, our greatest living thinker RuPaul once tweeted, “Hard to remain patient with friends who focus solely on their own crucifixion. Get off The Cross, ladykins…we could use the wood!” And as I poured myself some wine, a single glass I’d wind up slowly nursing for the rest of the night, much to my own surprise, it wasn’t a splintered stake against my back that I was feeling. It was my own two feet standing solidly on the ground.

Al, in his latest variation on an annual theme, was a guy who works for Geek Squad. Listening to the run-down of all his different “men at work” costumes over the last couple years, I said, “So: trade?” Austin was reportedly unimpressed by the look’s minimal effort but, as Al pointed out, a lot of attention was paid to the making of his name tag. A $200 bill recently got sent to my mom’s AOL email from people who claimed to be Geek Squad, a scam she only avoided because we, her children, responded to the family group chat in time. “Was that you?” I asked Al. It was good to laugh with him. That housewarming earlier in the month, that first public outing for me and Austin, was at Al’s new apartment. Al who, unfortunately, for no fault of his own, got caught in my crossfire last Halloween. Al was visiting New York, while otherwise living in Ireland, and I remember saying to him, “You better see me before you see my ex-boyfriend.” I could argue it was just a joke but, punctuating my command with the knife emoji, that would just be a lie. One thing or another got in the way and we didn’t get together—but he did attend Austin and Kiera’s Halloween party. And of course he did. Al and Kiera have known each other since high school, they’ve been best friends for half their lives. But I could only understand it as someone choosing Austin over me. Days later, when Al posted some photos from that night, I messaged him, “How was Austin at the party? Did he seem to enjoy himself?” An impossible position that Al nevertheless handled with grace, acknowledging his discomfort while still sending me love. But I was left feeling so dismissed, so hostile, and so totally embarrassed. It’s a wonder Al still wants anything to do with me. But at his housewarming, and here again on Halloween, whether or not I deserved it, he was such a good friend.

After going on twenty-two first dates in five months time, and fishing always from the same highly concentrated pool of arty boys within five years of 30 who had soulful eyes and morally upright jobs, I’ve accepted that the likelihood of run-ins will remain high. Besides, I obviously combed through the entire guest list before I arrived. So it came as no surprise when I made my way into the living room to see not just one but two of my old Hinge dates sitting right beside each other on the couch. Mistaking him for a cat, Steve was a werewolf while Alex was wearing a leather vest, smart slacks, and a sassy bob wig. He was a librarian. But before I joined this gay guy contingent on the couch, I talked to Austin’s friend Cecile who recently passed the bar. I congratulated her but she deflected the praise, sharing just how shockingly low the fail rate is for people who attended law school and speak English as their first language. However, with a noted failure coming immediately to mind, I started telling Cecile about this circa 1990 New York Post with a front page reading “THE HUNK FINALLY DOES IT” only for her to beat me to the punch, already aware that it took John F. Kennedy Jr. three attempts to finally pass. Because once she heard the good news, Cecile’s mother called her up to say, “You did what John-John couldn’t!” Something I’m sure my mother also remembers. With a picture of JFK Jr. tacked inside her high school locker, my mom was always smitten, only to one day give birth to a son who shared his birthday and, in time, inherited her same crush. Maybe, just maybe, in a very lucky past life, John-John and I went on a date.

Describing her once upon a time as “Lisbon sister blond,” Jessica was Kirsten Dunst from The Virgin Suicides. Life imitating my art imitating her flaxen life. Opting specifically for Lux Lisbon at homecoming, with a corsage on her wrist and a crown on her head, Jessica’s long white dress with its trailing pink flowers had a hole perfectly cut away at one hip. Revealing a pair of underwear that had a boy’s name written in a girl’s handwriting. The ‘i’ in ‘Trip’ dotted, how else, but with a heart. When Austin fetched me from the door after I finally arrived, as every prayer and affirmation and deep sip of strong drink was suddenly getting put to task, Jessica was the first person I spoke to. “Haughty” and “droll” and “WASP-weary,” those are some other ways I’ve fondly described Jessica in the past, her rolled-eyes shtick, much like Kiki Dunst, making for something delightfully dark out of someone so fair. But perhaps I tried to reintroduce that old rapport too quickly when I hugged her hello and said, “Fancy seeing me here.” Vim was the intention but I fear my delivery skewed venomous. And as the night went on without much laughter between the two of us, at least at first, I worried my greeting was the least of my concerns. Because even if this was all in my head and Jessica didn’t feel one way or another about breathing my same air, going forward, I know this is something I’ll need to consider. That there are people in Austin’s life who might not care for me very much anymore and that only time will tell if I can manage to change their minds. But soon enough, even if Jessica was mostly telling this story for Austin’s enjoyment, stopping herself mid-sentence, with a huff, every time he turned his back to talk to someone else, I was just happy to be there, laughing at what I was hearing. She was telling us about getting a trim earlier today at this hole-in-the-wall downtown salon that’s recently developed a following for unbeatably priced haircuts. Quality customer service not included. Trying to pay at the front desk, Jessica suddenly felt the nearest stylist grab both her shoulders and, without a single word, move her a couple feet away from his station. To her, this was appalling but I thought it was hysterical. And while laughing at her discomfort was, perhaps, the very last thing I should’ve been doing, with a sense of humor like hers, I trust she understood.

“Can you sit down?!” asked Austin as I returned to my stance at the head of the kitchen table, sipping from my latest refilled cup of water. Evidently it was a little oppressive having a six-foot-four Jeanne d’Arc looming forward every sixty seconds for his latest pretzel or fun-sized Butterfinger. Now seated across from Kiera and her boyfriend, Austin was telling us that after learning about his costume, his boss asked if he was going as Carrie before or after the prom. “Carrie before the prom? So, what, just a girl on her period?” For the life of me, I cannot remember who told this joke. If it was Austin or if it was Kiera, I really don’t know and it almost doesn’t matter, just that one of them said it and the other laughed because of it. More than once during this ongoing preliminary of ours, this trial period, Austin who never cries got upset talking to me about Kiera. After all, despite that boyfriend sitting beside her, Kiera’s couple costume was with Austin. In a bloodied white nightgown, telekinetically punctured with a dozen knife handles, she was Carrie’s mom. Austin loved living with Kiera, and she loved it too, but once their lease was up, she was ready to live alone. Back in spring, Kiera moved out. For almost a year, it was just the two of them in that apartment. And sometimes I wonder if Austin having this perfect roommate, this wonderful friend for a live-in companion, kept him from fully wrestling with the end of our relationship. That there were things he could have realized and things he might have learned if only he didn’t have the distracting joy of someone he adored right on the other side of his bedroom wall. And out of all the things I’ve done in this past year, of all the ugly thoughts I’ve had, I think this might be my ugliest. Because of Kiera, Austin was able to love his life. Because of her, he kept on living. I should grovel at her feet.

It would be a long way back. It took me an hour to get here and—past one in the morning by now, with the party winding down slowly and then all at once—I knew the trains could take twice as long getting me home. But I didn’t care. I had to get up for work in five hours and I didn’t care. My fear, or, at least, one of my fears, was that I’d need to get out before the going really got good. That I’d say goodbye to Austin and tear myself away from a party that was only just getting started, leaving behind an apartment filled with people who were young and alive and employed by a job that doesn’t require working on Saturdays. And yet here I was, wide awake, shutting down the party and among the very last to leave. Meaning every word, I said to Kiera, “Thank you for having me.” Out on the sidewalk, we waited for a car. I really was planning on taking the train but Austin insisted we share a ride, even offering to pay for the whole thing. It made sense. They’d drop him off first and I’d continue on to Queens. Where we were coming from, there was no getting home without passing by where Austin lives. I told him how stressed I was all day, how nervous. I told him that I cried at work. And I told him how much fun I ended up having tonight. Austin listened to my fears and said, “I’m not friends with anyone who’d treat you like that.” I should have known. Lifetimes ago, before anything else, before everything else, Austin and I were just friends. Pulling down his street, a street I lived on for years, before he got out of the car and scaled that stoop, before he washed away the blood and climbed into a bed we used to share, Austin turned to me and said, “You’ll come hang out tomorrow night?” He went one way and I went another and we’d see each other again soon. It didn’t take long for me to start feeling sick. Not from too much drink, or from the many speedbumps down those long blocks of Bed-Stuy, or even the nauseating backseat confines of this sedan. It was from the ropes I’d tied around my stomach. Standing, I felt fine. Seated, they were a vice grip on my guts. I had to take deep breaths to keep from throwing up. But any minute now, as soon as I got home, once I untied the knots and unwound the cords, I would know relief. Standing still in the growing heap of a hundred crowns of thorns, I was about to feel so good.

Completely naked in the reflection of a mirror, though lifting up one leg to conceal the goodies, I took a nude picture of myself in Honora’s grandmother’s house. The mirror was hanging over a dresser topped with these little porcelain ladies in fancy dresses, an old issue of National Geographic, and a crucifix. We did meet at a Catholic college after all—me and Honora and everyone else who was here for a weekend on Cape Cod. Home from Los Angeles for the week, Honora got here first. Sarah picked Kyla up from Logan after she flew in from New Orleans, the two of them getting to the house on Thursday night just a couple hours after Nick and Ashleigh arrived from New York in their rented car. And finally, on Friday afternoon, I joined the party. Had I been in the city, I would’ve just glommed onto Nick and Ashleigh’s road trip to Massachusetts but I was coming from New Hampshire. Spending some interim days up at my mom and dad’s house after the previous weekend’s trip to the Berkshires to visit Cam—my “straight ex-boyfriend,” better known to the broader Emmanuel College community as “Elliptical Boy.” A triangulated New England getaway just as summer was starting to become fall. A time of year best described, for me, as suicidal. People love to love it, this season of shorter days and colder nights and dying leaves, but when I’m walking around on that first evening with the smell of wood stove on the air or the sight of a seven o’clock sunset, it’s true weariness that settles in my bones. It makes me as blue as can be. And it doesn’t help, looking at my nude form in that mirror, that I didn’t get very tan this year. Long gone are the days of finding sunscreen with SPF any lower than 30 and, even then, I swear the bottle I bought had twice as much protection as advertised. My tanlines already blurred by this Saturday in mid-September. And yet it took all I had to say a simple thank you, resisting the urge to ask if he had his ear to the guest bedroom wall, when I finally came down for breakfast and Nick said, “Okay, tan legs!”

There wasn’t any reason for me to have any expectations. Back in July, when Honora first invited me to a weekend at this Cape house, I swear I’d never heard her mention it before. She comes from a big extended family and I knew they were well known in her hometown but had no memory of Honora spending so much of every summer down the Cape. And while it’s possible I was never privy to this lore, it’s even likelier I was just a bad listener. But in anticipation of this weekend, for whatever reason, and meaning no offense to her kin, I imagined the house as something small. Something seaweathered. A cedar shake with low ceilings and mildewy towels where Nick and the girls would cram onto a couple busted-spring mattresses after I insisted I was okay sleeping on the couch. Fearing allergic reaction, I included Benadryl in my trademark traveling pharmacy, just in case. And as I waited on Friday afternoon for Nick and Ashleigh to pick me up from the nearest train station, an old guy on the platform said to me, “Young man, how much does the Commutah Rail to Bawhston cawst these days?” Down on his luck, skinny as a whip, and needing to get to the VA hospital before 5:00, he was shocked to hear it costs twelve dollars, remembering a time when it was only three bucks. Asking me where I live, I qualified my answer with “but I was in Boston for a while.” He’d love to get out of here one day but not while his mother’s still alive. “God bless her,” I said after he told me, “She’s ninety-fawh. And still works! Shahp as a tack!” Giving him enough cash to cover the fare, he waved at me to come in closer, looking both ways before saying, “I gawt a joke fawh ya, somethin’ to tell ya little friends. Whadaya call two lesbians in a clawzit?...A lickah cabinet!” Just then, Nick and Ashleigh pulled up to the curb. And after several minutes of putting on my deepest, straightest voice with him, I greeted my friends with the sissiest “Yaaay!” imaginable.

Giving me the lowdown on what I’d missed, they told me about last night’s conversation topics and the too-heavy pours that inevitably led to tears. It’s not a competition but if anyone has reason to cry right now, it would be Nick. Thankfully, he has places to stay but, for the time being, he’s homeless. A couple weeks earlier, in the middle of the night, Nick woke up to the sound of fire alarms. Living in an apartment building best described as “cursed,” this wasn’t the first time it’s happened. This was, however, the first time he stumbled to his front door only to see thick black smoke seeping in from all sides. Stuffing a tote bag with a change of clothes, he climbed out his window and down the fire escape. This was my first time seeing Nick since it happened, and as he’s telling me all this in a Jersey Mike’s, while French-braided teenaged girls with braces on their teeth made our late lunch sandwiches, try as I might—I was cracking up. It’s a bad habit. A friend will tell me about some horrible thing they went through and, right in the face of their misfortune, I laugh and laugh. Not because it’s funny, or at least not “funny ha-ha,” but because it’s absurd, just totally absurd what can happen to a person. As I once read on a bumper sticker: Honk if you’re in on the cosmic joke! But I suppose that’s different. Finally getting to the ladder that would safely bring everybody down to the street, Nick discovered that it was all tied up and knotted in place with somebody’s old Christmas lights. “So, I yell back to all my other neighbors behind me, ‘Does anybody have scissors?!’” said Nick and, even though he didn’t ask for this, I’m honking away. I hope people understand, I hope Nick understood, where that laughter comes from. That it’s sympathy, it’s heart, as pure and concentrated as can be. But to others, to my friends, perhaps this sounds much less like my heart and a lot more like my head.

Pulling down a lavender-lined driveway, and looking up at a three-story tall house with a two-car garage and a private dock on Buzzard’s Bay, I said, “Holy shit.” I wouldn’t be sleeping on a couch, I’d be sleeping on a bed in a guest room that has its own name. Per the color of its window treatments and bed skirt, Honora told me I’d be in “The Red Room.” It felt like I was staying at the White House or something. Like I was a Kennedy for the weekend. John-John and I do share a birthday, after all. The whole house was perfect. So lived-in and familiar. So grandma-and-grandpa’s. Walnut furniture and overstuffed couches, grand piano and a colossal TV unit circa 2002, with an entire wall devoted to the senior portraits of every single grandkid. “It’s so Scream in here,” I said that first night, something we all admitted, by this morning, had us feeling so scared once we got into bed. As Honora cooked us eggs for breakfast, saying good morning to everyone at quarter to eleven, I noticed the memorial cards tucked into a kitchen cabinet. In 2020, Honora’s grandmother passed away and, two years after that, her grandfather did too. This house is for the whole family now but even I could tell it will always be theirs. In his study, I was browsing her grandfather’s bookshelf, peering through its glass-fronted doors and pretending not to see half the titles, when Sarah joined me. “I love that they let everything stay where it was,” said Sarah, reading my mind. “Like, I opened a closet upstairs and all their clothes are still inside. That’s so nice.” I hardly needed to ask how different this must be for Sarah. Her father died last February, less than a year after a decision was made to move him into assisted living. His transition to the facility would’ve been difficult enough for Sarah to process, with all the logistics and labor it entailed, but then there was the grief of losing him so shortly thereafter. I don’t know how much of her dad remains in the house, not materially at least. But if she had the choice, if any of us did, to push open the doors to all those old shirts and jackets, to breathe them in, to breathe in every last stitch, I’m sure there’s not a closet on earth that could ever be big enough.

We ate breakfast in the sun room. Like the Golden Girls lanai, albeit suitable for Massachusetts winters, it was my favorite part of the house, with a model schooner in one corner and some very 1980s white furniture and a rosary on every side table. And blowing in through the French doors that morning was a cold, cold wind. The sky was clear and the sun was bright but it was much cooler today. It seems I’d missed my chance to swim. Changing into my bathing suit the day before, I really considered it. Figuring I’d follow right behind Sarah who dove off the dock just moments after Honora—only to convince myself otherwise upon seeing their chattering teeth. That and the realization that I’d need to wash my hair. Naturally, Honora was first to jump in. She is the boss. It’s not something especially maternal she offers us—though “Mommy Issues” does seem to be our collective tie that binds—it’s something sisterly. And oldest sisterly, at that. Beating me by four months, Honora is the oldest but I wouldn’t say her command is on account of something so literal. It’s not her age that has us deferential, it’s just…her. The way she always has a question to ask and a story to tell. How urgently she pulls her hair back into a ponytail. The barreling force of her embrace, its collision strong enough, and sweet enough, to knock you clean off your feet. Blindfolded on Boylston, all I’d need to hear were some Birkenstocks pounding the pavement with that determined, slapping gait to know it was her. With plans to spend the afternoon in Sandwich, me and Kyla got in Ashleigh’s car while Nick and Sarah joined Honora. We left before them and yet they got there first. I wondered aloud how that was even possible and at the same time, in the same voice, Ashleigh and Kyla said, “Honora.”

“I hate Massachusetts!” screamed Ashleigh as we inched forward in a tiny parking lot where just as many cars were trying to exit as enter. A situation further complicated by all these slowly roving packs of sturdy older ladies in flip flops and Bermuda shorts. A moment away from Honora jumping in as traffic controller, Ashleigh found a spot and reversed into it, expertly. More in awe of her than usual, I said, “Now, that’s a California girl showing ‘em how it’s done!” Ashleigh heard me, I’m sure of it, but she didn’t say anything in response, not even treating me to a knowing sparkle in her eye. And I loved it. A consummate Taurus Woman. Just like her mother. Just like my mother. Our mothers who—go figure—are so very much alike. We’ll be catching up after our latest visits home and, like clockwork, Ashleigh will tell me “That is so Gina” only for me to say “And that is so Kristine.” It feels good to know there’s someone else who understands, someone besides our sisters. But out of all of us on the Cape that weekend, Ashleigh and I are the only ones with siblings. Somehow someway, we’ve found ourselves in a friend group made up entirely of only children. For the most part, none of them prove too case-study and I’ll show my cards here when I say: thank God for that. If anything, I think it’s most apparent in our silence. Each of us, in our own way, can be very quiet. We have plenty to say, with lots to laugh at, and Ashleigh in particular, when she’s really having a good time, when she’s taken a breath and can really be here, becomes positively hyper. Playful and yipping. Like a puppy dog. But still, we all know silence well. The baby of my family, it’s without question we’re on the receiving end of the most affection. And yet I just as ardently believe that the youngest also receives the least amount of attention. We’re seen but not heard, cared for but not really considered, loved and inevitably left behind. I wasn’t an only child but I was so often the child by himself. And how funny it is to think about each of us setting out at 18 years old in our first stumbling efforts at making a life, at creating and recreating a home, and just how much talking needed to happen before we could finally just shut up.

With a mill built in 1654 that’s still in operation and centuries-old churches flying rainbow flags outside their sanctuaries, Sandwich was like a parody of itself. A variation on the same “Pornographically Massachusetts” theme I’d just experienced in the Berkshires. It wasn’t just any kind of walk that brought Cam and I to Great Barrington’s Saturday morning farmers market, it was a walk down a wooded lane through a forest where Cam routinely sees herds of deer, and Ilana Glazer, and Big from Sex and the City. Catching up with his wife at the market, we sampled some of the briefly-in-season Concord grapes she’d just bought as their toddler ran up to classmate after classmate in their beanies and Blundstones. Cam is a Berkshires boy, born and raised, and in Great Barrington these days—that’s an anomaly. Almost all of the parents at their kid’s school moved to the Berkshires within the last couple years. And, much to Cam’s chagrin, they moved here from Brooklyn. Opening up cute cafes and good restaurants despite the lone hardware store never having what Cam needs and years-long waitlists for the few doctors and dentists in town. I get it. Having lived in Clinton Hill for five years, the indiscreet charmlessness of the Brownstone Brooklyn bourgeoisie is something I know all too well. But what I believe, and what I said to Cam, is that all these ex-New Yorkers driving him crazy are exactly that: ex-New Yorkers. The bankrolled-by-daddy Millennial who leaves New York for the cozy appeal of Western Mass and the Staten Islander who flees to Florida are, in my eyes, one and the same. They found someplace else that feels more like home and that’s where they belong. Of course, Cam begrudging the arrival of all these transplants is really no different from me celebrating their exodus. Cavemen of different tribes, pounding their chests at the suspicious other, no matter if they’re coming or going.

“So, where’s your, like, dream place to live in New York?” asked Honora. After I suggested we go for a walk around the more residential streets, having selfishly seen enough of Sandwich’s “pahk the cah” gift shops, Honora and I wound up a couple paces ahead of everyone else. No sooner than she finished her question, I answered, “I love where I live so much.” It can feel obnoxious sometimes, how much I enjoy life in Ridgewood. I have friends whose apartments face maddeningly noisy avenues, whose first floor bedroom windows directly overlook rat-nest trash cans, with gas stoves that haven’t worked in a year and ceaselessly horny neighbors in the unit overhead. Meanwhile, I share a quiet, sunny apartment with two girls I really like with a bedroom the size of a roller rink in a neighborhood I routinely describe as “amazing” and “hysterical” and “the friendliest place I’ve ever lived in New York” or “no, actually, the friendliest place I’ve ever lived—period.” My time in Clinton Hill was wonderful. It’s a gorgeous, well-manicured neighborhood filled with a lot of gorgeous, well-manicured people. When I first got to New York, living somewhere like Clinton Hill felt like nothing more than a dream. A dream that, much to my surprise, came true. Until that one day, that exhausting and tear-soaked day, among the saddest I will ever know, when I moved away. I really figured that wherever I’d end up next would fall so painfully short but, thank God, it hasn’t. “It’s just exactly why I live in New York to begin with,” I explained to Honora. “It’s the real deal. And funny! Truly kooky characters all over the place. And it’s just so, like, lost to time. At least my part of Ridgewood is. All these shops with fake wood paneling on the walls. Lots of immigrant families but also lots of families who’ve just been there for a long time. I mean, I hear New York accents. You never hear New York accents in New York. Nowhere I’ve lived.” Like the Brian Burns before me, my namesake, I’m in Queens. Back in the borough where my father grew up. I barely notice it myself but I know he’s still got an accent and that it’s strong. And I’m sure that most anywhere I go, down any given street of Ridgewood, if I care enough to listen, I can hear my dad. Honora has been living in California for almost a decade but she’s been ready to move for a while now. Not that long ago, the places she’d mention were just further up the west coast but now she talks about moving back east. Because even though Honora’s still at a point where she can go, more or less, anyplace she might want, she understands it won’t be this way forever. Honora, again, is her mother’s only child. And her mother lives here in Massachusetts. And just like the rest of us, she’s only getting older.

In the backyard of a place called The Brown Jug, we split a bottle of wine and talked about people getting married. Cam boasts the title of having my first “friend wedding” but, a senior when we were freshman, that’s not exactly beyond the pale. But that was back in 2018 and it wasn’t until just last summer that a proper peer finally got hitched—when Juliette married Liz in a stunning sapphic ceremony in Mendocino. Me and Honora and Ashleigh, and Ashleigh’s fiancé John Michael, all attended. And unless someone takes us by extreme surprise, landing an engagement and planning a wedding within the next twelve months, Ashleigh and John Michael are next in line. Come October of next year, we’ll all be flying to Sicily to see them be wed. And I’ll help make it happen. Getting together with Ashleigh and John Michael a couple months ago, she surprised me with a gift bag. Along with a vinyl record of the song that will accompany her walk down the aisle, there was a handwritten card that read, “Before we even got engaged, we would say, ‘One day, when we get married, Brian has to officiate.’ Crazy to think we are there now. Officially…will you officiate our wedding?” Of course I will. It won’t be my first time doing it and—as a gay guy with a clever enough turn of phrase—I suspect it won’t be my last. I was still in college when I officiated my oldest sister’s wedding. But as I stood there at the altar in an Italian restaurant in New Jersey, there were, in fact, no powers vested in me. And no need for it either. A mere figurehead overseeing a conciliatory ceremony, Jillian and Scott had already tied the knot at a wedding chapel in Las Vegas. I wasn’t a justice of the peace but their Elvis impersonator sure was. However informal it may have been, I’m still a little embarrassed by my performance. For starters, I forgot it was my responsibility to tell everybody they may now be seated. Long off to the races with my little spiel by the time all our friends and family, tentatively and then all at once, sat themselves down. And then, in lieu of the classic “I give you this ring as a symbol of my blah blah blah,” I went a little rogue. “Please repeat after me,” I said. “I, Scott, will cherish the thought of always having you here in my life…I, Jillian, hold the lock and you hold the key…You must be my lucky star but I, Scott, am the luckiest by far…And I, Jillian, feel like I just got home, and I feel…” I forced them to recite Madonna lyrics. Of course, the fact that I’m a Madonna fan at all is largely due to Jillian’s influence. She loved that I did this. How my straight, macho, now-ex-brother-in-law felt about this, however, I might never truly know. But we live and we learn and, with any luck, “live to tell…”

Exhibiting some “only child behavior” all my own, I steered our dinner plans away from an old school place called Kool Kone in fear of what its offerings might do to my stomach. Deep fried food does me dirty. Winding up at a comparably-townie bar and grille, I consulted a menu Talmudic in scope only to choose a fried fish sandwich for myself. And not just any fried fish sandwich but a fried fish reuben. An order that surely had each of my friends thinking, He’s gotta be fucking kidding. Jokingly, but only kind of, Kyla considered ordering a peanut butter and jelly margarita. “This feels very ‘bring an item from your culture’ day at school,” she texted us earlier that week, still down in New Orleans. “But would anyone drink hurricane mix if I brought it? Or are we too old?” Not wanting to yuck any yums, God forbid appear any older than I am, I waited for someone else to say the first no before chipping in my two cents. “Despite feeling younger than ever at 31 years old,” I said, “Also no.” Of all the people I know, of all the friends I have here in New York, or in Los Angeles, in Chicago or San Diego or wherever else, I don’t think there’s anyone quite so invested in the place they live as Kyla. She’s always loved New Orleans. Even before she lived there, she loved it. A week or two after graduation, we all took a trip down there where we stayed in an old yellow school bus retrofitted with these groovy beds and couches, permanently parked in the backyard of a practicing witch who never made eye contact or spoke above a growling mumble. And all weekend long, all we needed to do was follow in Kyla’s wake. Showing us around with the earned understanding of a local. And she’s become just that. The work she does, the friends she’s made, the neighbors she takes care of—she’s the real deal. And while Kyla doesn’t think she’ll live in New Orleans forever, that’s not entirely by choice. That wondrous city with its wondrous people is sinking into the ocean and no one else seems to care. In the couple years she’s been in her house, the cost of her homeowners insurance has tripled. And the storms are only getting worse. I’m sure she’ll stay as long as she possibly can, and keep on doing the good work. And that when the time comes to leave, it will be with a deep and true grief. Out of all of us, Kyla might be the most reserved. Fellow observers, watchfully taking things in, Ashleigh and I can be this way too. But there’s something particular to Kyla’s reticence. She’s tough, tougher than us. And she’s twice as tender. Every time, Kyla is the first to cry.

As everyone changed into comfier clothes and congregated in the living room for our last night together, I was squeezing at my stomach in the bathroom mirror. Regretting my dinner not because of gastrointestinal distress but because I didn’t like what I was seeing. Not liking how soft I looked, how much flesh I was pinching between my fingers, and that a pat to my belly caused the slightest ripple from one side to the other. Snooping around all the rooms the night before, I spotted a scale in the master bathroom. “Uh uh,” I said to myself with a kind of strength that, by tonight, had seemed to disappear. Come tomorrow afternoon, we’d all be going our separate ways. And as my friends settled in amongst each other for a good time, their trills of laughter climbing up the stairs, I snuck into that other bathroom and I weighed myself. It was a year since the last time I stepped on a scale, almost to the day. Getting my annual physical just a couple weeks after moving away from Clinton Hill, just as I started really getting lost in the woods. Realizing it wasn’t just difficult trying to stay in contact with Austin, trying to be just friends, but that it might actually be impossible. Already feeling like I was dying, I read the lab results from my physical. My bad cholesterol was through the roof and I had some nucleated red blood cells which are “usually a sign of a life threatening condition.” But aware of what was happening in my life, my doctor was confident these results were just a stress response. We’ll see how my next physical goes. And until then, last September wasn’t without some good news. If nothing else, I was skinnier than ever. When I’m sad, I don’t eat. I can’t. And while sadness may never be far behind, not for me, it has been a while now since I last knew the clawing, cloying stomach that refuses food. Of the force-fed mouth that can’t bear to swallow. My appetite returning is a good thing, it’s a blessing. I am back to life. But looking down at the quivering hand on this analog scale, and noting the fifteen pounds I’ve gained in a year, it was so easy to forget how painful it was to starve.

Crisscrossed on the living room floor and wearing her new pair of glasses, I said to Ashleigh, “You look about 18 years old.” Back when I first met her, she was never without them. And while I can’t remember when she started wearing contacts instead, like Proust with his madeleine, how astounding that this memory of her, this image of her in glasses, will always be with me. Nick and Kyla were also down on the floor while, up on the couch, Sarah was sandwiched between me and Honora. We drank the last couple bottles of wine and I got a little high. Coming to understand that the last thing I needed at a party was a substance that would drag me any further into my own head, I didn’t smoke weed for a while. It was at the college house that the girls lived in, as a matter of fact, where I suffered the single worst high of my life. Late one night, on the warped planks of their front porch, I suddenly couldn’t move. No sooner than I said yes, for whatever godforsaken reason, to a hit off someone’s bong, my feet became cinderblocks. An Allston paraplegic incapable of taking a single step. Everything felt so dark and cramped out there, surrounded on all sides by people whose faces were morphing into their inner child or their inner demon. Which was worse, I couldn’t tell you. But just when it seemed like I was doomed to that porch forevermore, that I’d sooner pee my pants in front of all my fellow English majors than move an inch, I took a brave first step toward the house. And there, in the soft light of their hallway, greeted by the many perfumes of girlhood, I was home free. I felt saved. Sarah found me there in the hall and, in no time, we were doubled over in laughter. Realizing that the human mouth couldn’t possibly utter a series of words any sillier or cuter—any fluffier, even—than “55 Butterfly Lane.” But despite that happy ending, for years now, most anytime I’ve been offered a hit, I’d always say no. Only very recently has that changed and I’m not totally sure why. Maybe it’s just getting older. Or maybe it’s the daily Lexapro curbing my old inclination to see the sadness in everyone’s eyes. But either way, and gladly, I’ll take all the laughter I can get.

All together in the living room, talking for hours on end, it didn’t take us long to arrive at Emmanuel. It’s getting harder for me to remember a lot of people we once knew. Despite our college being so small, or really precisely because of it, I bet we were friends with a much greater number of people than kids who went to schools ten times the size of ours. Or, at the very least, we knew their names. And what with the liberal arts nature of Emmanuel, where I took Intro to the Bible with Econ majors and Spanish I with pothead seniors, there was an orchestrated kind of mixing that leaves me so very grateful. It’s just that I can’t seem to put a face to a name anymore. As the girls, and Nick as well, went down the list of this lacrosse player and that volleyball boy, filling each other in on what the Pratt Street guys are doing and who they’re with and where their hairlines are, I found myself thinking about all the nights I didn’t spend with these friends of mine. Of course there was Shannon, my very best friend of all, who filled so many of my nights with laughter and kinship and a kind of understanding that made her as dear to me as family—but we really didn’t get all that close until senior year. These characters who loom so large to my friends mean almost nothing to me. Not then and definitely not now. So, where was I? Who was I with? How’d I pass the time? And was it any fun? There are answers to these questions. Diaries I could consult, tweets I could track down, and most effortfully of all, old columns I could read. Effortful not because my 21-year-old musings published in The Hub would be painful to read but because they’re nowhere to be found. Nobody’s running the college newspaper anymore and, once they stopped paying for the online domain, my four years of essays disappeared. They’re gone. Over the rainbow, once and for all. And that’s fine. Because as the whereabouts and passersby of these last ten years get harder to pin down, receding ever further into the charred shadows of Allston porches and the quiet, cloudy gleam of nine a.m. classrooms, I can still remember the feelings by name. I was lonesome, but laughed a lot. Virginal, but desired. And so naive that it saved my life. Looking at my friends, at Ashleigh, Kyla, Nick, Sarah, and Honora, sitting around a coffee table at midnight on Cape Cod, this was already a memory, like so many before. Memories that, suddenly, seemed to be taking on a new color. Something richer and deeper, like an amber fossil. Honeygold, forever, where none of us will age a day.

Laying on the beach on a Wednesday morning, flat on my stomach in pursuit of a tanner back, I wondered how I was going to make ends meet. For the first time in years, I’m broke. Summer is always the slowest season at the museum. For most tourists, let alone upper-crust locals, New York City isn’t exactly the most desirable place to wile away the hottest months. Their loss. Never is New York quite so sublimely itself than during the dog days of summer. Something that, at the very least, Europeans seem to understand. Long accustomed to living life without any ice in their drinks, they seem unbothered by the sensual challenges of New York City summers. It’ll be 95 degrees outside and some shivering, bird-boned woman from Milan will whip out a pashmina scarf the second she’s confronted with air conditioning. But nevertheless, she persists—and we’re grateful for her. It’s just that there’s been less of them than usual. Far fewer foreign tourists visited New York City this summer than in previous years. And with a despot in the White House and an All-American Gestapo deporting people off the sidewalk, who can blame them? I could seek out the information and quantify these hard facts and figures but I hardly need to. Not when my already part-time job has consequently become, more or less, a no-time job. If I get scheduled 18 hours a week these days, I’m lucky. Visitorship is down and the budget is strained so, barring lay-offs, cutting hours seems to be the only option. I get it. But rent must be paid. And so, tanning in the sun on one of my four days off from work per week, I considered how I might afford spending a thousand dollars on a ticket to see Lady Gaga.

My goal every summer is to make it to Far Rockaway once a week, aiming my trek for the hottest and sunniest possible day in the forecast—only to park my stuff at a surf-only beach. There aren’t any lifeguards but staffers frequently drive by on four-wheelers to blow their whistles at anyone wading in even knee-deep water. “You never swim?” is something I hear a lot whenever I tell people about my beach of choice. It just doesn’t occur to me. I’ll be roasting on the sand, oil and sweat pooling in my belly button within a half hour of getting there, covered in goosebumps and verging on heat stroke—and it’s like heaven. Growing up in New Jersey, we were at the beach all the time, with Spring Lake being my family’s shore town of choice. A bonafide sun goddess who hardly ever stepped foot in the ocean, I’d say my mom was lucky to have three children who all enjoyed the beach but we hardly had a choice in the matter. Sink or swim, so to speak, I don’t recall my mom packing so much as a pail or shovel to keep us occupied. Also, Spring Lake strictly forbids any and all food on the beach. I’d be sitting on the boardwalk at four years old, eating my tuna fish on a Martin’s roll next to some yenta in hair curlers asking me, “Little boy, where’s ya motha?” Never one to wear a watch and years away from getting her first cellphone, if we were brave enough to ask our mom if we could leave soon, she’d crack one eye open and say, “Go ask the lifeguard what time it is.” And in the world where we either rebel against our parents or become them—here I am, laying perfectly still on a scorching beach for hours on end. Maybe this sounds punishing. But for me, it’s as close as I ever really allow myself to pleasure.

All day, I was looking. There were plenty of re-sale tickets available but the prices were gouged by scalpers to the tens of thousands—and I’m no fool. Instead, I was waiting for Ticketmaster to drop some last minute seats with prices gouged by their algorithm to a far more reasonable singular thousands. I’ve seen her twice before. At MetLife Stadium for The Chromatica Ball and at Radio City Music Hall alongside Tony Bennett for his very last live performance. Betrayed by our bodies and trapped by our brains, that’s what both shows were all about—intentionally or not. Gaga beginning her solo stadium concert entombed within this massive brutalist structure, equals parts couture and crypt. Fifty-thousand people were screaming her name, totally losing their minds, and she’d barely moved an inch. But liberation, in time, in song and in dance, in one “hands up!” after another, would soon come. A kind of release that, try as she might, just wouldn’t be found that night at Radio City. Looking perfect and sounding phenomenal, right at home in this genre at that venue in our glorious city, Gaga was amazing. A hometown girl warming up the stage for one of the ultimate hometown boys. In the oral history I recorded with my father, my own New York City man, I asked him for his favorite song when he was little and he said, “It’s one of those things where you got the Rolodex in your brain and it comes forward and it’s laying in the bed at my grandmother’s house in Brooklyn and hearing Tony Bennett sing ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco.’” It was one for the books, being there that night, like I was fulfilling some sort of prophecy. Watching Tony Bennett sing “...can’t be bad to feel so good, never felt quite so sunny that I keep on knockin’ on wood…,” his hand leaning all the while on the piano, I felt such reverence and love from the crowd, and so much history. And so much worry. I think every person at Radio City had the same fear that night—that standing up there on stage, he’d get lost. But ever the good Italian-American Girl, there was Stefani, helping him on his way. I saw both these shows with Austin. Most of the pictures of us online have been hidden for a while now and I don’t fault him for doing that. And I guess it’s fitting that, if you scroll down far enough, one particular photo still remains—two boys in evening wear smiling on the corner of 50th and 6th before a marquee that reads, “One Last Time.”

Climbing the steps to the Beach 67th subway platform, barely three o’clock but already homeward bound on account of unexpected clouds, I refreshed Ticketmaster to discover some newly dropped seats. There was a teenaged girl up there waiting for the next train and, playing out loud from her phone just as I walked past, I heard, “...I can see you staring there from across the block with a smile on your mouth and your hand on your HUH!...” God is a Little Monster. And so I did it. Despite more money going out these days than coming in, and even though my rent was going up by fifty bucks a month that very next week, I had to. Knowing, already, that it was more than worth it. While I refuse to share just how much I spent, I will say that a quick Google search informed me this ticket cost 4% of my total yearly income.

Years ago, coming up with a title for a memoir, for an essay collection that existed solely in my head, I decided on Thrift: All The Money I Never Spent. And fittingly—the buck stopped there. I never did anything with it. Examples of my penny-pinching are legion so, of course, I could still write that book. As recently as this February, when I was on week six of The Artist’s Way, a week that’s all about recovering a sense of abundance, my answers to a prompt titled Money Madness were as follows: “Money makes people detached, selfish, harsh, and meanspirited; In my family, money caused big, undesirable changes; I’m afraid that if I had money, I would be punished.” And yet, much to my own surprise, as the year went on, this tumultuous and transformative year, I became someone who spends his money. It’s not cheap to be single. All my living expenses have just about doubled. Then there was furniture to buy, and picture frames to purchase, along with hangers that all matched and sheets that wouldn’t feel too hot or too cold in the night. And this is months and months before I’d start going on dates, splitting the bill 50/50 with boys who just pulled out their American Express. Not to mention the priciest breakup expense of all: losing my mind. Weekly sessions with Liza my therapist, I can justify. But the life-saving decision to delete social media from my phone came at the greater cost. To fill my scrolling void, I shopped online. Offering two less dollars than the listing price for a pair of vintage 550s or a Lourdes, France novelty shirt and feeling such a giddy thrill whenever some 19-year-old Depop seller accepted my bid. It’s possible I just swapped one fix for another. Or maybe I’m richer for it. Because I might be throwing money out the window but, all too recently, that window was closed.

One stop on the M train at a time, more and more people came aboard who were clearly off to see the same wizard. Black on black, with lots of leather and lots of lace, everyone appeared in step with the general gothcore of Mayhem. A lesbian couple got on at Seneca Avenue with the femme partner in a little dress, wearing a veil that fell down to the bouquet of black roses in her hands, while her butch other half had every inch of visible skin lacquered in devil red Halloween makeup. I’d argue I was the least conspicuous of all, in my trucker hat and little black running shorts and Asics sneakers. Though maybe one look at my Bette Davis t-shirt with WHAT A DUMP printed down the front was all it took for my fellow riders to know jussst where I was headed. The last time I went to Madison Square Garden I was wearing this same shirt, coming to see Madonna on her Celebration Tour. We were in the second row from the end of the runway, with super-agent Bryan Lourd seated right in front of me, and when she eventually called him out from the stage, when she stood directly in front of us and said “Bryan,” I barely needed to pretend it was my name Madonna just said out loud. She’s my number one, of course. Her presence and influence in my life already reaching titanic proportions by the time I was in the ninth grade and a certain pop star came on the scene.

Every new song of hers, I loved more than the last. Ripping her VMAs performance of “Paparazzi” off YouTube, I played that during every shower I took for about a year of my life, as loudly as my rinky speaker in the bathroom would allow. And when I listen to Born This Way, every track, from start to finish, possesses a kind of feeling so specific and so vivid and so true that it actually hurts. And yet, all through high school, I didn’t have a single nice word to say about Lady Gaga. I remember my mom hearing “Bad Romance” for the first time on the radio only to look at me and say, “So Madonna…” Further fanning her flaming son’s fires. It’s never been easy, being a Madonna fan. She has objectively changed the world, and subjectively for the better, with her principles and sanity and sense of humor remaining so steadfastly intact. And while there is a growing reverence for her among this newest generation of pop stars, not too long ago, that was not the case. In fact, it was just as Mother Monster was making a name for herself, elevating her pop shows into theatre and exhibiting once-in-a-generation star power, that Madonna had become a joke. And so I drew a line in the sand and picked my side. What a pity. At the time, I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything too specific, or too tangible, in this public denial of my affection for Lady Gaga. But now, looking back, I think I missed out on more than I could even imagine. Out of the closet to all my friends by freshman year, I was one of maybe five or six gay guys in my high school but I was never very nice to any of them. And it’s possible they could have been such good friends to me, that for all I know they could’ve changed my life, but I wasn’t ready for that. Besides—they were all Little Monsters.

It was just shy of 8:30 when I shimmied my way down row 11 of section D where my seat was the only one still empty. It almost felt wrong, seeing such a fully assembled audience only thirty minutes after doors opened. But, once again, I am a child of Madonna—queen of the eleven o’clock showtime. People love to hate that about her, this diva behavior and its supposed lack of consideration for all her concertgoers. But I’ve always figured that the earlier something starts, the sooner it has to be over. I’d barely made contact with my seat when I heard someone say, “Are we dancing?” It was a question asked with so much urgency, and with such brash expectation, that I didn’t think it could possibly be directed my way. Figuring this person beside me, all instant familiarity and New York accent, must’ve been talking to a child, or a gay best friend, as if those two things are all that different. But turning toward this brunette in her sequined high heel boots, she was looking me right in the eyes when she said, “Well?! Are we dancing or what?” Her name was Nicole, she’s from Long Island, and this was her third time seeing The Mayhem Ball. “And it’s awwwll thanks to him,” she said, jerking one thumb in the direction of her husband, the vestiges of pop-punk teenage years still evident in his black hoodie and pierced eyebrow. “We’ve got three kids but he works hard enough so I can stay home and, duh, come see Gaga. It was our dawwwghter’s ninth birthday last week so, come on, had to take her for that. And then we wanted to go on our own, just the two of us, so we had those tickets too. And then today, I, uh, ‘accidentally’”—missing everything but the vaudeville hook, Nicole winked one huge eye at me—“bawwwght these tickets. I was just looking! My finger slipped! Oops!” I assured her I would definitely be dancing and was happy to hear she’d be doing the same. So pushy she interrupted her own sentences, Nicole was talking about other concerts she’s seen recently when, suddenly, she asked, “How old are you?” She could have asked, “So, how lawwwng’s it been since the last finger up ya butt?” and I would have felt less taken aback—and more eager to share. I’ve just become so accustomed to the bruising reality of people thinking I’m so much older than I am. And it shouldn’t bother me, I guess, not when I spent so much of my life wishing for exactly this. Refusing to dress up for Halloween as early as the third grade, and using curse words before any of my friends, and even, again, with the Madonna worship. Willfully setting myself apart from kids my own age in hopes of growing up as fast as I could. To be forever wise beyond my years. Only to catch up to this supposed wisdom and find myself looking so much older for it. But whatever she might have thought, whatever age she may’ve pegged me for, Nicole seemed nothing but excited after learning we’re both 31. With a finger snap, she said, “Nineties babies!”

All around me, and all at once, thousands of gay guys screamed, “She’s putting down her pen! She’s putting down her pen!” Leading up to the lights finally going down, Lady Gaga is projected up on screen, writing something with this big red feather quill. Until, at last, she sets down that plume and the show begins. The show, indeed, had begun. And as Madison Square Garden erupted with screams and applause, appearing once again on those massive screens to read us what she’d just been writing, there wasn’t just one Lady Gaga up there but two. One dark and the other light, a brunette in stiff red garb and a blond in a flowing lace dress, speaking from opposite ends of the stage to each other, at each other, despite each other. “The Mistress stands before me, eyes wide, and full of wrath. Her cane held in her right hand, on her left foot, a cast. ‘Beware,’ she says, ‘The chaos in your heart will never cease, until you find another way to harness what you seek.’...To not know any peace is the great nightmare for us all. To wake, and feel unsettled, in a house that has no walls. So I must sing, and build the walls to cradle my own space, and my own sound will build the fortress of a home erased. And her and I will find a way to live as dueling twins. But I will know, if in the end, Mistress of Mayhem…wins.” And amidst the plunging drone of an organ, blood red lights reveal this massive set piece up there on stage, an opera house of empty box seats suggesting a ghostly audience staring right back at us. And as velvet curtains draw back, we see a towering crimson gown, looming ever closer to us, its bustle as big as a house, and standing atop it all, just as massively—Lady Gaga. Standing on tippy toes to tap my shoulder, Nicole yelled, “I can’t see shit!”

We should all be so lucky to experience a performer at the peak of their powers. To catch them at that rarefied moment when good work and keen vision in a strong body can deliver every godly detail to an adoring mass. There have already been many peaks in Lady Gaga’s career, with more to come, but watching her that night, I felt certain that this was the best pop show I have ever seen. The best pop show I might ever see. For two and a half hours, I sang and danced and screamed, at one point I even cried, but most of all—I laughed. Worried at times I’d catch the evil eye from my surrounding fans for laughing as hard as I was. The girl is hysterical. Of course, she’s dead serious, about most everything, and always has been. Reverent, studied, meticulous. She is an Aries. But that’s the thing. It’s not despite her earnestness that she’s so funny—it’s because of it. And to think she’s been at it almost twenty years now. It’s hard to believe. Even when the setlist threaded every needle of these last two decades. “...Promise I’ll be kind but I won’t stop until that boy is mine…She’s not broken, she’s just a baby…It’s been two years since I let you go, I couldn’t listen to a joke or rock ‘n’ roll…Ich schleiban austa be clair, es kumpent Madre Monstère…Enigma popstar is fun, she wear burqa for fashion…Head stuck in a cycle, I look off and I stare…” Every chance he could, the guy next to me would storm the aisle to cram himself right up near the stage, and I followed right in suit every time. Security guards would eventually show up to bark at us, ushering us back to our seats, only for them to return to their stations and all of us to promptly return to the aisle. For most of the show, I was second from the barricade, right at the very end of her runway. I prayed for this. Before I left for the beach that morning, I said a prayer for Lady Gaga. That I’d find a ticket and be able to see her. And like heaven on earth, here she was. And while my heaven may have been on account of her hell, delighting in the art of her personal chaos, at least it was a darkness I recognized. A darkness I’ve even come to know by name.

For Gaga, her name is Mayhem. In the music video for “Disease,” she’s chasing her down from behind the wheel of a car, desperate to kill her dead, showing up once again in “Abracadabra” to demand Gaga dance for her life. And as that opening manifesto promised, she plays a central role in the concert as well, this time as The Lady in Red. Leaning her rickety weight on a cane, like a spider dressed all in lace, she orbited around Gaga all night long, taunting her, testing her. Torturing her. Just like Gaga’s larger than life costume from the start of the show, the Lady in Red is also in a bustled dress—but, as she’s wont to do, it’s been cut down to size. No matter the form she takes, she’s here to remind you that you’re nothing. That you are no one. For months now, I’ve been aware of this character, this manifestation of Gaga’s darkest shadows, the lyric “...like a poem said by a lady in red…” long ago rendered a meme by my milieu of online gay guys, but it was only now that I finally saw her for who she is. During an interlude in which the Lady in Red gets chased around the stage by two dancers wearing—wait for it—huge, billowing nun habits, I thought to myself, Holy shit…she’s my Old Sicilian Widow…

Come to think of it, maybe I don’t know her by name. She doesn’t occur to me as Rosaria, or Giulia, not Elena or Chiara. Rather, as she limps around my head in a black dress and a black veil, with scorn and suspicion in her hundred-year-old eyes, hunched over and peeling a potato, it’s plain and simple. For me, she’s just The Old Sicilian Widow. She’s been with me for years now, for all I know she’s been with me all my life, but only in adulthood have I come to see her so clearly. This glum dark cloud who, go figure, always shows up for joy. Because I’ll be at a dinner table, or at a party, or out at a bar, watching a parade or attending a concert, surrounded by the smiling laughter of strangers and loved ones, when the clapping smack of her sandaled feet start getting louder and louder. And swatting flies away from her grimacing, ancient face, here she is to say, “Uh uh uh! Not so fast!” Such sweet and simple happiness isn’t for me to know and I better not forget that. And it’s not just that she appears to me, like some floating specter of Catholic gloom. I am her. A friendly word can be all it takes to land among the living, I know that. When I’m at that party or at that bar, it wouldn’t cost me a thing, not a dollar, to reach out and touch somebody. But how on earth am I supposed to do that with a potato in one hand and a knife in the other? “But you love her, don’t you?” asked my friend Sophie, after first hearing about my Old Sicilian Widow. And without a second thought, I said, “Oh, I love her.” Because it’s not punishment I get from her, it’s protection. When we cast our beady gaze on everyone else’s good time, we beat life to the punch. Stingy in the face of all that stupid abundance. It’s not that I don’t have anything clever to say, she assures me, it’s not that I’m strange, or unlovable. It’s that I’m better. Our Ladies of Pity, above it all—and all alone. Nameless as she may be, I have always understood her as a widow. She knew love, and then she lost it. She wasn’t always by herself. And lately I’ve been thinking that I don’t need to be either.

No sooner than Gaga finished singing about a God who makes no mistakes, willing all us subway kids to rejoice our truth and know we’re beautiful, the Lady in Red descended from on high for her last judgment. Finally face to face with Gaga to play this deciding game of chicken as she sings, hysterically enough, “Million Reasons.” But it’s not a fight to the death. They’re not enemies after all, they’re each other. “Why don’t you stay?” she sings, in an amended final lyric. “Stay.” And when a gothic row boat suddenly rose from under the stage and Gaga stepped into it alongside the Lady in Red, holding a lantern to light their way, it took all I had not to Facetime my therapist.

It was near the start of this year, during some of the darkest days of my life, when I first put it down in words. It came to me fully formed. Like something out of a lucid dream, or a movie watched so many times that every word had long been committed to memory. Back in bed to write my Morning Pages, I said my goodbye to the Old Sicilian Widow. I saw us on a seashore, all rocky and windswept, uninhabited and uninviting. Maybe she really didn’t know what was about to happen, what I was about to do, but when I take her in my arms for a parting embrace, she screams. Freeing herself, my Old Sicilian Widow smacks me across the face and lands these hard, mournful blows upside my head, clawing her nails at my cheeks and my neck so viciously I bleed. And even once I manage to get her back in my arms, she can’t last there long. But still I kiss her, wherever my lips can reach, I kiss her. And as I turn my back and she pelts me with stones, I walk toward a row boat eddying at the water’s edge. Stepping inside, I find my balance and I begin to sail away—but not without a final look back. Fallen to her knees, The Old Sicilian Widow pounds at her chest, pounding to dust an already broken heart with a kind of grief that maybe only a mother can fully understand. And while I wave goodbye, she wails and wails and wails. Her voice may give out but she won’t. Petrifying into driftwood before she ever takes her eyes off me, still searching long after I’ve become some speck on the horizon, long after I’ve completely disappeared. It made me cry, writing this. And I cried again at that week’s therapy session. That the Old Sicilian Widow exists so vividly in my mind was striking enough for Liza, let alone that I could conceive such a lived-in farewell. Nodding her head for a moment, silently, Liza said, “So, you have this goodbye and you make this choice to leave but I’m wondering—have you considered the possibility that she could still be with you somehow? That maybe this woman also gets on that boat?”

There in that hallowed hall watching that boat sail away, as I stood in joyful communion with 20,000 other people, it may have been Lady Gaga singing “...we’re far from the shallow now…” but, oar in hand, it was the Lady in Red steering their course. Liza’s question, evidently, has also crossed Stefani Germanotta’s mind. Can we suffer hunger but also stomach abundance, bearing all our sorrow alongside all our joy, and somehow find that way to live as dueling twins. And the answer, the only answer, is that we must. Either we live as those twins, finding some quiet place on that faraway shore where our beautiful crones can finally lay their burdens down, or we’re really not alive at all. As Lady Gaga said, at the top of the show, “Category is: Dance or Die.” Her final encore begins with a live camera feed showing us Gaga in her dressing room, wearing a tank top and a beanie, with a washcloth to her face. This pop phenom whose artistry is all but inseparable from her costumes and her wigs, whose recognition was built on artifice, is taking off her makeup. Making her way through the bowels of the arena, when she finally takes the stage, she’s alone. Her dancers will join her soon enough but, for now, it’s just her. Barefaced, and naked as a newborn, but no less a superstar. She looked so happy. Like someone lost at sea for God knows how long who, at last, spied land. Leaving the show, a show I wish could go on for another two-and-a-half hours, a show I wish would never end, I thought about all the people in my life who needed to know all about this. How excited I was to try and convey this masterclass in performance to Ashleigh, and Shannon, to Krista, to my mom and dad, and maybe even to Austin. And how tomorrow, at five o’clock, I’d get to tell Liza all about Lady Gaga getting on a boat with her Lady in Red. Liza’s last name ends in a vowel. And back on that day when I first told her about the goodbye to my widow, before I left her office, I asked if she was Italian. With a laughing smile, Liza said, “Sicilian.”

How did I ever do this, I wondered, making my way to a high school in New Jersey for the eight o’clock bell. A 31-year-old about to attend his first day of freshman year all over again. This was the same school my sisters attended, and I would have gone here too, if only our family hadn’t moved my summer before the eighth grade. Freehold Township. It’s got more kids in each graduating class than the entire student body of my New Hampshire high school. My New Hampshire high school that had, as I recall, one Black student, one Jewish student, three or four gay guys, and twice that number of straight boys who drove to school with a Confederate flag tacked to the back of their pick-up trucks. And yet—and I really believe this—I probably had an easier time coming of age up there than I would down here. Of course, there were boys in New Hampshire who made fun of me but at least they had dirt under their finger nails and lived in actual rural poverty. Compared to all the Anthonys and Dominics who would’ve called me a faggot from inside their BMWs as they peeled out in pursuit of the nearest RetroFitness tanning bed, it’s a kind of homophobia I can almost respect. But so much has changed, I told myself, and maybe the boys of today have evolved with the times. Maybe the prison of New Jersey masculinity isn’t quite so gaudy in its gilding anymore. And here’s my shot to do it all over again. Youth not wasted on the young but recompensed to the older and wiser. It ain’t over til it’s over. And so, all gloss and promise, like the morning sun, like dew, I pushed open the front doors to this high school and said to myself, “I think I’m gonna do the spring play.”

Cracking up on my living room couch, Krista said, “Okay, I really thought you were about to say, ‘I think I’m gonna meet somebody.’” It was a Sunday morning and I was telling her all about this dream I had last night. Considering just how often I’ve called myself a lifelong learner, I was always, in reality, a lazy student. Case in point, whenever I have the occasional dream about school, I’m never stressed about an assignment I didn’t complete. Rather, it’s usually my last week of senior year and I’m feeling sad about the merciless passage of time. It’s over? Already? That sort of thing. But this night’s dream—this was different. This wasn’t some bruised pang over paths not taken, this was a do-over. A rebirth. A Never Been Kissed. And lazy as I am, I’m bright enough to clock the conscious inspiration behind all this. Sitting there on the couch with Krista, both of us drinking coffee and feeling more than a little hungover, it was the last day of her week-long visit to New York. The initial plan was that she’d stay with me for three or four nights and find a hotel for the remainder of the stay. Historically, I haven’t proven to be the accommodating type. As I said to Krista, when she first proposed this visit, “Being a more hospitable person is a legitimate life goal right now so A) take that as an indication of my previous behaviors re: hosting and B) help me become a more gracious person and plan on staying with me for at least a couple of nights.” In a testament to either her saintly goodness or just a rabid desire to spend some time in the Big Apple free of charge, against all odds and reason, this didn’t scare Krista off. Reading those texts, she replied, “Woo!” And all told, once more against all odds and reason, she never ended up going to a hotel. And Krista wasn’t just staying in my apartment, she was sleeping with me in my bed. From sun up to sun down, in constant company, with nary a lull in conversation, we were together. Laughing and talking, talking and laughing. And to think, not even a week ago, I met this girl for the first time in my life.

Walking home from the M train back on Monday evening, with Krista already waiting for me out on the stoop, her flight from Honolulu landing at LaGuardia just a couple hours earlier, I prayed to God that she and I would get along. Please, God, I said, Please. Following each other online for the last eight years, I was confident in Krista’s character. Sunny, soulful, goofy, and blond, she’s like a living embodiment of that Gwyneth Paltrow quote about finding the balance between tofu and cigarettes. Because while Krista may believe sunscreen is worse for our general health than unmitigated sunshine, she also loves a cold, crisp Diet Coke. She worked for a resort in Big Sur for a while but now she lives in Hawaii with her best friend. And at the same time that she’s this latter day flower child, eclectic and wild on the wind, Krista also spent a recent year living at home to help take care of her mother. She has MS. As Krista would eventually tell me, “She hasn’t left her bed in eight years.” And though we’d never met, Krista had met my best friend—twice. First when they were both living in central coast California, and once more when they were in Idaho at the same time, Krista got together with Shannon. I remember loving this so much. This merging of my worlds. And in a way, in a woo-woo way, by getting to know Shannon, Krista got to know me. But it’s not like Krista was here in New York to see me for a dinner and some drinks, for some one-night-only banter and pathos. And all I could do now, with a sign of the cross, was hope for the best. At my doorstep, alongside her luggage and a vase of flowers she’d somehow found the time and the means to arrange, Krista saw me coming. And colliding into an embrace, before either of us said a word, we were laughing.

Krista cut into a rotten apple, but I had another to spare. Tightening the purse strings while we still could after eating out for basically every meal, we opted for breakfast at home on this final morning together. A Honeycrisp and some peanut butter would be just fine, Krista said—knowing already I had plenty of that to spare as well. “Yeah, I opened your kitchen cabinet yesterday and was like, ‘Okay, wow, so he’s a little OCD when it comes to peanut products.’” At that moment, I had three open jars of Teddie’s, a couple roasted variations for snacking, and no less than six bags of Trader Joe’s peanut butter-filled pretzels. I used to be allergic until I decided I didn’t want to be anymore. In the eighth grade, without any medical supervision whatsoever, I started doing this thing where I’d come home from school, put some peanut butter on a Ritz cracker, and eat it. If my throat swelled up enough to make it hard to breathe, or the inflamed bridge of my nose started compromising my vision, I’d just pop a Benadryl and feel more relaxed than usual for Oprah at four o’clock. And voila, a couple months later, I was packing peanut butter and jelly for lunch. Overcoming anaphylaxis through my sheer force of will. As simple as that. If only it could all be peanuts. This willpower of mine, it’s something Krista admires, something Krista wishes she had more of herself. Telling me, “I can’t think of anything I’ve done every single day except for, I don’t know, coffee. And joyous laughter. And, like, texting.”

With three new voicemails from my mother, each of them left one right after the other and amounting to six total minutes in length, I asked Krista if she wanted to hear them. It should go without saying but: we’d done plenty of “mom talk.” Getting dinner at a place called Hellbender a couple nights earlier, right there at the table, I cried at a story about her mother’s health and she cried over a story about my mother’s heart. Quoting for Krista a line from one of Annie Ernaux’s books, a line I’ve long committed to memory: “I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.” My mom called to tell me about the weekend. It wasn’t just her grandson’s 4th birthday party yesterday, it was also her first time meeting my oldest sister’s boyfriend. The relationship is still new, but it’s pretty serious, and we’re all so excited about it, so excited for her. But it wasn’t ten seconds into the first voicemail when I realized we weren’t getting what I wanted. My mother exists as such a character in my life, and in my writing, and for good reason. Hysterical and irreverent and mighty, she’s a titan. And she’s a person. More than once, after finally getting to meet her, I’ve had friends say she wasn’t totally what they expected. Not that she wasn’t as funny as they hoped, or as bold, or as glitzy. That’s all surefire. Rather, it’s that she can also prove pretty serious. And it’s not that she even had anything negative to say about the weekend. It wasn’t anything she said so much as how she was saying it—seriously. Sitting there beside Krista, I felt like she was looking through my cabinets all over again, and finding all this stuff I usually keep just for myself.

On the train and headed to Broadway for our 3:00 matinee of Death Becomes Her, I let Krista look through “my roster.” It’s a photo album on my phone dedicated to, at that point, the twenty first dates I’d been on in the last sixteen weeks. The majority of which have stayed exactly that: first dates. But after carefully selecting their most flattering Hinge profile picture—for reasons both charitable and self-serving—even the one-and-onlys live on in perpetuity as screenshots in my phone. Screenshots that my friends and sisters and barely acquainted strangers can ogle over. It’s fun to note the patterns. The guy everybody agrees is cutest. The guy everybody agrees is hottest. The Bushwick boy with the joint in his mouth who makes everybody laugh. And the one with the round glasses and brown messy hair that makes everyone say, “Well, yeah…duh.” It’s fun going on all these dates, of course. But what I really like best is talking about them. Like maybe that’s the whole point right now. Not to find some perfect match but to pause Krista’s swiping long enough to say, “So, this guy—we’re out on the sidewalk afterwards? Having a little kiss goodbye? And all of sudden we hear this lady next to us say, ‘Oh, I love this! I love your love! Look at you two! I am okay with this! Yes! Now, listen—can either of you help me out and spare some change?’”

Of all these get-togethers, there’s only been one disaster. A date that left me feeling so mad at myself for not recognizing all along just how wrong this person was for me, wrong even for just an hour or two of my life. Adam was 46 years old (strike one) and used to teach math (strike two) but left the profession a couple years ago to work in tech (you’re out—or, at least, one would think). Because on a night back in April, at Nowhere Bar on 14th Street, I met up with Adam. And in the time it took me to drink one vodka soda with a splash of orange juice, an order that, thank God, only set me back five total dollars, Adam spent every second willfully opposed to every word that came out of my mouth. Refusing to entertain a single question I asked, or remark I made, or story I told. I can handle some friendly disagreement, I’m not looking for a sycophant. It’s just a little confusing to meet someone for the first time who, as far as I could tell, wanted me dead from the second we said hello. And after asking Adam an admittedly banal question about where he grew up only for him to scrunch up his face and say that was a long time ago, I looked at him and said, “You are an incredibly contrarian person, has anyone ever told you that?” At which point, this middle-aged man said, “No. No one ever has. And…I don’t know…I wouldn’t really say I am contrarian…” Early on in the date, talking about the challenges from his time as a teacher and my time at the museum, I joked about not “believing” in de-escalation only for him to say that I clearly need to resolve some major anger issues. And just like that—he had me cornered. Because if I gave him a piece of my mind, or even if I just got up and left, I’d only be affirming his idea of me. And maybe, even worse, the same idea I already had of myself. And so, I stayed. I stayed even after this one lull in conversation, when the two of us were staring daggers at each other under a cord of red string lights, and he said to me, “In these lights? You look evil.” I still haven’t totally figured out how to tell this story. The couple times I’ve tried, I’d get a hum of sympathy when I wanted laughter. Or, even worse, half-interest in place of outrage. But Krista got it. Our train finally arrived at the 50th Street station just as I finished telling this story about Adam. But already running a little late for the show, we had to dash to the theater. There wasn’t time to discuss it any further, and no chance for me to ask why Krista was suddenly crying. Not that I really needed an explanation. Not when I could hear a million words, loud and clear, right there in her eyes. And for this, I almost have to say—thank you, Adam.

One of the more boorish things about me is that I rarely enjoy musical theatre. Because Death Becomes Her easily slotted itself among the finest shows I’ve ever seen on Broadway. The songs were great, the staging was grand, the visual effects truly inventive, with a powerhouse performance from Megan Hilty and a…performance from Michelle Williams who…belongs to Destiny’s Child! Which not just anyone can say for themselves! And yet—I still thought it was just okay. “I try and keep that to myself though,” I said to Krista, as we waited for a downtown train, beginning our trek to Bushwick for an Ethiopian dinner at a place called Bunna. But Krista mostly feels the same way about musical theatre, and no surprise there. Time and time again, all week, we were of the same mind. It’s possible she was just on her best behavior, willing herself to be as agreeable as she could. Because it’s not like Krista was overstaying her welcome, I’d made that clear when she offered, one final time, to spend her last couple nights of the trip at an Airbnb in Jersey City. But she was a guest. And yet I really believe that if she had something to say, something to take issue with, this Gemini woman would have done just that. So how amazing that I can only remember one single thing we disagreed about: an Ottessa Moshfegh book. It was our first full day together and we were at McNally Jackson, down in the Seaport, and Krista was just about cross-eyed in pain. When we left that morning for some coffee, Krista didn’t think twice about wearing a skirt and flip flops. But when we left that cafe to head straight over to Manhattan, Krista thought, Uh oh. But too amenable to ask if we could turn back around, off we went to spend the next eight hours walking eight total miles. By the time we were browsing this bookstore, Krista’s thighs were so chafed and her feet so blistered that she had no other choice but to walk on tiptoes with her legs splayed approximately five feet apart. And instead of sympathizing with her, let alone finding some way to make her even slightly more comfortable, I just laughed my ass off. And when I wasn’t laughing, I was biting my tongue upon hearing Krista say she didn’t enjoy reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation. (As if disliking that bonafide blockbuster of a book isn’t, in fact, the far more interesting and discerning opinion.) Krista must have been stifling squeals of agony at this point, doing everything she could just to keep her knees from buckling, while I pretended to browse the magazine rack and thought, Girl, keep that to yourself…

Just about finished up with dinner, I texted Jarod, asking if we should hurl a rock through his bedroom window. His apartment, aptly enough, a stone’s throw away from Bunna. In the mood for a Barbara Hershey movie, as one is gayly wont to do, Jarod said he was watching Boxcar Bertha and, if we wanted to come over and say hello, he’d rewind it so we could see her sex scene. Krista already met Jarod, the three of us getting together at a bar called Carousel a couple nights earlier. Over the past week, Krista chitchatted with my roommates, we got drinks with Ian, there was dinner with Grace, and I brought her up to the break room to meet a whole slew of Educators after she took one of my tours. But out of everybody, Jarod was her favorite. “Even when he does that ‘So, I’m, like, the smartest and funniest person you’ve ever met’ thing,” said Krista, “He’s still just so…so warm.” He’s one of the more forthright personalities I’ve ever known, forthright to the point of abrasion, and by design, and yet—I totally agree. Fetching us from the front door of his building, he spoke to us in this raspy husk, his party boy voice still on full display after yesterday’s “Camp Bushwick.” It’s an annual backyard party attended by a lot of Jarod’s friends, all of whom would surely stone me to death if ever I were to show my face there. Not that I can blame them. I never wanted to make things hard for Jarod, never wanting to do anything that might further bruise that heart he was so willing to give. And yet I can’t say I ever tried to make things easier.

I opted for the ottoman while Krista squeezed in beside Jarod on the couch, both of them sitting on their tucked legs, babysitter style. Giving him the rundown of our last couple days, it didn’t take long for us to start treating Jarod as this medium of our affection. A conduit of our heterosocial desire. “I need a witness,” said Krista, so many times that week, “I love a witness!” And considering how good it felt to know Jarod was hearing our every word about how much we love each other’s company, maybe I need that same thing. If we were boring him, he was a good sport. Generously paying us all his attention. He has a lot to give. Only for life, so often, to pull the rug out from under him. I wish that wasn’t the case, that he could lay some burdens down. That is all I want for him. Right around this time, a fellow museum Educator said she had a dream about us. “It was your birthday and we were in the break room kitchen,” she said, “And then Jarod comes over to you and kind of nuzzles his face against your arm and then suddenly he’s, like, the size of a five-year-old. And you take him in your arms and just, like, hold him against your chest. Really gently. Like a baby.” Maybe I was giving myself too much credit, offering myself far too much grace, but when I heard about this dream, with all the truth in the world, I said, “That’s it! That’s it exactly.”

As Krista packed her bag for tomorrow’s early morning flight, we watched the season finale of Love Island USA. “Okay, I feel shame…,” Krista said, coming back from the bathroom one night that week, having spent the preceding 35 minutes giving me an exhaustive summary of bombshells and Casa Amor and being “closed off.” Telling me what makes Huda crazy, and why “Nicolandria” deserves the win, and that, yes, there are contestants named both Bryan and Austin. I hadn’t watched a minute of Love Island but, after laying in bed that night and listening to Krista’s fevered synopsis, I hardly needed to. “And it’s bad,” she said. “It is bad. It, like, fully breaks my brain.” Explaining that, whenever she and her roommate Carli watch it, before long, their hands will be clasped together in their laps and their heads bowed softly toward the TV, not so much blissed out as fucked up. The opiate of the Tiktok’d masses. And like an addict waking up the next morning to a downward spiral, Krista felt truly embarrassed for talking about it so much, and for so long, and with such spirit, and apologized to me because of it. But I wouldn’t accept it. Maybe I looked bored, or deferential, listening to her, like I’d long surrendered to being her captive audience. But that wasn’t it at all. Rather, it felt so good, laying there in bed and listening to someone talk and talk and talk. Someone who has so much to say. Someone who seems like they could never run out of words.

Those hangovers we had this morning were on account of the heavy-poured tequila sodas we had in my apartment before going out to dance at a place in Greenpoint where the one bottom shelf cocktail we each ordered came to a total of $60. “Can I get a White Russian?” asked Krista to which the bartender said, “No.” Just when I thought I couldn’t love this girl more, she intended to step out on the dancefloor with a milk-and-vodka in hand. I don’t do this very often. Barring the occasional wedding or concert, I hadn’t danced like this in every bit of six years. There was reason to believe I’d feel nervous, or self-conscious, that I might even feel shame. And yet there was none of that. With great relief, we’d already addressed the fact that neither of us like too much interaction, that we wouldn’t be singing lyrics to each other or yelling in each other’s ears or doing anything even remotely “jokey.” Instead, we would dance. And what a thrill it was, seeing this, seeing Krista. Expressive and expansive, totally unshrinking, with her jerking sheet of hair this vital and golden extension of everything she is. It was Godly. Missing her step, Krista bumped into a girl who was dancing with a circle of friends right beside us. And instead of a conciliatory wave or a shrieked apology, Krista decided to say she was sorry by placing her hand directly on top of this girl’s head. How Krista imagined this would go over, I don’t know, but it didn’t go over well. The girl mostly just looked bemused while her mean gay guy friends shot enough daggers to kill. Briefly breaking our terms and conditions, when Krista resumed dancing by my side, I yelled to her, “Too cool for school! Just zero sense of humor! Lighten up!” I was grateful all this came and went without any gays-on-girl crime, but I was all the more grateful it happened, and that I witnessed it. Moving at however many beats per minute, it was Krista in my eyes but someone else on my mind as I realized just how much I adore being with someone who other people might find embarrassing. That too much is actually just what I want. That too much is just right.

All of a sudden, I got shy. My old concerns about this house guest of mine, concerns I wound up not even needing to worry about, had come home to roost and not a minute too soon. Because chatting there in my bed, just like we had every other night before, I was uncomfortable for the first time. Continually readjusting myself on the mattress and laughing too loud at all the wrong things and meeting every word that came out of her mouth with my nervous tic of choice: “Aww!” As, all the while, Krista’s packed luggage was zippered shut in the corner of my bedroom with tomorrow’s travel outfit folded neatly on top. In the middle of the night, just a couple hours from now, Krista would wake up and get inside a car bound for the airport. In the morning, she’d be gone. But I’d still be here. Showing up to a Monday at the museum, just like always. Grocery shopping and cooking my soup and, on my days off later that week, writing and going for my walks. With passersby in Ridgewood to make me laugh, and people to see, and a boy or two who might be interested in a first date. And I would be alone. There are people who love me, that much I know. Friends who enjoy my company, friends who might even wish they saw me more often—if only I’d let them. With a best friend too, a best friend to beat the band, in Shannon. It’s just that Shannon lives 2,400 miles away from me. Because here I am in New York City, this vast and unrelenting place that I love as dearly as kin, where I am no one’s number one, no one’s best friend. Not anymore, at least. Maybe it’s unrealistic or unhealthy or juvenile, a child’s wish, but I’d rather give all of myself to someone than bits and pieces to a crowd. And for this past week of my life, I did have someone. Someone who upended my routines and shifted my hours and brought me places I hadn’t been yet. Someone who understands so much only to respond to so many of my questions with “Beats me!” Someone I’d never met before who, in a week’s time, fit squarely inside of me. So, I told her that. And when Krista had us get out of bed for a proper embrace, providing me with exactly what I wanted, exactly what I’ve been so starved for, still I was the one who tried to pull away first. But grasping me all the tighter, Krista made sure I let myself have this. Giving me another chance, another God-breathed chance, to be a friend.

I get up in the morning and I scrape my heart out of my mouth. It’s still a relatively new thing, something I only started doing this year, first hearing about it from, I’m sorry to say, Azealia Banks. In what else but a series of tweets, she explained that refuse from our hearts backs up into our mouths while we sleep and that “when you drink hot coffee on morning breath, you slurp that detox right back down.” If this is true, I don’t know. If it’s false, I don’t care. And to all the people whose eyes darted straight down to my mouth while informing me they’ve already been doing exactly that all their lives—congratulations. Because besides some slips early on, a morning or two when my cardial sludge went right back down the gullet with my first sip of percolated coffee, I’ve adopted the habit. If I’m anything, it’s habitual. I do call it a nun’s life, after all. It’s just that if I’m trying to do anything right now, it’s the opposite of all that. To forsake the prior ways, my “I would nevers” and “I’ve always saids,” to crack open all those old chestnuts of mine and leave them for the birds. Remaining principled but parting ways with opinion, with rigidity. With all my sweet, sweet rules. Rules of how I should live and, even more importantly, how you should too. To free the staunch from my character, that, I think, is what I want. It is what I need. And so, every morning, in this ongoing bid for change, I get up and do the same exact thing. I brush my teeth and I make some coffee and then I get back into bed, resting in my lap a copy of The Artist’s Way as the base for my journal—one of the three different journals I’ve currently got in active rotation, dare I admit—and I do my Morning Pages. Wading as far into the stream of consciousness as I’m capable, I write those three sheets. And for the second time that day, in the half hour since my feet first touched the floor, I’m scraping my heart from my mouth.

On this particular Thursday morning in the middle of June, waking up in a bed I’ve called my own, and all my own, for the last nine months, I wrote, “If I could just get a handle on sex.” If only. “God knows the most sexually experienced gays guys can also be the most fucked up,” I kept writing. “So while I don’t think meeting up with a couple guys off Grindr will free me entirely from all these preoccupations, maybe it could root me a little more deeply in myself.” It’s never been easy for me. Feeling over the years, in fashions both literal and figurative, impenetrable. Off the top of my head, I can think of three different nights which fit the bill of “that time I almost lost my virginity.” And living here in New York City, I’m well aware of my embarrassment of riches. It’s like fish in a barrel—which, incidentally, would make for an amazing name for a gay bar. But while I know these options are out there, and have even been presented with a couple opportunities to shoot away at that barrel, I can’t. Or, I won’t. Either way, I don’t. So, what did I do this for then? Why bother casting myself out into this wilderness of living single only to deny myself some possible answers to the questions I had? I suppose I know why. Of course I know why. I’m hesitant to discuss this one particular “task” from “week nine,” fearful I’ll give all you non-initiates a complex before you’ve even started embarking on your own Way, but there comes a time when you’re supposed to read back all your old Morning Pages. I was afraid how it might feel to plumb those old daily depths, that it would just tear open all my hard-earned scar tissue and I’d go back to bleeding. And yet. Annotating insights in red ink and actions in blue, there was this one thought I kept landing on, a takeaway that became all the clearer as I kept on reading, slowly discovering my foremost lesson learned from this turbulent season of change: I prefer being happy to being sad. Hold the applause. It seems obvious, and I guess it is. But there are people I know, brilliant people, who’ve gone all their lives without realizing it can be this simple. I hope I don’t forget. And I’ve still got a ways to go—clearly. Because despite writing these Pages every day for the last six months, I never really bothered accommodating an extra half-hour to my morning. I also can’t seem to remember that my commute to the museum from Ridgewood is twice as long as it was from Clinton Hill. I’m running late a lot. I’m not proud of that but it is something new.

“You guys going back to school after this or what?” I asked some eighth graders sitting around this circa 1937 recreation of an auction house. One of the sixty businesses that operated out of the ground floor of that Orchard Street tenement, it’s an interactive exhibit with all these touch screens built into a long auction table, with pictures to see and oral histories to hear about the business travails of a man named Max who made a living, from cradle to grave, on the Lower East Side. Landing his first job as an auctioneer in 1918 at 8 years old and running a botanica in Essex Market until the day he died in the late ‘80s. This old Jewish guy who taught himself Spanish and had a Puerto Rican girlfriend while most of his peers were long retired to Florida. To me, he’s a riot. A total cartoon character of his time and place. To 14-year-olds on a field trip with their Brownsville charter school, he’s, evidently, less than compelling. I don’t claim to be amazing at leading these field trips but I know what I hope to accomplish. That I can spend an hour with a group of kids and make sure they know that they should be here at this museum. That they have things to say, and that I want to hear it. And if they’re talking to me about an upcoming basketball championship and the accompanying cheer tournament instead of, I don’t know, Mayor LaGuardia’s pushcart ban—good. It was no less a success. Sitting on a stool among this throng of Brooklyn teens, I was asking about their last day of school and what they’ve got going on for summer vacation when it happened. When all of a sudden, without any encouragement, without so much as a word, three of the girls broke out into one of their cheer routines. Clapping their hands and stomping their feet, punching their arms out at alternating angles, making shapes all their own, making music. And the rest was history. This building is 162 years old. Seven thousand people lived here. Its floors, whether pine wood or linoleum, continuing to bear all that weight. And yet I cannot imagine that at any point in time, not in any of those lives lived, that it ever once knew this kind of cheer.

Sitting on one of the couches in our breakroom, I held up my hand to compare its size with Gwen’s. Originally from Wales, Gwen once told me she can shear a whole sheep in one-and-a-half minutes. Trusting this fact long before we were ever palm to palm, it was only now that I could really understand how. Almost as large as my own, Gwen has these strong, beautiful, life bearing hands, hands that remind me so much of my mother’s. Gwen who is, herself, a mother, a grandmother even. Not that I believed that at first. Our workplace is something of this grand equalizer, agewise. Recent college graduates and recent retirees alike work as Educators but, in our active annihilation of any and all professional boundaries in that breakroom, everyone becomes approximately 27 years old. It’s awesome. Even if it also leads to a collective questioning of our very grasp on reality after learning, for example, that Gwen—our resident baddie with her chavvy-chic style and her tattoos and an endlessly endearing habit of beginning most of her sentences with the word “yo”—is in fact 50 years old. I pray to God that I might have so mind boggling an effect on an assembly of underpaid 20somethings when I myself reach 50. Especially given how familiar I am with this mistaken age phenomenon—only in the dreaded opposite direction. But I’m working on that. Knowing that while I might not be able to look any younger, let alone my own actual age, I need only act as old as I want to be. That evening, I would see Ian, getting dinner with him and Nick and Ashleigh to celebrate his birthday. He was turning 30. But earlier in the week, I reached out to him, asking Ian if he was still around this Saturday night and wanted to go dancing somewhere. It is Pride, of course. “Ummm,” Ian replied, “Out of character!” Back when I was objectively older in my early twenties than I’ve felt so far in my thirties, it was Ian who first christened me “Uncle Brian.” If it was my mustache or my taste in clothes or the reflection I gleefully saw of myself in the gleeless Fran Lebowitz, I don’t know, but apparently my soul was more than just old. Ian, pure of heart, never meant to hurt my feelings with that title, I’m sure. Besides, I believed it enough for the both of us. And I guess I can’t fault any of the people in my life who’ve listened to all these stories about who I am—and believed my every word.

“The Roches! I absolutely love The Roches!” said a visitor, pointing at my t-shirt with its image of the sisterly trio’s debut album cover. It was before I even took my first necessary breath to welcome these new visitors to my tour that this woman not only expressed her mutual fandom but—totally unbothered by the two perfect strangers patiently waiting to get their thirty dollars worth of museum education—proceeded to ask if I’m a filmmaker. “Well,” I said, “I want to be!” Someone needs to make a documentary that properly speaks to their impact as women musicians, she said. And as a man who can’t carry a tune and has zero experience making films, why shouldn’t I be the one to do this? All told, as small as the group was, they were pretty marvelous. There was someone from New Hampshire, which is a very rare thing. An opera lover from D.C.. And then there was Margaret the Roches Lover from Park Slope who told me how she attended just about every single tri-state area concert of theirs all through the ‘70s and ‘80s. And also: that she has a gay son. “Though I don’t love saying that: ‘my gay son,’” said Margaret. “I mean, if I had a straight son, would I really be saying ‘my straight son’?! Really? Come on.” Going from a day at the museum to the birthday dinner for Ian, and needing an outfit that wouldn’t just translate from day to night but would also look impossibly cute in all our inevitable pictures, I opted that morning for a graphic tee slightly more graphic than usual. We do still have a dress code, albeit a shadow of what it once was, everything changing as soon as we reopened from the pandemic and the new ungovernable crop of Zoomer Educators ignored it so flagrantly that it just stopped getting enforced at all. It’s a good thing. As always, when young people are breaking rules, it’s the rules that are time to be broken. “Maybe we can swap numbers,” Margaret said, chatting with me after the tour. “It’s not every day you meet a fellow Roches fan!” Feeling close enough with her to share the story—as if I don’t spill most everything to most anyone—I told Margaret who gave this shirt to me, and how long we’d already been broken up when I found it, this unexpected Christmas gift, and what that felt like, what it still feels like anytime I wear it. Letting my face, my words, the tone in my voice betray everything still inside my heart. But evidently Margaret wasn’t quite as much of a romantic as I thought. Either that or I was just dashing her hopes of setting me up with that gay son. Because it was with a shrug, totally matter-of-fact, that she said, “Five years together…eh…that’s a good run!”

Riding the elevator right up to the penthouse, which is just to say one of a dozen units on the top floor of a nondescript Greenwich Village highrise, I waited for Liza. I’d been seeing her for five months by now, almost to the day. It had to be a woman, I knew that much. Also, I needed her to be young enough to understand Instagram and Twitter not as some trivial aspects of modern life but as trick mirror hellscapes singularly designed to make specifically me absolutely miserable. And when I saw her picture on a portal for low income earners, and—more importantly—read her sliding scale rate, I really felt like she could be the one. Only to show up for our first appointment and discover the address wasn’t for an office building but an apartment tower, leading me to wonder, as I waited out in the hallway, silent save for the doors eerily rattling in their frames on that squally January day, “Am I about to get trafficked?” But then the door opened and I saw her for the first time, gap-toothed and warm-eyed, a Sicilian paisana by way of New Jersey, and knew immediately she was my kind of girl. As more than one person has said to me: “Of course you have a therapist named Liza.” Long before I bothered asking about her approach to psychotherapy, I got the information I really needed—she’s an Aries and, yes, she has siblings. A firstborn daughter with two little brothers, Liza is the oldest. As the baby of my family, this was music to my coddled ears. Liza is a couple years younger than me and yet—for better or for worse—when I sit across from her in that office, she’s like my newfound third older sister. Another girl who’s looking out for me. Another girl who just wants me to be okay. Another protector. It’s a little absurd, and more than a little retrograde, to see her this way, to see any woman this way—as someone to take care of me. Maybe I was conditioned to think like that, or maybe I was just born this way.

The concerns from that morning’s Morning Pages soon enough introduced themselves to that afternoon’s therapy session—just as Julia Cameron intended. That white devil. From my blue armchair of choice over by the window, as Liza rubbed at one of her gold hoop earrings, nodding her head with not-too-much but not-too-little frequency, I talked to her about sex. This wasn’t the first time it’s come up, not the first time she’s heard me talk about feeling like such a failure for lacking the desire, the guts to just go out and do it. A failure as a young person, as a single person, and, above all else, a failure as a gay guy. A late bloomer, it’s always been a source of stress, always a point of tortured comparison against this abstract mass of gay men who make putting out seem so easy. It’s just that said comparison, and said torture, is a lot less abstract now, and a lot more painful than that amorphous throng. And the thoughts I have about him—they’re like pits in my stomach. Thorns around my heart. But, of course, what’s the common denominator here? Back when it was a million gay fish in that barrel or now that it’s just one particular boy, a boy who’s out there somewhere holding a gun and aiming his shot, I know it’s all in my head. And that none of it is actually true. They’re fantasies. They are lies. And I’m the one making them all up.

Occasionally, Liza will mirror back what she’s hearing from me. Sometimes to encourage further reflection, sometimes just to clarify. She did it this afternoon. And while I can’t know her intention, not for sure, its impact clearly wasn’t what she expected. In a measured, lilting tone, with utmost sincerity, Liza said, “So, what I’m hearing you say is ‘I imagine he’s having a lot of anal sex and that he must be really happy about it.’” Those words came out of her mouth and I couldn’t help it. Throwing back my head, I laughed out loud. Cackling so hard that something close to embarrassment fell over Liza’s face. I didn’t want to make her feel bad, or wrong, not at all. She wasn’t wrong. She heard me clear as a bell. But it was only in ringing that bell back to me that I could actually hear it for what it was. It was fucking ridiculous.

Salads and martinis, that’s what Ian wanted for his birthday dinner. There were a couple different places in mind, but he didn’t have a reservation at any of them, and it’s with love that I’ll say: Gemini Chaos. Each of us were assigned to a different restaurant in hopes we could walk in off the street and charm our way into a four-top at 6:30 in Greenwich Village. And after I informed the group chat that my delegated spot proved a no-go, Ashleigh says, “Brian, is there any world we get into Waverly?” Dressed as I was, I couldn’t have schmoozed my way into the Waverly Diner, let alone the Waverly Inn, so I waited out front for Ashleigh to do the pleading. And spotting her down the block from the corner of Bank Street, it took all I had not to burst into applause. In a white t-shirt, jean shorts, and these high heeled boots, she had on the simplest look, so clean and unadorned, so herself, and yet she looked like a superstar. Like if George Michael were an Italian-American Princess. She’s always had this effect on me. Anytime 20-year-old Brian got a little high off a couple hits of someone’s joint at an Allston house party, I’d spend the whole night chasing Ashleigh around, telling her, “You are so beautiful.” Then and now, I mean it entirely. Even if I recognized, all along, that rapturous ovations can sometimes have the opposite effect. That wild-eyed adoration is perhaps the exact opposite of friendship. Because it was later on that night when Ashleigh told us about someone who came on so strong when they first met her, with a million wonderful things to say, all flattery and diva worship, only to never actually show up when it mattered. I know I’m a better friend to Ashleigh than that. Without a doubt, she does not see me this way. But as I listened to her discuss the hollowness of praise, I considered the sound of my own voice.

Ian made it four minutes into a psychic reading before walking out. Intended as an auspicious forecast of this new decade stretching out before him became, instead, this harried and impersonal reading from a white girl downtown who told Ian he’s blocked off to the world and struggles trusting people. “I was like, ‘Babe, what the fuck are you talking about?’” he said. Regaling us on this failed reading once we were properly settled into our table at Little Ruby’s, we’d already addressed the mandatory task of any group of four friends out to eat at a New York City restaurant. Deciding that Nick was Miranda, Ian is Samantha, I’m Carrie, and that Ashleigh was Charlotte. “Well, I am planning a wedding,” she said. After ordering an espresso martini and an IPA at the same time, Ian recounted telling his classmates that he was “going out for dinner tonight with my three bitchiest friends.” He’s in a graduate program, studying botany and other similarly crunchy things. It’s a big deal, with only a dozen or so students accepted every year for the newest cohort. Asking him recently for the most surprising challenge and the most unexpected delight of his studies so far, both of his answers had to do with people. Regarding his classmates, he isn’t always sure who he can really scratch some social itches with, and that’s hard. But then, in his occasional work with the general public, he finds himself really enjoying the curiosity of strangers, even if he has to field their same eight questions over and over. “I feel like you at the museum,” said Ian. If that psychic was worth her mettle at all, I wondered what she saw in Ian to say he’s blocked off to the world. Maybe it’s just because he’s blond but I’ve always seen him as this loping Golden Retriever. A puppy dog. Playful and guileless, childlike. But there is this other side to him. A reverent streak. Watchful and remote. Here today, gone tomorrow, back next month, maybe. I love that about him. I admire it. And I relate with it, with that reverence. Though, with him, it does seem different. When Ian needs to draw back, when the time comes for solitude, for quiet, that’s just what he does. It’s where he goes. It doesn’t appear to plague him, to keep him from anything or from anyone. For Ian, it’s just a part of it. Just a part of his world.

“Death creeps in through the gums,” I said, baldly stealing this non-joke of Sarah Silverman’s after Ian shared that better dental hygiene is an aspiration for his thirties. There were more goals from there but, first, Ian told us the habits he’s hoping to break. Habits that, also, had mostly to do with people. Of everyone I know from that time and place in my life, from Emmanuel College, from Boston, Ian was the last to turn 30. We’re all in it now, together. Ian talked about relationships, and online behavior, and backsliding, sharing what he wants from these years ahead and what he intends to part ways with. It’s easy enough to think of my own answers to what I’m aspiring toward, and even what I’m hoping to forsake. But it’s in taking action, on either front, that lies the rub. I have Liza, and The Artist’s Way, and a daily dosage of Lexapro so small it’s technically non-therapeutic though nevertheless life-changing. I deleted social media from my phone, even if I wasn’t brave enough to temporarily deactivate my accounts, meaning I could—and did—lurk on my computer. Though I didn’t miss it, not at all. There were online personalities who I’ve followed for years, for a decade in some instances, people who I actually like—and yet I didn’t think of them once. It makes me laugh, that’s something I used to think about Twitter, justifying its presence in my life whenever it started feeling too claustrophobic, or too noisy. But the thing is: I’ve laughed plenty without it. Besides, any time I did give in to that compulsion to lurk, it was only ever for one single person. And, also, there’s been dates. This self-inflicted crash course in putting myself out there, in being among the living, and all on my own. First dates are so easy, and while I can’t say they’re always fun, they are always funny. Funny even when they’re not. “And while, at this point, there’s really only been a handful of second dates,” I said, the proverbial Carrie monologuing her column, “I have to say—I haven’t enjoyed a single one of them.” I hardly needed to explain why. They all understood. “But wasn’t that what this was always about?” asked Nick. “To see what else was out there so you could really feel certain that…you know—” He didn’t finish his thought. Nodding my head as affirmatively as I possibly could, maybe the exuberance of this reaction did it for him. Or maybe the exuberance of my reaction scared him off. But either way, my only answer is yes.

“No way!” said Ashleigh, picking up my tote bag and shouldering its colossal weight. “Bad luck!” Thinking back, I can’t believe I did that. That I set my tote down on a Manhattan sidewalk. The only thing more all-consuming than my superstitious nature being my general germaphobia. Clearly, I was scattered. We were back outside on 7th Avenue so Ashleigh, honoring my wish, could take my picture on my film camera. That’s another new thing, with thanks—wait for it…—to Julia Cameron, but also to Juliette. Consulting the premier photographer in my life for a beginner’s point-and-shoot, she responded almost immediately with links to Olympus Super Zoom 3000s on eBay, the downtown camera store where she gets her photos developed, and the brand of film she likes best. With no other subject more appealing or beautiful or godly than my New York City passersby, but still mostly lacking the courage to ask these strangers if I can take their picture, I’ve been settling in the meantime on my roommate’s cats, and trash heap mise-en-scenes, and visions of Mary. She’s everywhere, Mary. I can’t think of a single block in Ridgewood without her. And if there was anything that did excite me about my eventual return to that social media fray, it was the chance to share these images. These things I’ve come across and how they appeared to me and what I made of them. I’d bought several rolls of film at once and this was my last one. Once it was finished, I’d get them all developed, and wait for the scans, and see for myself how the world looks. Knowing already there’d be moments I completely forgot, such pleasant surprise. Others more beautiful than I could’ve dreamed. And things I thought I’d love the most that might actually prove nothing special at all. But that’s the risk. And on that street corner, stock-still in a million fields of vision and waiting for the flash, I considered the reward and I smiled.

Knock on wood, I thought to myself on the first day of this new year, noticing a moment too late that I was cheersing my beer with David’s canned water. Living in Los Angeles, but originally from New Jersey, David was here for the holidays. And getting together around New Year’s has become something of a tradition for us—if doing this once before, two years ago, can qualify as such. I could’ve taken the bus from my apartment but instead I walked the four miles from Ridgewood to Bed-Stuy, beating David to The Coyote Club by a couple minutes, where I seemed to be the very first customer of the day. It smelled like disinfectant and the fanning traces of mop water on the floor looked like little bedsheet ghosts. As I swallowed my superstitions with a happy hour pilsner, David told me, “I was actually here last night too, this is where we were for midnight.” It’s a small town, Brooklyn. Asking me how I spent my New Year’s Eve, I told him I saw Babygirl in theaters but was already back home when the clock struck twelve. “So, yeah, I watched an erotic thriller—solo!” I laughed but, more importantly, so did he. I was so afraid of this New Year’s. A holiday so inherently fraught with melancholy, I was worried what I’d do if plans didn’t come together—and only slightly less worried if they did. That if I accepted a last minute invitation to a house party, and joined in on that countdown from “...10!...,” when the aching strains of that old sentimental song of mine began to play—what then? Instead, in my bedroom at 11:59, I kneeled down at the closest thing I have to an altar. At my window, with its ledge all but concealed by hostas leaves, and my Mary statuette tucked in the corner—gifts, both of them, from people I love—I could hardly believe what I was saying, even though every word was true. “Thank you for this year,” I prayed. When the fireworks began, I knew it was over.

Knowing we’d see each other, David told me he purposely didn’t read about the goings-on of my December. “I’m going to try and tell this as quickly as I can,” I said, before the horse’s mouth began its half-hour monologue. Telling him about the Hinge revelation and being the subject of gossip, about my late night phone call to Austin and the immense comfort it brought me, and how that comfort was made all the more devastating by his surprise Christmas present on the heels of that failed attempt to let myself into the old apartment. But a day removed from sharing all this with the public, David could also be privy to the reaction. All year long, I worried about this. That in writing about my life, and the people in my life, in putting quotations around their words despite my imperfect memory, I was risking danger, and embarrassment. The mere thought of a friend saying, Oh, Brian, I wish you hadn’t written that, can you take it out? was—believe me or not—mortifying. But other than my mother taking issue with a comparison to Patti LuPone, I somehow managed to avoid this. Nobody else coming forward to say I’d compromised their trust, or misinterpreted their meaning, or cast them in a false light. And I’m sure I did, in fact I’m certain of it, but evidently the people I hurt just kept it to themselves. I wouldn’t know a thing about that. But not a moment too soon, the old year had its last laugh. I hurt feelings. I was called staggeringly cruel by one subject of my writing and I wasn’t hearing anything at all from another. Criticism I could deal with, but not silence. Good intentions are a good thing but interpretation wins the day. And after listening to all this, David just doubled down on his generosity and asked for my hopes for the year ahead. Insisting he go first, I told him, “I’ve already said too much.”

David was gainfully employed for 10 of the last 12 months which, for a writer in Hollywood, is a big deal. He also spent half the year in a long-distance relationship with his longtime boyfriend. Take a guess which accomplishment I cared about more. Especially given the fact that, almost two years ago, he and his boyfriend broke up. David wrote about it when it first happened, that’s how I found out, and after going through our old texts, I found the message I sent him. “I’m thinking of you during what’s gotta be a very upsetting time. Having never been through a breakup myself, I so recognize the (heartbroken) novelty of finally getting a window into that, like, entire chapter of the human condition. Not that it makes things easier.” Most everyone in my life beat me to a broken heart. My friends, my family, Austin—they all knew this pain long before I got around to it. And I’ve worried about this, worried if I was as good to them as they needed me to be. If I was as good as they deserved. There was a night in Allston, shortly after we all moved into that apartment, when Juliette called me to ask if I was home. I remember her standing in my bedroom doorway, crying, just absolutely heartsick. But I do not remember hugging her. I was 22 years old but that is no excuse. I just didn’t know. And maybe David felt the same way. I’d call him a fellow “late bloomer” but perhaps my words have already caused enough damage lately. It’s just that we’ve gone about love at a remarkably comparable pace. This was his first relationship, too. Wanting demonstrativeness, and a desire to live together one day, and an ease of presence that proved too tall an order for the boyfriend, they broke up—for seven weeks. But when the boyfriend reached out in hopes of a reunion, David said he felt unsure, uneasy even. Baffled, I asked, “You don’t enjoy having the upper hand?” They’ve been back together ever since and when I asked if the work’s been done to change the old habits, and if David has found what he needed all along—he said yes. Understanding his every word, I said, “That could put tears in my eyes.”

Waiting for the M train at Delancey-Essex on a Friday night, I wrote a message to Austin. He was back in New York. Per my online sleuthing, he saw Queer that afternoon at the very same theater where, just a couple hours later, I had a ticket for Nosferatu. A film Austin had already seen, per some earlier online sleuthing of mine. So while that spared me the magical thinking of making my way to C6 in hopes of finding him already seated in C5, still I wondered where he was, or really—where his head was at. For two people who aren’t talking, we’d communicated a lot to each other over the last month. Of course, there were those heavensent two hours on the phone where, at last, we sounded like ourselves again. But then there was also the Christmas gift for me, the surprise present that Austin tucked away with the mail that had me sobbing before I even opened it. It was a t-shirt of the album art for The Roches but the wrapping itself proved an even greater gift. Written by hand on one corner of the brown paper, Austin quoted some lyrics from “Hammond Song” and the words he chose—they thrilled me, and they devastated me. I heard from him again on Christmas, when he told me that everyday he’s been home, he has wished that I was there too. Saying that back in 2019, when we spent the holiday apart from each other with our own families, he remembered telling me, “This sucks. We are never doing this again.” And finally, not five minutes into 2025, he wished me a happy new year—albeit with a heavy heart. One, two, three: a magic number. “Three,” as he once said, “Is better than two.” And so, I felt like it was my turn. That if I was looking through a window of opportunity right now, I wouldn’t dare let it close before sticking my neck out to say, “I’m thinking of you.”

I had never felt so human. That’s something I heard first from Camila. Working at the museum just as long as I have, she’s in a full-time position now. And on a morning back in September when I showed up in tears before a long day of tours had even begun, I asked Camila if someone could be on deck to take over for me. That I wasn’t sure I’d have what it takes to stand in front of 12 strangers and answer their questions, or give them their money’s worth, or smile. Sitting across from her down in the office, I began to cry. But in the months to come, I’d return many times to something Camila told me that morning, when she was recalling her own devastation in the wake of a breakup. “I had never felt so human.” Everything was still so fresh at that point, and I was only just beginning to get acquainted with my own breadth, and depth, of feeling. Feelings I thought I knew in and out. The much-examined life I’d made worth living. And yet. The sorrow I’d feel, the anger, the resentment and the bitterness, the longing and the fantasizing, it has been unlike anything I’ve ever known. And I am more human because of it. The love in my life hasn’t diminished, it has multiplied. I feel a hundred times closer to a hundred more people. New friends and old. Passersby on the street and couples on the train. Season two of Sex and the City and “Rain” by Madonna, I understand them now. When I said “thank you” in my New Year’s Eve prayer, this was why. But it seems that I spoke too soon.

Getting back to me a couple hours later, Austin was fair in his response, and as gentle as can be, or as close as anyone can get to the impossible gentleness I so badly desire. But it wasn’t at all what I wanted to hear. Reminding me that we made this decision together and that he doesn’t think either of us have yet experienced what we really wanted. For me, he said, that was experiencing other people. To try and answer the question, “Do I want my first relationship to be my only relationship?” But for him, he’s realized, it’s been about experiencing life on his own again. “I miss you too,” he said. “But I have enjoyed the freedom and productivity I’ve gained from solitude.” He was so sorry that I’m hurting, promising he knows exactly how I feel, and I don’t doubt that. But I felt, more than ever, deeper than ever, so alone in my sorrow, so lopsided in this anguish. Like the grief was only mine to bear, and that more was on the way. “A window isn’t closing because there is no window,” he said. “If we are supposed to get together, whether it be in six months or six years, we will be together.” If. If if if if if. I’d never hated a word so much, not in all my life. I asked if I could call and when he said that might not be a good idea and I called anyway, I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear sincere irritation in his voice when he answered, “Hello?” He remained fair, albeit less gently, and when I begged for an explanation of how his sentiment on Christmas could look and sound so different by the third of January, Austin reminded me of something I myself said at the beginning of the call—“You can feel multiple things at once.” In less than fifteen minutes, it was over. We said goodbye and I hung up. Staring at my bedroom ceiling, I screamed without making a sound. Stretching open my mouth to release a carbon ton of woe, silently. If my roommate was out in the hall, and happened to hear this, she might’ve mistaken me for steam from the radiator. This human body of mine, and its human heart, was suffering the worst pain it’s known so far. Excruciating and foreign, this was something new, something different. For the first time, I was hopeless.

I had to take a Xanax to fall asleep only to wake up the next morning a half hour before my alarm with an already racing heart. Force feeding myself breakfast, every spoonful of oatmeal taking what felt like minutes to chew, let alone swallow, I was beside myself and I needed someone to talk to. Calling me as soon as she saw my message, I could still hear the sleep in my mother’s voice but, in no time, she was crying right along with me. Not just shouldering my pain but understanding it. I don’t go to my mother when I want to feel better, I go to her because I know she’ll hurt just as keenly as I do. That’s really all I ever want, from anybody, but no one does it better than her. And yet it still took me completely by surprise when my mother said, with a lump in her throat, “You need to go to him. Tonight. Go see him! Go see him tonight and tell him how you feel!” It took my breath away. When she started that sentence, I was expecting her to say I needed to stop talking to him, that I needed to get him off my mind, that I needed to move on anyway I possibly could. Only for the words that actually came out her mouth to prove so ardent, and guileless, so real despite feeling like something you’d only ever hear in a movie. The final fist-shaking encouragement from a Carrie Fisher Type that spurs the leading man to run across town and declare his love to the leading lady. “It’s about old friends,” happily ever after, as easy as that. I had no intention of going to Austin’s apartment that night and knocking on his door. He had made himself clear on the phone and I knew there was no changing his mind. But that suddenly didn’t matter as much. Not when I had this person in my life, the person who gave me life, encouraging me to do everything I can to reclaim a lost love, to fight for it while I still can, reaching out for a person’s heart before it has the chance to fly away. Perhaps most other moms would have had something very different to say, something more enlightened, something healthier. But I wouldn’t want to hear it. Because nothing else, nothing else on the face of the earth, would have sounded quite so real as my mother.

“I have a million questions I’ve wanted to ask you for so long now,” I said to Sara, dodging puddles of dog piss as we walked in loops around a convention center in New Jersey. When Grace and Erica first asked if I wanted to join them to a “Super Pet Expo” in Edison, my answer was “no.” Sophie also turned down the invitation, but once she heard Sara was going, and that I was considering it, she didn’t want to miss out. And suddenly, neither did I. We all met up at Erica’s apartment, eating samosas she got for us from Diversity Plaza before Grace pulled up in her dad’s car to shuttle us off to the Garden State. All told, our time in the car was the best part. Sara, of course, was cueing up the music. She played Kitty Craft and the Lijadu Sisters while Erica introduced me to Anita Mui, the Chinese Madonna, and Sophie suggested a song called “El Invento” that sounded exactly like what this was—riding in a car with friends on a Sunday afternoon under the pale, milky glare of January sunshine. It was more or less what I envisioned, this expo. Specifically what I was envisioning when I first said “no.” Booth after booth of Shark Tank aspirants trying to sell their wares, a $10 photo opp with “The World’s Smallest Dog (Unofficial),” a seminar on how to make your dog “pawsitively” famous, and racks on racks of graphic tees that all basically read, Does it look like me and my Cane Corso give a shit? But just when it started feeling too depressing to bear, I would share a knowing smirk with Sophie, or watch Erica freak out at the sight of a kinkajou propped on the shoulder of a bleach blond meathead, and it was all right. We’d already been there for a while when Sara and I found ourselves a little removed from the group. I asked her how the holidays went and, after she asked me the same question, I exhaled heavily. And a smile, this cheeky, consoling smile, immediately crossed her face. Sara knows. This pain, this longing, my craziness, I know Sara knows everything about it. They’ve been back together for a while now but, for a year, she and her boyfriend were broken up. I’ve always known this was something that happened in their relationship but not with any specific detail. And maybe it’s precisely because of this mystery that I’ve been able to project so much onto them. Happiness for her, and hope for myself. More than once, I’ve sought out the posts they made for each other on their anniversary, looking through the select images that best captured their fondness for each other, the images that most clearly showed the love. Sara knows I’ve done this, I’ve told her before—not that it makes it any less pathetic. But for months now, I’ve been thinking about everything else I want to tell Sara, or really everything else I wanted to ask. And it was there, finally, soundtracked by a barking chorus, that Sara said, “Dude, talk to me.”

Walking shoulder to shoulder around the convention center, I told Sara about all the latest happenings, about the hopes I’d begun to harbor before the rug got pulled out from under me. There were puppies and kittens all around us, pythons and geckos, lip-linered broads talking to Hasidic fathers and children, but we might as well have been the only two people there. But once she started telling me about that year in her life, that year of the breakup, we were face to face and standing still. “Whatever you’ve said, whatever you've done, whatever you’ve wanted to do, the craziest thing you can possibly imagine,” she said, “Don’t worry because—I did it!” During their year apart, they saw each other three total times. I think Austin and I saw each other three times in one week back in September. Though of course that’s changed. I haven’t seen him now for three months, and I don’t know when I might ever see him again. Sara would open Spotify and look at all the songs her then-ex-boyfriend listened to lately, searching for a coded message, parsing out some indisputable truth. Trying, desperately, to read his mind. If Sara is anything like me, and I think she is, surely this satisfied something for her, even if it hurt, especially when it hurt, knowing all the while what she really wanted. But then, after that year apart, “or really a little less than that, 11 months,” Sara heard from him. They met up that same night and they talked for eight hours straight. They live together now and the background on her phone is a picture of him as a little kid. Grabbing me at the shoulders, and smiling that same cheeky smile, Sara said, “I’m rooting for you.” Maybe this was the last thing I needed, this second encouragement in as many days to keep holding out hope. But to know there are people in my life who are making my same wish—it is a saving grace. I just pray I’m not alone here. I pray that it’s not just my people in my life who are hoping for this.

“What?” said Sara after Sophie found us in the crowd and asked if we saw the jumping dog. A Border Collie just spent the last half hour navigating an agility course, shimmying into tunnels and leaping over hurdles and jumping through hoops—or so I’d imagine. Because while we were standing right on the fringes of a gathered crowd all that time, close enough to the action that Sara, consciously or not, would clap right along every time they burst into applause, we hadn’t seen a thing. Never once turning our heads to face the spectacle. That’s how closely she was paying her attention to me. It’s just that Sara came to this pet expo with the specific intent to see a dog jump through hoops. That was why she came here. If there was a reason I didn’t have this conversation with Sara any sooner, it’s because she finds herself in this situation a lot. A lot of people share their problems with her. And I can think of about a million reasons why. She’s this wonderful listener, so soulful and so spirited, so cool and artful and beautiful without any compromise of welcome. Who wouldn’t want to talk to her? Sara doesn’t resent this inclination that people have with her, not really, but she’s talked about it enough for me to know it takes a toll. And as Sophie, dumbfounded but laughing, showed us the videos on her phone of the jumping wonder dog, I suddenly wanted to crawl on hands and knees all the way back to New York. “I am so sorry,” I said, racked with guilt for holding Sara as my captive audience. But she didn’t want to hear it, insisting she was happy she could be there for me. Of course, I was happy about it too. That in recognizing my misery, and remembering it, she gave me the hope I so hungrily desired. But I’m not sure I gave her any other choice.

No less steady than a ticking clock, or less ominous, I woke up before my alarm to the repeated clink of metal pipe on metal pipe. With a parking lot that directly faces our apartment’s backyard, there’s a plumbing supply store nearby that occasionally starts the work day around six in the morning by throwing a bunch of metal pipes into these wooden crates. If it lasts two minutes, it lasts a lifetime, and more often than not—that’s just how it feels. Usually, I fall back asleep as soon as they’re done but not this morning. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was Sara’s grip on my shoulders, maybe it was my mother’s quavering command over the phone, or maybe it was just Austin’s recent return to social media after two months offline that, selfishly, made so many things so much easier for me. All I know is my feet hadn’t yet touched the floor when I reached out to Austin, expressing my confusion, yet again, about his apparent change of heart. Asking if there was something I did, something I said, or something I wrote that made him go from feeling one thing to suddenly quite another. When I sent this message, this latest variation on the same old theme—begging to be wanted as badly as I want, to be missed as sorely as I miss—it was with a familiar anguish. This keening of a still-broken hearted boy, completely out of control. It was his response, however, that felt different. When Austin got back to me later that morning, I think I felt the final shard, the strongest, most mulish one of them all, chip right off my heart. Because while he assured me I hadn’t done anything to change his mind, Austin remained resolute in the uncertainty of it all. It wasn’t “if” this time, it was “maybe,” that maybe one day we will end up together but that I still have so much to learn about myself with a lot of hard work ahead—as I myself wrote, Austin reminded me, somewhere in that six page letter I left on his doorstep. “I have done everything I can to guard your feelings and support you during this time,” said Austin, “But I need to be honest and blunt.” As prescriptive as a physician, but with the same aim to heal, he told me what I needed to do if I intend on feeling better. He has done so much to take care of me, long after he was obliged, and as honest and blunt as his suggestions may have been, I knew that it was, as always, with my best interest at heart. That very same morning, perhaps after realizing the potential dangers of her go-get-him!, my mom messaged me and said, “It seems like you’re thinking Austin doesn’t care as much as you do. But actually, he’s making the biggest sacrifice by letting you see what else is out there. He’s doing this for you, you realize that, right? You sometimes say he doesn’t care as much as you do but it’s the opposite. He loves you.” My choice of response wound up being the very same. What I said to my mom, I also said to Austin. “I know.”

And yet I was wrecked. All the tears I surprisingly didn’t shed that morning were waiting for me during my walk to the museum from Delancey-Essex. I would pull it together in time, steeling myself for the day of tours still ahead of me, but I wasn’t finished. On the train that evening, and during my walk from the M, and back home again in my apartment, I cried. Sitting on the bamboo chair in my bedroom, I could almost see it. Everything I was crying for, it appeared to me suddenly as this black metal box lodged inside my chest, smashing its pointed corners against my ribs on every sob. Fitting there inside of me, just barely, and only because everything else seemed to be gone. And I cried at work, too. At first on my own but then, twice more, with others. Jarod had, more or less, stopped talking to me. I had given him good reason to hope, only to take it all away in writing. I’m sure he was mad but that’s not what prompted his silence. It was instead the far more bitter pill of sadness, of disappointment, and a hopelessness all his own. He was so upset and I was the cause of it. To hold a person’s heart in your hands—it is an immense responsibility. “But that’s not really the right word, responsibility, that’s not what I mean,” I said to Jarod, sitting across from him in the break room that day for our first proper conversation about all this. “I just mean that I don’t want to be the reason for any more pain. I want to protect you. From myself.” His mouth was quivering and the suggestion of tears was in his eyes. Distraught, Jarod said, “That is the saddest possible thing you could’ve said.” But Jarod loves the truth, that’s what he always says. For him, there is no greater virtue. Choosing to believe that, I told him what’s keeping me from happiness. Sharing with him the fear, my ultimate fear, that makes the abject misery of these last four months somehow preferable to a brighter future. For the first time, I cried in front of Jarod. I might as well have been totally naked, I was so exposed. And while most people would have recoiled at such a sight, at such stark vulnerability, he didn’t turn away. If anything, Jarod seemed to be looking at me closer than ever. “But really,” I said, finally, “These are all things I should be telling a therapist.”

It’s like he knows, sometimes. Before I’ve even had the chance to wish him a good morning, or ask what albums soundtracked his Sunday afternoon, before he’s even heard my voice, Daryl will turn to me and say, “You okay, brother?” Talking to him, listening to him, being heard by him, it is nothing short of a miracle. I hope I know him forever. Just like me, Daryl works every Monday and rounding the corner into the break room kitchen that morning, right beside the window, sitting in his chair and reading his book, as always, I found him. Taking a seat right across from him, I told Daryl what was going on. Coworkers came and went through the kitchen to fill up their water bottles or top off their coffee and, with one hand, I was shielding my face, concealing my tears from them as best I could. But with the other, and with finer clarity than the fallible human eye could ever grant, I was being seen. Reaching out for me across the table to wrap his fingers around my own, and not letting go until I seemed ready, Daryl held my hand. There is safety in the dark, Daryl said. In the uncertainty, in the unknowing, in all my fumbling and free falling, despite how it feels, there is still safety there. Who I was a year ago, six months ago, six weeks ago is not who I am anymore. I am becoming a different person and that is painful, and it will remain painful, in ways I can’t yet comprehend or imagine. “You don’t know that,” Daryl said, when I suggested I was as low as could be. “You don’t. But your hopelessness? That hopelessness you feel, Brian, you know what I think that means? You’re close to the finish line.” I still can’t imagine it, and a greater part of me doesn’t even want to. How it will feel on that first fateful morning when I wake up with a restful heart. The first Saturday night I can spend contentedly at home, let alone a Saturday night joyfully among the living. The meals I’ll have the stomach for. The pictures I’ll hang on my wall. When I can watch Casablanca again, or The Wizard of Oz. When the sound of his name becomes as sweet as an old favorite song playing overhead in the supermarket and, up and down the aisles, I can sing right along. When, at last, I reach the end of this race and I cross that finish line and throw myself, spent, right onto the ground. Until then, I can’t know. Until then, I am still running. But once I get there, in the time it takes me to catch my breath, I will try and find the words.

Please don’t say Austin, please don’t say Austin, please don’t say Austin, I thought to myself only for Jarod to respond, “Austin.” Still in New Hampshire a couple days after Thanksgiving, it was so cold I could barely move my fingers to type these texts but nevertheless, I was out for my walk. Jarod had just interviewed for another job and, after asking him how it went, he said, “Honestly, I was very distracted because I was receiving unrelated and upsetting texts.” They were from a particular friend of his. I’d him met once before, at Jarod’s birthday party back in April. He was sweet, this friend, his face as warm and dopey as a cow’s. In what felt like nothing more than a friendly gesture, he invited me to his own birthday party a few weeks later. An invitation that, in Jarod’s eyes, was so ridiculous he laughed and laughed until he was red in the face. It’s always something with Jarod’s friends. Wondering what he said to him during the interview, Jarod stopped me dead in my tracks when he replied, “Do you want the whole truth?” Because before I even got his dreaded answer to my question about who this whole truth involved, despite all my pleas, I knew—Austin. And I was off to the races. Suddenly imagining that he’s done x-y-z with so-and-so, or that he’s already in a serious relationship with someone hotter and younger but mustached all the same. Bracing for the worst, I told Jarod to tell me what he’s heard. And anticipating destruction, that I was seconds away from losing my mind, what I felt instead was relief. Austin is on a dating app. Compared to my delusions, this was nothing. This was almost okay. But this wasn’t everything.

Again, Jarod asked if I really wanted to know, giving me an out while I still could, even though he knew, even though we both knew, that I never stood a chance. And so Jarod sent me what this friend had to say about Austin—but also about me. Mentioning some specific boys by name who Austin has liked, this friend said I should forget about looking for another man’s shoes at Austin’s apartment when, in his eyes, and in as many words, he has obviously moved on. That he is out in the streets. And that, above all else, I should be embarrassed for still hemming and hawing over this unbelievably deep soul connection of ours. Of course—he doesn’t know me, not really. And he certainly doesn’t know Austin. But he does know how I feel. He reads my writing, so he knows. And when he delivered this news to Jarod, he was gleeful. This was his pleasure. I wasn’t just surprised by the meanness of these remarks, I was unmoored by it. A blow to the head would’ve felt less violent, I swear. Because I don’t fault Austin for putting himself out there, I can’t, especially now that I’ve done some putting out of my own. It may have been over the clothes and stopped before anything even began but it was with Jarod—my friend and coworker of several years, whose name Austin heard me mention many, many times. If our roles were reversed, this would kill me. I have to let Austin do what he wants to do, even with boys whose names I recognize, boys I’ve met, boys with mustaches. It’s just that these boys with mustaches are all friends with Jarod. Jarod knows too much, and I know he knows too much, and that’s too much to bear. He has more access to Austin’s private life now than I do. If I was feeling knocked off my feet—and I was—this was why. Insisting he never wanted to know, that he didn’t ask to be burdened with information that suddenly had to become some sort of secret, Jarod said he felt awful. But I felt played with. Just totally bought and sold. Mocked in a group chat of gay guys who make navigating this mean world of living single look so stupidly easy. All of a sudden, I felt like a child. Because maybe this was a concerted effort, some grand plot. That if Brian could only learn that his ex-boyfriend has moved on, that Austin’s shoes just might be on some other boy’s doorstep, perhaps Brian will permit himself to do the same. Who exactly I’m apologizing to here, I don’t know, but I’m sorry to say—it didn’t work.

I’m always looking. On certain train platforms, at particular street corners, just in case—I look. “...and thinking you’ll be there, I walk a little faster…” Knowing he’d want to see this movie as badly as I did, and as soon as he possibly could, and that this theater is within walking distance of his apartment, I took my seat at BAM for the 7:15 showing of Queer and I looked for him. The lights went down and the film began but still I searched, straining to hear a laugh I’d know in a crowd of thousands. It was a packed house, but he wasn’t there. Jarod also went to the movies that night, joining a group of friends that included, naturally, one of Austin’s Hinge matches. “Resisting the urge to ask the question I want to ask,” I said to Jarod. Because surely it had been a topic of conversation for them. Surely there was more to know, new details that have emerged, and Jarod heard all about it. But still I resisted, knowing I needed to stay in the dark. But Jarod wouldn’t let me. “R— did not message him back, just confirmed,” he said. “I think Austin just commented on a photo/answer, that’s all. But I also found out he commented on K—’s answer. Too much!” Too much. Much too much too much. I had already made something clear to Jarod: I did not want to hear about this again. That if he was privy to any more gossip, or any new details, he was not to tell me about it. But now there was yet another name for me to worry about, another person I already knew, another boy with a mustache. “Jarod stop,” I said. He did but it was already too late. I was out of my mind. Feeling just absolutely insane. Jarod said he was sorry, that he wasn’t playing with me, that it was all so unfair, but when he asked “Do you want me to call?”, I was being wholly sincere when I asked, “Call who?” Call me, of course. It seems that was all the encouragement I needed. Hovering one finger over my phone, just a couple minutes before midnight, I couldn’t bear to look when I finally pressed that button and placed the call. With a racing heart, and breath already catching in my throat, I waited for Austin to pick up his phone.

With concern and fear in his voice, a voice I hadn’t heard at all in a month and a half, Austin asked where I was and if I was okay. God knows what he was thinking. And breathless with nerves, I was no help. Minutes went by before I managed to string together an entire sentence and, even then, it hardly soothed—“I don’t know if I should share this with you.” All week long, I deliberated, wondering if being a 24 year old’s subject of gossip was worth sharing, let alone worrying about. Questioning if I wanted to bring that old exchange of ours back to life, a conversation that slips further down the inbox with every passing day, on account of something so petty. But it was always the same thought that kept me from doing it—that Austin would ask “Who told you this?” and I’d have to say “Jarod.” That thanks to the first boy I kissed since the end of our relationship, here I was to—do what, exactly? Warn Austin? Scare him? Police how he’s going about his single life with this implicit reminder of my saintly goodness? Having my cake, this bitter, bitter cake, and eating it too. But when Austin said I could tell him anything, I knew to believe him. He listened to me and what he was right to consider absurd, he considered absurd. And what I hoped he’d consider cruel, he considered cruel. “He’s probably never been in love before,” said Austin, who didn’t recognize Jarod’s friend by name but by Twitter handle, thereby speaking volumes. We were on the same page about everything, Austin and I, and no one in my life, not a soul, had ever brought me so much comfort. A thousand pounds lifted clean off my heart and flew right out the window. “None of that’s true and, honestly, I wasn’t even planning on using Hinge,” Austin said. “But then I read that you’d, you know…that you kissed your friend and I thought—whatever, I guess I will.” I had a feeling. That up until he got word I’d had my first date, my first whatever, he’d hold off. That Austin would wait for me. Figuring that that’s just the kind of person he is. After maybe twenty minutes or so, we put this topic to bed. But then we kept talking.

For the first time in a long time, the first time since summer, he didn’t feel like a stranger to me—he was just Austin. We laughed so much. He told me about Wren’s new braids, and how his niece got lost for three terrifying minutes at Aerlie Gardens, and that he recently went to a Broadway show where he recognized his seatmate as the cello-playing child actress from School of Rock. Realizing we were both making our way through the audiobook of Cher’s memoir, Austin said, “I was just telling Kiera that it’s actually been making me sad, listening to it, because every other line out of Cher’s mouth has me thinking, God, Brian would crack up at that.’” Hanging up, always, was the hardest thing. Every other time we talked on the phone since I moved out, I’d bargain and beg for more. No amount of silence on the line stinging as badly as silence on my own. But when it seemed we’d caught each other up on everything, that there was nothing left to say, I didn’t fight it. It was past 1:30 in the morning by then. We talked for an hour and forty-five minutes.

I was about to leave for my next tour when I heard Jarod reading aloud my text messages to him. I was down on the first floor of our break room while he was up on the second and, even though he was technically only talking to Willa, his voice carried clear through the whole building. Our correspondence, suddenly, public record. During my minute of eavesdropping—if overhearing things I myself said can even qualify as such—I didn’t hear anything new. Because if this was how I learned of the newest happenings in Austin’s life, and I think about how I might’ve reacted to that—it terrifies me. “Jarod!” I texted him, to no avail, as he continued rattling on. “I can hear you! I don’t appreciate this! Quit it!” A face-to-face confrontation would have to wait because, in the meantime, I had people to impress. My cousin Kelcey was visiting the city with her French fiance and they wanted to come to the museum. It’s always risky having people who know me on a tour, but the visitors were great so I was great. It can feel like nothing short of ministry, a good tour. Telling Kelcey and Arnaud I’d join them for drinks just as soon as I freshened up, I went back to the break room to yell at Jarod. In the closest thing to an inconspicuous corner of that ceaselessly conspicuous break room, I told Jarod I had no interest, no desire, and no tolerance to be swept up in all this gossip. That I’m too sensitive for it. That it will destroy me. And that, above all else, I’m just not used to it. That my friends, even at his age, never acted this way, and shooting to kill when I said, “Birds of a feather, Jarod.” He was hurt. I saw shame on his face, and disappointment, and sadness. Walking away from him, I felt a harshness settle in my heart. I can be just as cruel as the rest of them.

Cheersing drinks on my mother’s dime, I wished Kelcey a happy birthday. Her mom is my godmother and my mom is Kelcey’s and, when I told her about our plans for the night, she sent me money for a first round of drinks. Kelcey turned 30 that day. Waiting for us at the bar was a friend of theirs who recently moved to New York. He was straight but wore a necklace and had long blond hair that fell to his shoulders in these tight, moussed ringlets. After the initial plan to go to a “hot dog speakeasy” fell through, we just hung around a couple bars. In another life, Kelcey and I would be sisters, not cousins. Telling me stories about the kids she works with as a speech pathologist, I looked at the clownish elasticity of her face, and listened to the goofy depths of her laugh, and I didn’t just see myself—I saw our mothers. We also have the same little crooked tooth, something we both got from our dads, two men who are only related by marriage. Sitting around a table at a place called Goodnight Sonny, after spending most of the night engaged in separate conversations, we all started chatting—about artificial intelligence. Disturbing me to my core, I see AI as a truly apocalyptic technology that will only make dumb people dumber and poor people poorer. This isn’t the washing machine, or the television set, or the locomotive striking fear into the heart of a Luddite. This is the mind. But with a kind of irony only a real human spirit could properly appreciate—I couldn’t imagine anything quite so boring as talking about it. But I played nice, biting my tongue, hard enough to draw blood, as their friend said to Kelcey, “You know, you should really think about optimizing your workload. You have assistants, right? Two? Wow. Cause, look, there’s no way around the human connection. The relationship you have with the students—that’s not going anywhere. Instead, just let it streamline things. All that work those two assistants do? AI can do it instead.” I was appalled and thankfully, ever my sister, so was Kelcey. Reminding him that those assistants are people who do that job to earn the money that supports their families, he wasn’t convinced. AI won’t take jobs away from people, he argued, it will free people from those jobs, from the jobs no person should have to do. And, for his example, he mentioned grocery store cashiers. What a fool. My mother and Kelcey’s mother both work in grocery stores. They ring people up at the register. That is how they make a living. “My mom would never retire,” said Kelcey. “She needs to work. She loves it.” And my mom, I said, is the same way. But still he insisted that our mothers would just find other ways to fill their time. And maybe that’s true. Maybe we are thinking too small. Like just a couple feeble-minded humans, bound together by something as pointless as blood.

Looking fabulous in these fuschia pleated shorts and a black cashmere sweater that she found, naturellement, out on the sidewalk, Billie took my coat and welcomed me to her birthday party. The pleasure was all mine. This was my first time at her house and my first time meeting her family, let alone all her other friends in attendance. And even once another Educator from the museum showed up, I was still the only attendee speaking only one language. And that includes Billie’s 11-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son. A true blue American. Dinner was served and we took our seats. To my right, there was a woman from Austria who used to direct music videos and documentaries but has stayed at home the last couple years to take care of a daughter with autism. It’s a tricky thing, talking to someone about the work they no longer do, art they no longer make. And to my left, there was a couple—a college professor with a little ski slope nose and a writer named Hakim with these great, brooding brown eyes. She was all right angles—in conversation, in appearance, in spirit—while he was all curves. And as one, they were perfect. “Memoir, I guess, I write about myself,” I said, after she asked what kind of writing I do, a question and answer that didn’t feel nearly as embarrassing as it does with museum visitors. Likely insulting them in the process, I asked if they’d ever read Annie Ernaux. “She’s just…everything to me,” I said, “She is my ultimate inspiration.” Telling them I keep a diary, privately and—as of late—publicly too, Hakim asked if it’s cathartic and I said that it’s not. I’m not letting go of anything, not a thing, in writing about my life. I’m hoarding it. Saving as much time as I possibly can, and as much memory. And soon, Hakim shared a memory of his own.

“I’m Palestinian but I grew up in Israel,” he said. “Two million Arabs live in Israel, of course. But anyway, for really my whole upbringing, Israel was at war with Hezbollah. And Israel, as I’m sure you all know, has its Iron Dome which blocks rockets and missiles. This military capacity to block attacks. But also a capacity to choose which attacks they block. Where we lived, it was all Palestinian, all Arab, and the apartment building right across the street from us one day—bombed to bits. So we’re encouraged, by the Israeli government, to create makeshift bomb shelters in our own homes and eventually…eventually…they distributed gas masks. My father, I remember, he made our shelter out of one of the closets, sealing all the cracks with duct tape and soaking a towel in chlorine to jam under the door. And, one afternoon, the air raid sirens go off and there’s fear of an attack and my father is begging us all to go into the closet but my brother—typical teenager, you know—he refuses to do it. And so my father, finally, he yells, ‘Okay, your choice—you die!’ Well. Nothing happened. But uh, years later, twenty years later, it was revealed that all of those gas masks? The gas masks that Israel provided to its Palestinian citizens? They were all faulty. They never worked. We would have died.”

It was past six o’clock on a Friday evening and Sophie and I were the last two Educators still in the break room. She was getting dinner that night with an old boss and I was meeting up for drinks with Ashleigh but it was still too early for either of us to get going. Showing me a picture of Timmy Chalamet wearing a sweater styled as a scarf during some recent promo for A Complete Unknown, Sophie was surprised to learn that I love Bob Dylan. According to Apple, Madonna was my most-listened-to artist each and every month this year—except for October, when it was Bob Dylan. “What happened in October?” a couple people have asked. “What didn’t happen in October?” is how I’ve chosen to respond. Talking about his mastery of the long song, and how much I love a long song, Sophie disagreed. Something really short, for her, often carrying greater weight. I asked if she’s ever heard “Bless the Telephone” by Labi Siffre and, reading my mind, she pulled it up on her phone and played it out loud. For the next minute and forty-one seconds, Sophie and I listened to the music. There’s this part where he sings, “...It’s nice to hear you say hello, and how are things with you, I love you...” and what he does with that “I love you”—it’s like a miracle to me. And maybe to Sophie too. Because with the softest little groan, Sophie rested her head right down on the table in front of us, a moment after hearing his “I love you.”

It was Kiera’s birthday that night. And as I walked up Orchard Street en route to Lucien for drinks with Ashleigh, I wondered what was happening in Clinton Hill. If Austin and Kiera were throwing a party at the apartment, or hosting a dinner, or getting ready for a night out. They’re close. Even before I moved out, it was clear they’d make good friends. And I really meant it, back in August, during a conversation in our living room that we both figured was our last, when I told Kiera how relieved I was to know Austin would be living with a roommate he likes. Since I left, Austin and Kiera rearranged the furniture, and have had weekend guests, and put up a projector to watch movies together, making the living room into a room for living. We never spent much time in there, Austin and I, never. Some of these changes to the apartment, he himself told me about. The rest, I figured out on my own. Scrolling through my feed or tapping through stories only to be waylaid by a picture of a place I once called home, a place I loved so dearly—that I barely recognize anymore. It was then that something occurred to me, like a matter of fact. It was 29 degrees, I just listened to “Bless the Telephone” for the fifth time in a row, Ashleigh would get to Lucien at 7:10—and I will never live in that apartment ever again. They have their own dynamic, Austin and Kiera, their own rapport, two people who’ve gotten used to the pleasure of sharing an apartment with one less person. I don’t need to hope they’re in good company, I’m certain of it. They’ve made a life and I don’t live there. Because even if all the twists of fate coiled toward reunion, and we got back together, and once again we shared that home—how strange. Strange for her, strange for me, strange for Austin. Not long ago, this felt inevitable. It felt simple. But there are a million things in the way. A million things would need to happen, perfectly, and at just the right time. Pulling up my scarf to cover my face, bracing the cold as best I could, I thought, It’s never gonna happen, is it?

“Am I being a bad person?” I asked Erica and Grace, seated for dinner at Nam Son, the Vietnamese place on Grand Street that’s become something of our go-to. Like Carrie and the girls at the coffee shop. (We wish.) It was a Saturday night and, after hearing I had time to spare before an 8:30 movie but not enough time to go home first, Erica suggested we get dinner. Erica is always suggesting we get dinner. No sooner did we take our seats than the waiter delivered us a hot pot of tea. A couple tables away, we noticed an old man with bushy eyebrows, long hair, and a huge white beard. Off the clock, Santa Claus was enjoying a steaming bowl of pho. It was bitterly cold out, frigid, and we all woke up that morning to a scant inch of snow on the ground. And before we even ordered, the conversation landed on Jarod. I was seeing Carol with him that night. Every year since it came out, and always at Christmastime, he’s seen it in theaters. It’s a very important film to him and he bought our tickets well in advance. But a couple days after our spat in the break room—when I was still smarting from hearing my texts read aloud—Jarod came up to me and asked if I’d changed my mind. Making sure I still wanted to join him to the movie. I wanted to hug him, he looked so nervous. “Of course, I’ll go,” I said. Erica and Grace know it all. I tell them everything and I know Jarod does too. But tucking into our dinner, as Erica handed me chopsticks and Grace passed me a soup spoon, something had seemed to shift. This wasn’t just some frothy gossip about a workplace crush—asking me what I want, and how I feel, and where I see this going, it was a mediation. Though Grace did stand her ground, and in my defense, arguing that Jarod is a willing participant in all this, that he knows full well about that other person in my heart and on my mind, and if he keeps at it anyway—that’s on him. But Grace is young, of course. Younger even than Jarod. And it was Erica, only one year my junior, who reminded us of this. “So, what, I’m the Carol now?” I said. “I was always the Therese!”

Pointing at Grace’s phone, Erica said, “Your mom.” It only lasted a minute or so, their conversation, with Grace mentioning something about her North Face as Erica and I figured out the bill. Hanging up, Grace told us that her mom was just wondering if she got home yet. Calling to make sure that her daughter, on this cold, cold night, was warm.

I’d only been here once before but I was certain I sat in this same exact seat. Pulling my scarf out from the collar of my coat, I found Jarod over on the left side of the bar, already finished with his drink. Years ago, I swear I sat right there with a certain boy who, in time, put things in such stark relief for me. That this wasn’t what I wanted but that! I tried to be gentle about it, when the time came, but I never heard from him again. “...Everything comes full circle…” When they announced overhead that the theater was now seating for Carol, I let Jarod choose. I wanted his experience to be perfect, which is just to say: I wanted him to cry. For him, the possibility of that was frightful. Telling me that, after masochistically watching Call Me By Your Name the previous week, his roommate was so “terrified” by his “intense wailing” that she gave him her vape as consolation. But that was unusual. He’s tough, Jarod. A brash, blazing character whose young little life hasn’t been easy. Though he does have his protectors. Izzy and Smidge, Ray and Hannah. And tonight, Erica and Grace. His tender heart so rarely gets its chance to burst, but there are people who look out for him, birds of another feather who look out for that heart, and I’m so happy for it. Almost as happy as I was sitting there beside him as Therese read Carol’s letter in front of the diner. Because as she wept in the backseat, and raced out of the car to throw up in the grass, suddenly, I heard something new in his breath. A sharp and quickened pace. I didn’t look at him but I knew. Jarod was crying.

Looking out the window of the B26 on a Sunday afternoon, riding the bus from Ridgewood to Clinton Hill, I was on my way to break into my old apartment. Earlier that week, I got a text from Kiera about having some mail for me, specifically a package that Aunt Patti mistakenly sent to my old address. “Austin is out of town now,” she said. “But I want to make sure it gets to you before the holidays.” But she made a huge mistake. Because when I offered to come by on Sunday and grab it from the hall, Kiera told me her plans for that afternoon—she had tickets to see Meet Me in St. Louis at the Museum of Moving Image. Immediately, I did the math. A 31 minute drive, multiplied by two—just in case she indulged in a car both ways—plus a 113 minute runtime equaled three hours of an empty apartment. For three hours, there’d be nobody home. “Shannon, it’s going to take everything I have not to go into that apartment,” I said, hoping to hear some voice of reason from my best friend. “Well, when you do,” Shannon said. “Facetime me.” Grace was the only other person who knew about this and I was just as surprised to hear her say, “Do it.” Problematic counsel perhaps but considering the sources, and the goodness in both their hearts, I I took their word. Triple-checking that I had both sets of keys in my pants pocket, both old and new, I boarded that bus and felt worried for feeling so calm. Like I was on my way to the dentist’s office, not my ex-boyfriend’s apartment. Steady as can be, I imagined what I’d find. That I was about to see for myself everything that had changed, everything they moved, and removed, taking stock of every remaining token of my time there—and every erasure. Stepping into Austin’s bedroom, would I wonder, again, about men’s shoes? And if he started keeping a diary, and he didn’t bring it with him to North Carolina, and I found it sitting there on his desk, would I be able to leave it alone? No matter what I found, I couldn’t be mad at him and even worse—there could be no talking about it. Nevertheless, as a Technicolor Judy Garland was only just beginning to dazzle a roomful of moviegoers in Queens, I knocked on the apartment door. Christmas music was playing and I swore I heard footsteps but, telling myself it was just Travis and Kelly up on the third floor, I knocked again. Harder and louder this time, really ensuring that no one was there. And just as I was reaching for the lock with the key in my hand, the door opened and Kiera said, “Hi!”

Caught red-handed, all I could think to do was point a shaking finger inside and ask Kiera if I could use the bathroom. I can’t believe she lied, I thought to myself, as I pretended to pee and lamented my suddenly foiled attempt at burglarizing her home. Kiera was in the kitchen by the time I finished up my charade and I figured this was it. That I’d thank her once again and, out of sight, she’d insist it was nothing before I saw myself out and returned to the cold. Instead, drying her hands on a dish towel, she joined me in the living room and asked, “How have you been?” She stood over by the mantle while I stayed close to the door, still wearing my backpack and winter coat. Nervous enough to have cottonmouth, my lips were fully catching on my teeth as I tried to make small talk with Kiera, and tried even harder to keep my eyes from probing every square inch of the apartment. But before long, and much to my surprise, Kiera and I were just having a conversation—and all it required was a little ego boost. Telling her how much I love living in Ridgewood, she said, “Yeah, I’ve had a couple friends send me pictures of you on the M, asking, ‘Isn’t this your old roommate?’” Like a latter day Greta Garbo. Kiera doesn’t love Clinton Hill and I can understand that now. Now that I live in a neighborhood where I hear New York accents, and where so many of my neighbors are immigrant families, and where I once saw a man with slicked-back hair and mutton chops heave himself out of his car on a Sunday evening after working—I have to imagine—the Elvis impersonator circuit. Clinton Hill was the be-all-end-all for me but now, thinking back to those tree-lined streets, to that pocket of brownstone Brooklyn I adored so much, in all its beauty, I see no charm. But when I asked if she’d keep living here come May, when their lease is up, she said she’s still not sure. She mentioned him a couple times and how couldn’t she—we wound up talking for over an hour—but casually enough for this “Austin” person to sound almost like a stranger. Knowing Kiera had errands to run and a holiday party to go to, and that it was these frenzied demands of December that nixed her plans to go see Meet Me in St. Louis, I put it plainly, “I’m going to ask you a very naked and vulnerable question—does he miss me?” With a withering glance that nevertheless brimmed over with care, she said, “Now, that’s a leading question…” Of course he misses me, and I know that, and she knows that I know that. But we also both knew what an impossible corner she’d suddenly found herself backed into. She could either betray Austin’s trust or further break my heart and, as generous as Christmas, she made a choice.

“It was only recently that he stopped saying my boyfriend Brian,” she said. “He mentions you a lot. And whenever you’d come up in a story, he’d always say my boyfriend Brian. He’s stopped that. But he doesn’t call you his ex, I’ve never heard him say that. Now, you’re always just Brian.”

Earlier, just before I got off the bus, I reached out to Grace telling her I was about to do it, that I was on my way to my old apartment. Among other things, she said, “I hope you find something beautiful in this experience.” And that became my prayer. Stepping onto Putnam Avenue and rounding the corner onto my old block, I acknowledged that I was about to do something wrong, that I was being dishonest, that this was a transgression and I was aware of it—but that I still hoped I might find something beautiful. Agreeing to Kiera’s surprising suggestion that we get coffee sometime soon, I said goodbye to her and stepped back outside. All week, when I thought about this ploy of mine, and imagined this exact moment of departure, I anticipated destruction. That all my ugliest fears would suddenly ring true after spending the last several hours hungrily seeking their confirmation and that, leaving the building, I’d be broken. But as I walked all the way home to Ridgewood that afternoon, firm on my two feet, I was okay. Not bothering to look through the bag of mail until I got back to my apartment, I pulled out the package from Aunt Patti, and a card from her as well, and an old sweater of mine that somehow got lost in the move. And tucked inside that sweater, I found a gift tied up with ribbon. Written on its brown paper wrapping, blurry through my almost endless tears, I read, “Merry Christmas, Brian. I couldn’t resist. Love, Austin.” Nothing happened as I thought it would, and I thank God for that.

It was a couple days before Christmas and, other than me and Jarod, all the other Educators still working at the museum were old New Yorkers or native New Yorkers. It was Jarod who pointed this out to me. I’m not sure I would’ve noticed—but he did. “I know you do,” he said, when I admitted to putting on an accent, Yiddish-inflected to boot, whenever I’m talking to Ruth. She was among the holdovers. I’ve gotten into the habit of recording our break room conversations on my phone. Maybe this is wrong, seeing as I’ve never asked for her permission, but I’m certain of the greater sin—for there to be no document of everything and anything my cherished 77-year-old colleague has to say. I could listen to her forever. She’ll tell me where she and her sons went out to eat in L.A. or how much she loved Emilia Perez and the joy I feel—it’s like I’m meeting my hero. She grew up in the city but Ruth was born at a displaced persons camp in Berlin to parents who survived the Holocaust. To a father who was lovely but a mother whose survivor’s guilt kept her at an embittered distance from all life’s pleasures. “Wherever she was, whatever apartment we were in, she was never happy, never liked it. Moaned and groaned, she’d want to move. But the minute we got to the next place, it was a mistake. One time my father signed a lease—and she fainted. And then he looks at the landlord and says, ‘I’d take this back but…she’ll do this wherever she goes.’” I laughed so hard, and so did she. “Like her, I suffered from depression, and that made me dislike her more because we were similar. Of course! But I remember when I went for therapy when I was 18, I didn’t even know that depression was an illness. I just said, ‘My mother’s in me.’ And he would go, ‘Well—kick her out.’ And I would go, ‘Well—I can’t.’” No, we can’t.

On the corner of 34th and 6th, I called my mother. Surrounded by European tourists spending the holiday in the city, I was a half hour early for my train to Aunt Karen’s house, where I’d spend the afternoon with Jillian, Nana, Aunt Patti and Uncle Steve, but not my parents. Spending the night at Lindsay’s house so they could wake up with their grandson to the wonder of Christmas morning, they stayed in New Hampshire. I was closer to her than I’ve been in years, New Jersey several hundred miles nearer to them than North Carolina, but the clipped, remote tone in my mother’s voice was the same as ever. Christmas, it makes us both blue. And then she tells me, “Nana’s not coming.” Insecure about her mobility, Nana didn’t feel up to the challenge of getting in and out of a car, and in and out of someone else’s house. God forbid something happen, none of us pushed the issue. But it was Christmas Day and Nana would be all alone. As I walked to Penn Station, I wondered how she felt. If she was depressed to spend the day by herself, or relieved. I wondered how often she cries, and what it was that mostly recently brought her to tears, and if it made her feel any better. I could ask Nana these things, and record her answers, and deliver us from that mortal sin of this woman’s life coming and going without a trace. Whether or not I’ll ever do this with her, with or without her permission, I really don’t know. But looking out the window at snow on the train tracks, it wouldn’t be this Christmas.

I woke up that morning and went to bed that night in New York City. In my six years of living here, this was my first time sticking around for the holidays. A New Yorker becomes a New Yorker as soon as they want to be, that’s my belief, but there is something to be said for a rite of passage. Offering to make us dinner one night, I went straight to Ethan’s apartment from work. The museum is only closed on Christmas and New Year’s so I was there all week—though we do get a daily bonus of $60 for working those days. I’ll try not to spend it all in one place. Asking me if I was a music-while-cooking person, I didn’t make it too far into my yarn about listening to celebrity memoirs during my weekly preparation of slop before Ethan said, “That was my way of saying ‘put on music.’” Hospitable in spirit, with a million friends who always show up for him, Ethan is having a hard time living in his studio apartment. There’s just not enough space to offer what he wants. Only just starting to prepare the meal, Ethan explained that the afternoon got away from him after answering a call from a friend who clearly needed to talk. Every relationship has one perpetual fight, that’s something I first heard from Ethan himself, back in March during his one man show. And when I told him just how often I still think about that idea, he said I’m not alone. That more than anything else, that’s what resonated the most with his audience. Rolling my eyes, I said, “What an original.” I did most of the talking, which still astounds me, even after all these months. That this year has given me so much to talk about and, all the more astounding, that I’ve found so many people who will listen. “You don’t want ‘Fuck the Pain Away’ by Peaches to soundtrack this moment?” I said after Ethan pulled out his grandfather’s menorah and asked me to turn off the music. Striking a match, he lit the candles and sang the prayer. “Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, asher kid'shanu b-mitzvotav, v-tzivanu l'hadlik ner shel Hanukkah.” Not thinking, Ethan put the plastic bag full of candles on top of his radiator and, by the time he realized his mistake, they were one big molten clump. Something aptly “Talmudic” about that, I’d say, though maybe I shouldn’t. Thanking him for dinner, Ethan replied that a meal is only as good as its guests—a meal he himself considered “just alright” after our first bites. Reminding him of this, Ethan said, “And I meant it.”

This morning, I will wake up on New Year’s Eve at 7:30 to the sound of my alarm, a piece of music by Bach from a cantata that translates to “Awake, calls the voice to us.” It has been my alarm every morning for the last five years and only just now am I learning this. Hannah will leave for work as I assemble my percolator and cook my oatmeal and she’ll say goodbye to me by name, and I will wonder if she understands how warmly that touches me. Fighting with Jarod once again about the latest example of the same old thing, I will question how much I can trust him and he will tell me he feels sick to his stomach because of it. I’ll write until it feels finished and then I’ll change my clothes and leave for my walk. I’ll call Shannon and, if she answers, we’ll laugh for as long as we can. With no plans tonight, no parties to attend, I won’t be in any rush. Every last minute of this year will be my own, time will be all mine. And I will think about Austin. On my walk to the Ridgewood Reservoir, and then again on my way back home, I will pass by Mount Judah Cemetery with its 54,000 gravestones. Fifty-four thousand people who held babies in their arms, and washed the dishes, and squeezed the fat on their hips, and wondered at midnight about someone they love. Men and women who led an entire life as richly as they possibly could—without a single living soul on this earth who still remembers their name. There’s a mausoleum on the corner with a mosaicked message on its facade and though I’ve read it many times before, I will read it again. To the reader. As you are now, once were we. As we are now, you must be. Be honorable, act always kindly. This is a long journey. The words are made up of many broken pieces but it’s written still in stone.

“Less auto-fiction,” said Jarod, “And more erotica.” We were sitting on his tiny couch in his tiny apartment and I’d just asked what his friend meant when they said I needed to stop writing like Rachel Cusk and start writing like Anaïs Nin. Getting my answer, I said, “Well, that’s never gonna happen.” I insisted Jarod keep his Saturday evening open, telling him we could just hang out for a couple hours before I went my way and he went his, bounding off into the night, all nervy jouissance, born, as he was, in the year of the rabbit. Taking my shoes off at his front door, Jarod told me his roommate was at a Diwali party on the Upper East Side and while it’d probably go late enough for him to show up before it was over—he wasn’t planning on it. We were going to watch a movie at first, before a couple episodes of Sex and the City seemed more realistic, only for the night to end without ever turning on the television. The night before, putting on the episode where the girls go to a Yankees game, I resisted the urge to record and share the moment when Miranda says, “You broke up with him, remember?” and Carrie, still devastated by her (first) breakup with Big, says, “Yeah, right, right. And that’s supposed to make me, what, happy?” Ever the Carrie. Jarod pledges his allegiance more ardently to Girls which makes sense to me. At least until I remember that I was heading off to college when the show first premiered while Jarod was entering the eighth grade. Putting our legs up on the couch, we were nose to toes, a latter day Ida and Bessie Rogarshevsky. I saw him at work earlier that day but, in the meantime, he changed his clothes and shaved his face. We talked and talked. Mostly about his beloved grandmother, his Mimi, who died the week before. In reference to some Japanese movie about a group of newly-dead people who are told they can only bring a single memory from life with them into eternity, he told me Mimi’s answer. The first dance with Jarod’s grandfather at their wedding in 1955. Not until later did I realize I never asked Jarod what his memory would be. Of course, Jarod didn’t ask me either but I don’t suppose that was an accident. Anyway, it was well past eleven and we’d been talking for hours when, finally, I suggested we get up from the couch and go lay on his bed.

Controlling his overhead light with an app on his phone, Jarod went through the ridiculous assortment of possible colors, the two of us laughing and groaning accordingly as his bedroom went from morgue to smoke shop to brothel. One long wall in his room is solid brick and once we chose an orangey-yellow, the one I liked best, it all became so very tenement. We were still talking—always talking, me and Jarod—but something changed. Fevered and pointless, total filler, it wasn’t words coming out of our mouths anymore, just sound. Babble on the brink of something. He might’ve still been listening to what I was saying but I certainly wasn’t. So, leaving the world of language, I crossed the borderline and kissed Jarod. And I felt like I was parallel parking a car. Steering the proverbial wheel left only to find myself going right. Not that it was bad, it wasn’t, it was just—different. The last time I kissed a new person for the first time was five-and-a-half years ago. And when I found myself feeling one thing while thinking of another, comparing and contrasting the here and now with the over and done with—reunited once more with language—I had to pull away. All of a sudden, I was exhausted. Smiling a forlorn smile, his face this squint-eyed front of some deeper disappointment, Jarod looked at me as I let him down easy. Telling him there’s so much on my mind, and so much work I need to do, work I haven’t even started yet. And that I am still just so completely heartbroken. Jarod said he knew this would happen. That despite our all-day-long exchanges, and the lingering contact of our eyes and hands, and the general growing tension between us over these last few months—he knew. I told Jarod he can be mad at me if he wants but he said he’d rather be hopeful. Of course, he has reason to be. This wasn’t the first time I’ve laid in a boy’s bed in Bushwick and told him I cherished our friendship too much to risk anything else. There’s history there. A lot was on my mind during that midnight walk home to Ridgewood but it was something Jarod said, maybe the truest thing he allowed himself all night, that laid heaviest on my heart. Because after hearing all my reasons why, or all my reasons why not, Jarod looked up at the ceiling and put a hand over his face as he said, “And where does this leave me?”

I moved to Ridgewood from Clinton Hill and yet I was walking to Bushwick to vote for president. Four years and two apartments later, I never got around to updating my registration. And sweating through my clothes on this eighty degree day in early November, I was overdressed. There’s plenty to be cynical about, and rightfully so, but I’m so glad I looked around just before I cast my vote and noticed how many Black women were there in the room with me. That’s something to believe in. Waking up the next morning before my seven o’clock alarm went off, I saw the news. How exhausting. Because even setting aside the policies, all the bills and acts and deregulations that’ll further erode the quality of life so many of his supporters falsely believe he champions, the greatest damage, I’m certain, will be spiritual. There will be more meanness, more cruelty. The world will become an even harsher place. So of course I understood what people were already feeling. Or the people in my orbit, at least. Their disappointment, sadness, fear. But what I couldn’t understand was shock. Waking up to the news that Donald Trump was president is nothing new. But scrolling around online, what did shock me was how quickly so many people had regressed to their 2016 selves, broadcasting a kind of earnestness that, as early as 2018, they themselves began to lampoon. I’m not faulting anybody their reaction. It’s all so dreadful. But I really do wonder—have we learned nothing?

Though I don’t think it’s wisdom that affords me this clarity. I’m not enlightened. I’m self-absorbed. God knows what’s going to happen. But none of it, not a thing, holds a candle to the end of my relationship. The pain I’m still feeling, the confusion, the anger—I cannot pretend it’s any less significant than a presidential election. I guess that’s insane, but it is the truth.

All settled at the table he booked for us, at the bar he picked out, Nick was the first to arrive. I showed up, breathlessly, a minute or two past the 6:30 reservation, despite getting to Manhattan two hours early for a walk around the river. And Ian, the picture of calm, was late. We are who we are. “It’s so hot,” I said as soon as I took my seat next to Nick only for Ian, however long later, to say essentially the same thing. It was the day after the election and the weather, eighty degrees once again, only added to the delirium. I didn’t pick up on this, feeling like Nick was contributing just as much as usual, but Ian knows him better than I do. Out of nowhere, he asked, “Nick, are you distracted?” So composed, so buoyant, one never sees Nick sweat. This took him by surprise, I think. Not just that Ian perceived something under that shiny surface but that he pointed it out. Nick, all told, was distracted. Telling us there’s a lot going on at work, new responsibilities that, without exaggeration, border on global diplomacy and that it’s all falling on his shoulders. It’s incredibly overwhelming. Listening to him, I couldn’t help thinking about my own life—my professional life, at least—and how simple it is. They’re much deeper people than this and we quickly moved on to another topic but, at the start of our time together, Nick and Ian talked balance transfers and I had to ask what that meant. I’ve never had a credit card. Is it pathetic, at 30 years old, that I’ve avoided so many trappings of adulthood? Or is it the ultimate blessing? I’ve got one of the more indulgent lives of anyone I know, with almost total freedom to do whatever I please, more now than ever. But over our martinis, as they ordered a third round while I ended the night with water, all I did was talk in such rigid absolutes. “I’d never go to a bar alone.” “Hate traveling, hate it, I’d gladly never leave New York ever again.” “It’s not exciting to me, the idea of going out and having sex, it’s stressful.” “I find no pleasure in food.” “That’s just not my nature.” “Absolutely not.” “Uh uh.” It’s something I mistook for personality, deciding as a teenager, as a child, that the contrarian’s way was the one for me. Saying yes to saying no. Endless opposition. It must be so exhausting. Perhaps it’s time I grow up.

“Are you going to leave your keys in the bag?” asked Grace, after telling her my plans to let myself into my old apartment that night and leave something for Austin at his doorstep. Her thought had already crossed my mind. Austin didn’t ask me to hand them over the day I moved out and, while he hasn’t mentioned them since, I know I shouldn’t have done what I did—I shouldn’t have kept the keys. But at least it wouldn’t be a surprise, this gesture. Weeks ago, back when I sent Austin a message I really believed was my last—until his disclosure about his Halloween party threw a wrench into everything—I told him that the next time I was in Clinton Hill, I’d drop off the sheets he lent me. But also that I still intended to write him a letter, a letter I’d been thinking about for months and putting off for just as long. Figuring I wasn’t ready while fearing that maybe I was. And when Maya’s owners asked if I could take care of her for a couple hours while they attended a wedding, ready or not, here it was—my next time in Clinton Hill. I was up until one in the morning the night before, writing. There will always be more to say but nevertheless I tried with those six pages, by hand, in ink, from me to him. The things I’m taking with me, and the things I hope he takes with him, how I could’ve done things better, and, at last, all the many wonderful things I wish for him. Finishing it, I felt like a sponge, like a rag. Spent and contorted, completely wrung out. As if I’d finally cried all the tears I had to spare. And yet looking at Grace, as knowing smiles crossed both our faces, I replied, “No.”

For the second time in a month, I took Maya for a walk past my old apartment. His bedroom light was on and, just as we were passing by, up there in the second floor window, stretching suddenly into the air, I saw his left arm. If only he knew about the ghost across the street who chose to understand this as a wave hello. Bringing Maya back home, I turned right back around to deliver what I owed him. Climbing the stoop, I inserted the key—but it did not turn. My heart sank. Until I realized he hadn’t changed the locks on me, I’d simply forgotten which of the deadbolts opened the door. I lived here for four years and, already, I forgot. Dry-mouthed and deadset, starved for this fix of an old familiar feeling in an old familiar place, I stepped inside. Travis and Kelly, at any moment, could come walking down from the third floor. Or Kiera could get home from an evening with friends to find her old roommate crouched and shame-faced on the landing. Or I could make it to that doorstep only to find a man’s pair of shoes that were too big or too small for Austin’s feet. None of that happened. Instead, I set down the bag and hurried back downstairs, the entrance already ajar so I could run outside the second I heard Austin investigate this strange knock on his door. But that didn’t happen either. Pushing my luck, I went up the stairs two at a time and knocked even harder on the door. And again, there was no answer. I left the building and walked away—but not without tapping my pants pocket to make sure the keys were still there, even though I have nothing left to give him.

Just as soon as she passes her evaluation, Sophie will start leading the tour at the museum about the Irish family. Sitting beside her at the computers one day, she told me something she read in her studies. “It was this woman sharing a memory of her great-grandmother who survived the Famine,” Sophie said. “That when her great-grandmother had to leave home, leave the cottage she’d known all her life and move to America, she refused to go unless she could bring with her a bucketful of live embers from the hearth. That nobody in her life, not in two hundred years, had ever let that fire go out. And the idea of just leaving that all behind—she couldn’t bear it.”

Mary appeared to me. My bedroom is on the backside of the apartment and in the yard of the building next door—the offices for a Christian station called Radio Maria—there’s a statue of Mary. But she’s been hidden. I could see some of her mantle these last few months, her hands folded in prayer, but she’s been otherwise hiding in the roses. With bushes to either side of her, the branches have long lost their blooms but not their foliage and I was waiting for the day when enough leaves had finally fallen that, even just in bits and pieces, I might see her face. Stepping out of bed, the morning after I left Austin my letter, I walked over to the window and felt tears immediately fill my eyes. The people at the radio station must have trimmed back the branches while I was at work yesterday because, unobscured and all of a sudden, there she was. The night before I moved out, back in September, Austin had something to give me. I didn’t anticipate this being a gift-giving occasion but, knowing him, I should have known. Wrapped in simple brown paper and tied with a red string, he had a present for me. As I opened the box, Austin said, “I just figured three is better than two…” In that new place I was about to call home, he knew there was an old painted picture of her nailed onto the building next door, and this statue of her down in that backyard, and now—ever so beatific from inside her gift-wrapping—one of my very own. Like a pilgrimage, like Lourdes come to Manhattan, Austin went to three different Catholic supply stores before finally finding a statuette of Mary he knew I’d like. “...somewhere in that ancient mystic trinity, you get three as a magic number…” I looked outside at Mary and more than anybody else, before anybody else, I wanted Austin to see this. Wanting him to know that what was still concealed just a day ago, by this morning, had revealed herself at last. But we’re not talking anymore. So I settled instead for a sign of the cross.

Laying down a couple blankets on top of the duvet, with the pillowcases already swapped out before he arrived, Jarod watched me prepare my bed for contact with his street clothes. “But I purposely didn’t sit down on the train,” he said. “This outfit is clean!” This was Jarod’s first time coming over to my place. “Those are the skylights I didn’t understand as skylights,” I said, giving him the grand tour. “My coffee percolator—will need to wash that later. Our fridge! My shelf is the top one. That’s where I keep my slop, there in that big Tupperware. See it? Hmm. What else…” The cats, like dogs, came right up to greet him. Back when I was looking for an apartment, there wasn’t a single listing remotely in my price range that didn’t already have a live-in cat, let alone two. Technically allergic and historically averse, I’ve never been a fan. But by the end of my first week in Ridgewood, I was taking a dozen pictures a day of Carmela and Meadow while coaxing their attention with “ps-ps-ps!” I swear I’m under some sort of spell. Infected with toxoplasmosis and sick with affection. I still never allow them in my bedroom but give the cats a couple more months and then get back to me. Sitting down in front of my bookshelf, Jarod cocked his head to read the titles as I pulled out my first edition copy of A Bintel Brief. The subtitle for this advice column collection reads, “Sixty years of letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward.” Flipping through it at random, I read aloud something written in 1908 by a 25-year-old who’d met a nice girl with a fatal flaw—she had a chin dimple and, per superstition, people with dimples in their chin lose their first husband or wife. “Signed,” we loved this, “The Unhappy Fool.” And when I showed Jarod all my Madonna cover issues of Rolling Stone, he asked if they arrived like that, neatly packaged in those plastic sleeves. “No,” I said. “That’s—that’s how they were presented to me.” I got them as a gift. The Bintel Brief, as well. All my most special things, really, were gifts. Laying on my bed and trying to identify which character trait is both the best and worst thing about ourselves, as one does, Jarod said, “I think you’re nice in a way that betrays your ability for meanness. That your capacity for cruelty comes from the same place as your compassion.” I didn’t take offense to that. In fact Jarod was barely finished with his sentence when both of us, hysterically, began to laugh. It is thrilling to talk to him. A truly exciting thing. Conversation as sex—and nothing more. Because when Jarod asked, with just enough playfulness in his voice to keep from sounding pathetic, “So, no making out tonight?”—I stayed strong and shook my head no. He was more upset this time, or at least more demonstrative about it, and I don’t fault him for that. More than ever, I don’t. Once he left, I stowed away all those blankets and got my pillows back into clean cases, readying my bed for the night’s sleep. And I wondered what Austin will do, what he might’ve already done, when he finds himself in bed with a boy who likes him. Will he hold back? Will it feel too soon, still? Could memories of me keep him from reaching out and touching somebody else? Or will he do whatever he wants? Just as he pleases? Stabs to my heart, these questions and answers. But if I don’t let go of that knife, I might never learn what pleases me.

I asked her if this was a “crossroads moment” for her relationship and I felt my heart break a little when she nodded her head yes. I won’t say her name but it was right near the end of a Saturday at the museum and, just as soon as I rounded the corner into our break room’s kitchen, I felt the gravity of this conversation. Grace was drying dishes by the sink and Erica had pulled in her chair as near as she could, there at any moment to rest a warm hand on our colleague’s shoulder. Telling them, and now telling me, that her partner isn’t just ready to take all the next big steps—he’s prepared for it. Setting aside the money and staying conscious of the time. But she’s not sure if she’s ready. She’s not sure about a lot. Feeling in her heart like there’s so much she still wants to try, so much she still needs to do. “What if I want to write a play?” she said, which said so much. But what is clear to her is how good he is. How very, very good. And when she said how guilty she felt for hurting him during their conversation about this, a conversation that compromised the very foundation of their five-year-long relationship, and perhaps irrevocably, I told her how well I understand that guilt. “Honestly, this whole situation,” she said. “It’s had me thinking so much of you.” Nothing’s been decided, to my knowledge, and I’m hoping for the best. “The best” meaning they’ll stay together. That they won’t have to forsake a lovely thing, and won’t be any unhappier for it. I mean that. And yet that’s not what I told her. “I am still so sad, and so angry, I am barely surviving, still,” I said. “But the one and only emotion I haven’t had to deal with, the one thing I’m not feeling? Is regret. This decision, as absolutely impossible as it’s been—I cannot say I regret it.” I’ve cried on many shoulders these last few months. And now, for the first time, maybe I could return that favor. Because while I’d like to think I was there for my friends in past moments like these, that I listened to them, and counseled as well as I knew how—I didn’t know. I didn’t have the slightest idea.

“I’m gonna be the oldest bitch at this party,” I said to Jarod, walking down Nostrand Avenue on our way to a housewarming at Willa’s new apartment. Earlier in the week, I used that same line on Grace, just as soon as I found out she and Sara would also be in attendance. She laughed. Telling it to the foremost truthteller however, Jarod simply said, “You probably will be.” Grace and Sara were already there by the time we arrived, talking in the living room with the hostess herself. Red haired and moony complexioned, always wearing some great wool sweater with a first edition book in hand, Willa grew up in Park Slope and lived with one of her two moms until just a couple months ago. Giving us the grand tour of this two-story unit she shares with four roommates, Grace asked if her room here was bigger than her bedroom at home and when Willa said, “Oh no, that was much bigger,” it wasn’t obnoxious—it was hysterical. “You can take the girl out of Park Slope…,” I said. She makes me laugh harder than anyone else who works at the museum. Mostly because the craziest shit only ever seems to happen on her tours. Fainters, farters, fondlers, and then some. A little nervous by nature, surely that’s why visitors feel so comfortable being so bizarre around her, but that’s also what makes for a storyteller who’s just as funny as the stories. Filling us in on who’s who, at one point Willa said, “That guy who just walked by? He’s the white Jamaican I was talking about.” Grace had to leave for a concert soon enough but Sara stuck around. This was the first time she and Jarod had ever really hung out and as I watched him do so much of the talking that night, I found myself thinking how easy it is for patterns to repeat. Either that or how hard it is to break them. Because there were times when conversation touched on music artists I’d never heard of before, and a moment when somebody successfully spread a fake rumor that some young actress with a name I didn’t recognize was on her way to the party, and finally a remark from Jarod about how devastated he’d feel to still be working at the museum when he’s 30 years old. And yet it was okay. My nerves upon first arriving, before long, gave way to ease. To something that almost resembled fun. On a night in Park Slope, well over a year ago, I was at a party. It was hosted by Al, in a twist of fate that wouldn’t skew ironic until just last month, once Austin’s Halloween party came and went. But surrounded that night by all these people who were a couple years my junior, I had the thought, almost out of nowhere, that “I will be younger at 30 than I was at 20.” If it was an angel who whispered that to me, or the devil himself, I don’t know. But yes, I was.

I watched Lourdes watch her mother. Already settled by the time she and some friends took their seats three rows further up, all I could see was the back of her cheetah print coat and the beanie on her head but without a doubt: there she was. Madonna—and Child. It was Sophie who told me Truth or Dare was playing at BAM and that, even though she’d be out of town, I should still go. I’d already seen Madonna’s seminal 1991 documentary in theaters and pretty recently. Just two August 16ths ago, it played on her birthday at The Roxy and every person in every seat turned out to love her just as much as I do. It was so profound. Leaving the theater and walking out onto Sixth Avenue, I was still in tears. And though I worried the crowd at BAM wouldn’t, couldn’t prove nearly as worshipful, I knew well enough to take Sophie’s advice. I went by myself but I didn’t stay that way for long. My friend Tom was there and, after spotting him in the auditorium, I went right over to say hello. It wouldn’t require going as far back as two August 16ths to find a past version of me who’d never do such a thing. All too recently, I would’ve pretended not to see him. Too embarrassed to seek him out and admit in the process that I was alone. No way around that anymore. His two friends who were supposed to join both canceled and when Tom insisted I sit down beside him, I did. All told—my corroborating witness. Tom, in fact, wasn’t totally convinced it was really Lourdes in front of us. But after catching enough glimpses of her face in profile, and straining my eyes to spot, with every fistful of popcorn, tattooed letters on her knuckles, I was certain. I’ve always figured it was just a matter of time. That walking down Allen Street, or smoking a cigarette on a stoop in Bushwick, at last: Lourdes. But I wouldn’t have expected this, not here amidst this crowd of moviegoers, all eyes on the woman who gave her life. Was she just as relieved as I was that everybody found Madonna so funny? That they didn’t just get her sense of humor but seemed so surprised to discover she had one at all? Was there a smile on Lourdes’s face too? Did it hurt as much as mine? And when Madonna said something about not having any fake body parts and a couple people in the crowd scoffed, did Lourdes hate them for it? Or has she been her mother’s daughter long enough to know better than that? For the first time in a very long time, it was raining. But after saying goodbye to Tom, I kept on walking. Drying my phone screen with my shirt sleeve, I spread the good news to my family, and to Jarod, and to Shannon out in San Francisco. All of them were thrilled but none of them were who I really wanted to tell. I cannot keep doing this, I can’t. But before I knew it, and despite the weather, I was walking down my old block. And looking up at his window, at his bedroom all aglow, right out loud, as if I were talking to the man on the moon, I said, “I saw Lourdes tonight.”

“Well, at least we’ll have a lot in common,” I said, after learning I was leading a private tour later that day for a group of seniors described as “low income, socially isolated, and mentally ill.” Not like there aren’t socially isolated, mentally ill seniors on any given public tour too. But even knowing what to expect, I was still concerned—not about what they might say, or what they might do, but how depressing it all might feel. “Old age,” as Bette Davis once said, “Is no place for sissies.” We were expecting twelve but, seemingly discouraged by that afternoon’s cold rain, only three seniors showed up. There was a man named John whose mother was Japanese but, after Pearl Harbor, never spoke her language in front of her children ever again. A woman named Shelly whose father worked on the Manhattan Project and died when she was only 18 months old. And another lady named Orlanda, with blond curly hair and an American flag ascot around her neck, who said, “The Manhattan Project? What was that? Like, a city project?” Shelly looked at Orlanda and said, “I’ll explain later.” They were on one of the more contemporary tours of the museum, here to learn about a family who survived the Holocaust and another who migrated to the city from Puerto Rico. It’s my favorite. Really, it’s the finest tour the museum offers but—dealing with such recent history in apartments recreated to look like the 1950s and 1970s—it’s not for everybody. But John, Shelly, and Orlanda were into it. After all, this was their childhood. This was when they were young. Engaged and friendly, and totally with it, I felt so horrible for coming so close to asking a full-timer if someone else could lead the tour instead. That would’ve been my loss. And even once Orlanda began telling us a story that left her, soon enough, choking back tears, I still felt that way.

“I used to have this friend, an old Jewish lady,” said Orlanda, her voice already shaking. “And she told me once, she told me, ‘Orlanda, all those moments in life that are most sad, most painful—that’s when we need to be the most creative.’ She changed my life, telling me that. She was a wonderful person. And then one day, she was walking down Flatbush Avenue and she was mugged and she died. She was killed! An old lady just walking down the street. And I was on my way to visit her that day. We already made these plans for me to go see her in Brooklyn and I brought—she loved these so much—I brought two pints of cherries. One for her, one for me. And I get to Brooklyn—and it’s too late. She’s dead, they tell me. So I walk down to the Esplanade, or whatever it’s called, I walk down to the water and I sit down on a bench and I eat the cherries, my pint of cherries, and when I leave—I just bring her cherries home. Why did that happen to her? She was a good person! And people don’t know about this but June 15th? June 15th—it should be on the calendar. It’s World Elder Abuse Day. You know that? People don’t know! They don’t!”

Looking at John and Shelly, I noticed their eyes were steadily glazing over, as if this wasn’t at all unusual, like maybe they’ve heard this same story several times now. Or maybe they’ve just lived enough life to bother with anyone else’s. Plenty familiar with grief, and with rage, and with being just another old person walking lonesome down the street. There was plenty of history I still could’ve shared but instead, for however long she wanted, I let Orlanda talk to me.

Beating him to the wine bar by a couple minutes, I felt like a cat, watchful and smirking from my comfortably seated perch, as a new friend named Josh fumbled with the wet umbrella in his hands. We’d never met before and even though he’s the established writer with a debut novel coming out next year, almost all the evening’s questions were asked by him. Sometimes I feel like I never get a chance to speak, sometimes I’m worried I make it all about me. Both can be true, I suppose, and for all the same reasons. “A friend told me that turning 31 was actually harder than turning 30,” he said, after learning my birthday was just a couple days away, to which I replied, “Oh, good!” I felt clever that night. Sparkly, even. That I was maintaining just the right tone in the stories I told, and punctuating his remarks with quips that never felt too forced, and that even if this wasn’t a date—and I didn’t think it was—it was good practice. It was a Friday and, that Monday, I’d turn 31 years old. And yet I saw Wicked by myself that night and woke up the next morning an hour earlier than necessary for work. “Leave him alone, Brian,” I often say to myself, curbing the urge to seek out Isaiah and start up a conversation. He can be a cool customer. But in our break room that morning, choosing the open seat beside me on the couch, he did the seeking. After asking him what he’s reading, and then what he’s working on, Isaiah told me that, when it comes to writing, he wishes for my kind of discipline. I recently heard from Jarod that when people ask him about me, “I always describe you as ‘disciplined.’ As the highest of compliments.” And the number of times Austin has said, “Brian has the greatest willpower of anyone I know”—there’s no guessing. Rules, rules, rules. They’re what brought me New York City, and lean muscles, and 8 miles a day, and 15,000 words a month, and money in my savings account despite only ever working a part-time job. That I am the way I am—I thank every lucky star. But all the same I wonder what they’re keeping me from, all these silly, old rules of mine.

Eight in the morning and almost out the door, hopping into my pants one leg at a time, my mom said something I’ve already forgotten that, nevertheless, made me cry. Calling to wish her youngest child, her baby, a happy birthday—only to hear tears through the phone soon enough—just before we hung up, my mom said to me, “Be happy today.” And I should have been. There were more birds in the sky than usual that morning, more birds than ever, and the M train arrived the moment my feet touched the Fresh Pond platform. Somebody already made coffee at work and my day’s schedule left me with plenty of break time to respond in kind to all my well-wishers. Lin gave me a journal, there were cookies from Daryl and a cupcake from Allegra, a scarf that Lydia Grace knit by hand just for me, and two books from Billie along with a collage she’d made of Jesus Christ, though I didn’t recognize it until she pointed Him out. And nervous in a way I’d never seen, nervous in a way I didn’t think possible, Jarod presented me with his gift. A new Nalgene that he got custom-printed with a circa 1983 Al Hirschfeld illustration of Carrie Fisher as a nun. Totally off-hand, months ago now, I mentioned to Jarod how I wanted to get that drawing on a water bottle. Not that I remembered telling him that. But he did. Jarod listened, and he remembered. And as I’ve learned, these last five or so years, that’s really all it takes to be good at this sort of thing. It was so perfect and I was so grateful and that night, after a martini for me and a Narragansett for him at Aunt Ginny’s, I thanked him for everything he did, everything he tried to do, to make this weekend as happy as possible. There on Woodward Avenue, a second before we went our separate ways, I gave him a kiss. Chaste as it was, I knew it might be confusing, that it might even be cruel—but it was true.

In bed that night, I put on Yentl. On the night of Barbra Streisand’s birthday, half a year ago now, Austin and I watched Yentl for the first time. And one week later—we broke up. I’d been warned. Friends telling me that if I heard from him today, it’d be sad. And if I didn’t, it’d be sad. But while I was at work that morning, delivered at a very specific time of day that always meant so much to us, I heard from him. Calling me by my full name and saying he missed me more today than usual, he wished me a happy birthday. But there was more. Regarding a certain something he found on his doorstep, Austin said, “Of all the gifts you’ve given me, that letter is my most cherished.” I went into the break room bathroom, sat on the toilet, and wept. Billie just so happened to be standing outside the bathroom and when I saw her there, try as I might to keep it together, I just about fell into her arms. “You will get through this,” she said, embracing me on tip-toes. “Also, sorry, I’m just so used to bending all the way down to hug my four-year-old, this is like a whole new world.” With more than one mother that day, I cried. We announce our arrival in tears only to be met, with any luck, in love. And I was. More love and more life, that was the point of all this. What I suddenly felt I needed, and what I believed Austin deserved as well, upon getting to the end of this movie and hearing Barbra sing, “With all there is, why settle for just a piece of sky?” That shattered my heart right open. But now, it put me to sleep. Past midnight by the time I woke back up, the credits were already rolling. It was over.

Standing at a street corner on the Lower East Side, I imagined what I’d say if we ran into any familiar faces. Past five o’clock on a Friday evening, with the last museum tours of the day just now finishing up, odds were high that we’d see any given colleague of mine who knows, more or less, absolutely everything about us. It’s no mystery to anybody that Austin and I still talk, let alone that we’ve seen each other several times in the last month. But still. “Have you two met?” I imagined saying, tongue lodged firmly in cheek. “This is Austin! My friend!” It made me so nervous, this possibility of being seen together, like I was having an affair when, really, I was just waiting for Austin to get out of Megalopolis so we could grab dinner before seeing Joker: Folie à Deux. But there was more to the nerves than that. It was on Madison Avenue, not Delancey Street, and Austin was waiting for me rather than the other way around, but on this very same day, my first full day living in New York City, six years ago exactly, we met each other for the first time and then went to go see a movie starring Lady Gaga. Stars were born. I already booked the tickets for Folie à Deux, picking out two seats for Friday the 4th of October, before asking Austin if he’d like to join me. Talking to Shannon on the phone, she asked if this was a good idea and I told her, “Either we go see this movie on the anniversary of when we first met and it’s sad. Or we don’t and I’m alone—and it’s sad!” She understood. In fact, Shannon did the very same thing, on the one year anniversary with her boyfriend, unfortunately coinciding with a brief separation of their own. They already had concert tickets for that night so—why not? It was a fine time. Austin and I got along and the day’s significance was acknowledged and our conversation was pleasant. And, for me, that was the problem. Gifted in gab and generous with laughter, Austin gives so much of himself to people, never running out of something to talk about, and sparkling, effortlessly, all the while. These things take two, and while I wasn’t exactly a laugh a minute, I know I wasn’t dull. But listening to him, I thought to myself, He’s talking to me the way he talks to his cousins. Joining him down to the platform after the movie, I was so pleased, and maybe for the very first time, that the next train wasn’t arriving for 11 minutes. I interrupted his attempt at a goodbye with my offer to stick around until it came. Something surface level with him still preferable, for now, to silence on my own. And as his train pulled into the station, I said, “Today’s, uh, a special day, you know…beginnings.” And with the faintest catch in his throat, Austin said, “You’re gonna make me sad.” Just before turning to leave, I patted him on the arm. So strange. I don’t think I’d ever touched him quite like that before.

Commiserating in the break room after a challenging last hour, Erica listened to me and said, wryly, one wage-worker to another, “It’s like all the failures of this institution fell on your shoulders—in one single tour!” I was already more than fifteen minutes into a program I hate giving when some latecomers made their way inside this circa-1870s German lager saloon. It was two generations of a Black family, husbands and wives, one middle-aged and the other elderly. The old husband was in a wheelchair and I understood immediately why they were late. This tour about businesses that operated out of the tenement’s ground floor is the only accessible option in the building. And even on the slowest days at the museum, the route from the lift to this recreated saloon requires a trek through at least two other ongoing tours. That’s upwards of 30 strangers pretending to not feel awkward as they clear a path. There’s no way around it, I suppose, but there’s also no dignity to it. And I could tell, the moment this family got settled in the saloon, that it wasn’t easy joining this tour. A tour that, again, I hate giving. Sometimes it works. Pack that bar with a rowdy Saturday crowd and it can be a truly fun time. No dice. I was as bored as everybody else. But with the finish line blissfully in sight, I asked my visitors if they had any final thoughts or questions and it was then that the middle-aged husband said, “So, what, no Black people? None at all? Everything I’m seeing here is all about white folks. Were Black people not allowed to live here or something?” That’s not the first time I’ve been asked that question. And every time I’m grateful, truly, for the opportunity to discuss the long legacy of displacement in that Black New York story, as evidenced by the very plot of land we were standing on. At the turn of the nineteenth century, it was owned by a free Black man, only for a tenement to get built here a couple decades later that housed 7,000 people over 72 years—each and every one of them white. But I don’t suspect he thought I’d have much to say about all this. Frankly, I think a part of him hoped I wouldn’t know anything at all. But looking at him, as he gripped the handles of that wheelchair and a new expression clouded his face, maybe I should’ve just played the fool.

Walking home from the train on a Saturday night, I called Austin. He answered the phone and, more curt than curious, asked “What’s up?” Per his recommendation, I’d just seen The Hills of California, a Broadway play about four sisters returning to their childhood home to say goodbye to their dying mother. Fraught familial dynamics at all turns, it’s so utterly my kind of thing—and yet it wasn’t until an hour before showtime that I bought my ticket. It was, again, Saturday night and I was hesitant committing to an evening spent all alone. But I’m glad I went. Austin said, “Wasn’t it amazing that the same actress who played the mom also played the oldest sister?” and, lying through my teeth, I said, “Yes—so good.” I was seated in the very back row and, even though it wound up being the emptiest Broadway theater I’d ever seen, with half the balcony totally vacant, I didn’t move any closer after intermission. If I did, maybe I would’ve noticed, and seen something I’ve long understood to be true—we are our mother’s child. There wasn't much more to say and I was a moment away from home but I couldn’t bear to stop talking. The night before, I sent Austin a text, something I thought we’d both find funny, but he never responded. Not until I asked, the next morning, “Am I bothering you sending stuff like this?” He’d already insisted it wasn’t a bother, telling me he’d simply forgotten to respond, but as I took lap after lap around my block that night, on the phone with him for over an hour, I couldn’t keep from scratching that itch. We fought the same old fight. He wants me to be reasonable, I want him to be demonstrative. He sees us as friends who talk about the books we’ve read and movies we’ve watched while I don’t see that as friendship at all. And while I’ve been listening exclusively to Blood on the Tracks and ABBA’s more devastating divorce anthems, Austin said, “You’re gonna hate to hear this but—I’ve already done that. I’ve done the sad songs after a breakup thing. And I cannot do that again. It’s too sad, Brian.” I felt like a child, losing my mind over some stupid little thing, totally inconsequential, with a pat on the head for my only comfort. Taking a shower that night, with the water turned up as hot as it can get, I thought about the gentleness I longed for, the affection and the care I wished I was getting. That if he could just demonstrate his sorrow a little more explicitly, a little more publically, using the exact tone and language I want, I might just feel a little less alone in all this. And as my skin turned pink in the heat, slowly, I recognized the naked wish underlying so much of my resentment—I want him to baby me.

“Oh, Jeffrey,” my mother would say, putting on her haughtiest Hamptons affect anytime she walked past her teenage son splayed on the couch for his umpteenth episode of The Barefoot Contessa. “Back from Fire Island so soon?” Willfully mistaking Ina Garten’s devoted nebbish of a husband for a closet case, I had to forgive my mother her ignorance. Who else was gonna buy the saffron, cognac, and good vanilla I’d need to replicate those recipes? I have adored Ina Garten for a very long time. And yet I wasn’t especially excited about her new memoir, having watched enough interviews with her to realize that, as a storyteller, she’s often repetitive and almost always nervous. Ha! Downloading the audiobook within seconds of its publication, I pressed play and wished it would never end. A woman born in Brooklyn who had to survive a cold, lonely childhood before going on to run a specialty foods store, host her own cooking show, and gut renovate a classic apartment in Paris, all the while madly in love with a nice Jewish boy—I never stood a chance. Still, not expecting to learn anything new, I was totally shocked listening to Ina recall her brief separation with Jeffrey. She’d just opened the store in Westhampton and it was this frenzied and fulfilling time in her life when she felt busier and more purposeful than ever—while falling short as a “wife” because of it, and ambivalently so. “It was the hardest thing I ever did,” writes Ina. “Haltingly, I told him that I needed to be on my own…he listened quietly, thinking about my words and processing their meaning and in true Jeffrey form, he said, ‘If you feel like you need to be on your own, you need to do it.’ He made it even more painful for me because he was so damn understanding.” Suddenly, at 30 years old, in New York City, Ina Garten was all alone. Recounting that she felt like a naive college graduate who couldn’t sleep at night and couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, wrestling with the choice of a nice apartment in a dodgy neighborhood or a crappy apartment in a good neighborhood, and feeling always so very alone. “And to make it even more painful, Jeffrey—still my best friend—came to New York to help me get the apartment set up…I thought, ‘Am I crazy? He’s the sweetest man in the world!’ But I remained convinced that I needed to figure out who I was on my own before I could be an equal partner with him. And frankly, he needed to do the same thing.” Listening to this as I walked my loops around the Ridgewood Reservoir, it took all I had not to shove my headphones in the ears of the next passing stranger and say, “Can you believe this?”

There was leftover walnut-crusted salmon in the fridge but I’m allergic and, after offering it to Austin, I wondered if my text failed to send. Because while he did respond to the picture I’d just sent of a beloved Chihuahua, he didn’t say a word about the fish. Dog sitting Maya for the week, I was three blocks away from him. But for the first time, I wasn’t three blocks away from home. Rather it was a $30 car ride that got me here from Queens, my duffel bag for this four-night stay far too heavy to safely brave that Broadway Junction transfer from the L to the C. “Assuming it’s a no on the salmon?” I finally asked to which he said, with some peccant hahahas, “Sorry.” It was his attempt at letting me down easy, I’m sure, trying to decline the requisite rendezvous for this free meal’s handoff without actually saying anything. Most of all “no.” Not that that stopped me from inviting him over to the apartment that night if he finished packing early and found himself feeling bored. Leaving for North Carolina the next morning to spend a week with family, Austin said he probably wouldn’t be able to do that, but he’d let me know if anything changes. Well past eleven at night, as I got the dog on her leash one last time before bed, it was clear nothing had changed. And yet—I walked Maya those three blocks to my old apartment. Across the street but in plain sight, a tragic character in an LED spotlight, I lost count of how many times I went up and down that block. The lights were on in Austin’s room but I couldn’t see him. There was his towel hanging on the closet door, and the screensaver’s slow crawl across the television, and his outfit for tomorrow’s flight folded neatly on the desk, trucker hat and all. But as Judy sings, in a song I’ve listened to so many times now, “It never was you, it never was anywhere you.” In the next room over, Kiera’s lights were on too. Getting caught by Austin as I spied on him from the sidewalk was an embarrassment I could deal with. But if Kiera just so happened to look out her window as I stalked by, peering up at a life I used to know—God, how sad that would be. Finally, with less shame than disappointment, I pulled at Maya’s leash in the direction of home but not without taking one last look. Austin! Standing in front of the window, at last, there he was. I raced behind the nearest tree, as subtle as slapstick, hiding myself from view but only for a moment, deciding soon enough that if I made this bed, I had to lay in it. Back under the streetlight, I looked up at Austin, waiting for a reaction—and it never came. It’s possible he was putting on the performance of a lifetime but, from what I could tell, he didn’t see me. And as my heart and stomach returned to their rightful places, I looked up at him in that window and I wondered. What was he listening to in those over ear headphones? Which shirt did he just shove up against his face, checking to see if it was clean or dirty? Is this a new habit, leaving his bedroom door wide open like that? What would happen to his heart if he noticed me right now? Would it race? Or would it sink? I wanted so badly to tell him, “I can see you.” But instead, I walked away.

Out on the front patio of a Ridgewood bar, I sat down with some friends who’ve only ever known me as one-half of a couple. One morning while I was still dog sitting Maya, headed to the train for a day at the museum, I saw my old neighbors walking my way on Washington Avenue. A boyfriend and girlfriend originally from Texas, sweet and smart and a couple years my junior, Travis and Kelly lived on the third floor of our Clinton Hill brownstone the whole time that I was down on the second. With all the same books on our bookshelves, literally and figuratively, Austin and I would get together with them every couple months. “I’m so Travis,” Austin said, once upon a time, no sooner than they left our apartment and started climbing up the stairs back to theirs, “And you’re so Kelly.” Of course, they still live there. But with sincere surprise on both their faces as we hugged hello, it seems my staking of the block went unnoticed from the third floor too. Thank God. Telling me we’d hang out the next time they were in my neck of the woods, clearly they meant that. Just a couple days later, the three of us grabbed some drinks before their late night plans in Bushwick. And I was nervous. Anxious I wouldn’t know what to say, that things would feel strained, that I’d fumble the efforts of introducing myself to people I’ve known for years. But all told, all for naught. Recently back from a trip home to Texas, Travis talked about being really close with his brother, who’s getting married later this year, and that it makes him just a little sad thinking about the inevitable changes to come. That he won’t just be Travis’s little brother anymore, he’ll be somebody’s husband, and son-in-law, and—sooner or later—father. They’re both oldest siblings, Travis and Kelly, and while she’s got a very different dynamic with her younger brother, the concern in their voices sounded just the same. It won’t be New York forever, they said, and after discussing the big changes that can really only happen with a change in scenery, finally I brought it up. Whether it was their concern for my heartache or my awareness of their home address, we went the whole first round of drinks without so much as hinting at the breakup, decidedly ignoring the elephant sitting beside us on the patio. They’re Austin’s friends too, I couldn’t forget that. So when I told them how hard it’s been to try and stay in each other’s lives, I aimed as close as I could for fairness, for grace. Trying to keep my head as level as his. But reaching out her hand to rub my arm, the two of us seemingly more alike than we already knew, Kelly saw right through me.

With an hour and a half to kill before my connecting train to Pittsfield, where Cam would pick me up for a weekend in the Berkshires, I called Shannon and said, “Could James Burns, my Irish immigrant ancestor, ever even dream of this? That 160 years after washing ashore in New York City, he’d have a faggot great-great-great grandson walking around Albany on a Friday afternoon?” Surprised by how quaint it looked, I thought of my old friend Jacki who grew up here. Brassy and inviting, a consummate Taurus woman, I used to see her a lot, ten years ago now, back when she was dating the bassist in Cam’s old band, Julius Earthling. And every time she showed up to one of those basement shows, or to the nights in Cam’s living room otherwise packed with monosyllabic punk boys, when we’d hug each other hello through our imitation-down coats during that record-breaking winter with its 107 inches of snow—I felt a saving grace. I loved Cam so much and I gave him, willfully, every second of time I had to spare. But it wasn’t brothers I grew up with. After telling Jarod that I was surrounded by a lot of Amish people on this train to Massachusetts, he sent me a note he’d written a couple years back during his own Amtrak travels. It read, “Seeing Amish people, their commitment and submission to god so strong that their plain clothes and faces and deference seemed otherworldly.” Telling him I need more of this, Jarod responded, “The writing or the submission to God?” He didn’t capitalize the ‘g’ in God then, but he did now—and I think I know why. I’d be taking the bus back to New York, not the train, and as I figured out where Peter Pan pulls up to this transit depot, I happened to look across the street where someone was waving at me from inside their car. Knowing Cam was still a couple minutes away, I wondered, “Who is this girl in a hoodie waving at me in Pittsfield?” Cackling as I jaywalked his way, I finally recognized who it was. Here to pick up his own friend also visiting town for the weekend, it was Anthony—the bassist in Cam’s old band, Julius Earthling. Keep dreaming, James Burns.

As brief as it was, playing out via text message no less, a lot was said during our fight this summer, when Cam’s commentary on my life became my accusations that he’d never asked enough questions to deserve such declarations. A horrible thing to tell a friend of ten years, it turns out, let alone a friend who’s made all the effort. “Anytime we’ve seen each other, it’s only because I reached out,” he said. “I’m pretty sure we’d go years if I left it up to you.” He was right. And as soon as I was settled in my new place, I booked my tickets for this weekend at Cam’s house in the Berkshires. The high holy day had already come and gone but, as I told Jarod, “This is my Yom Kippur.” But hopping in his car and making our way to Great Barrington, in no time, it was the same old him and me. Making a pit stop at the food co-op to pick up coffee grinds, there was a whole aisle dedicated to bulk gallons of Dr. Bronner’s soap, fitted with dispensers so customers could refill bottles brought from home, and suddenly I found myself thinking about the end of Yentl when Barbra is wearing a hat on top of another hat. “You’re a true New Yorker now,” Cam said, “Because you aren’t until you’ve bougie vacationed here in South County.” Over some fussy but delicious cocktails at a bar called Mooncloud, Cam and I talked about his two-year-old son’s new school, and the stress of moving, and the dynamic with his in-laws, and the staggering weight of doing something he loves: being responsible for his family. He wants to go to therapy and I hope he does. Last time I saw Cam’s son, over a year ago now, I scared him so badly he cried, the manic elasticity of my face not so much clownish as big bad wolfish. But sitting on the floor and getting down to his level, gently, after a couple shy minutes, I had him laughing. Julia, Cam’s wife, said that one of the parents at their kid’s school is a Jungian analyst. “I’m dying to see a Jungian!” I said, ecstatically, to which Julia said, politely, “Oh!” She was already familiar with Jung’s theory of archetypes, how our collective unconscious is populated by these mythical little personas who influence so much of our behavior. But when I asked Julia who her proverbial character would be—egregiously oversimplifying the psychology, I’m sure—she couldn’t decide. I’m Cinderella, I said, but a Cinderella who won’t allow himself the glass slipper. And when Julia said we have to figure Cam out too, it only took a minute before he appeared to me, all muscly and burdened, braced up against a boulder. The quintessential Sisyphus. “Oh my God,” Julia said, “He is!”  Realizing I didn’t know his fate, I asked Cam and Julia if they remembered the end of the story. If Sisyphus finally makes it to the top of the mountain, or if the boulder crushes him on the way down, or if he just gives up altogether. But they didn’t know either. He might still be at it, suffering the same old thing, over and over again.

“I don’t know why!” That’s all Cam kept saying. He opted for a vodka cranberry while it was pilsners for me and Anthony, who joined us for this round of drinks on Saturday night. Founding member of a well-known Boston skate collective, Anthony used to live in this crumbling house in Jamaica Plain, sharing the place with God knows how many other people. Attending a couple parties there, where the lightbulb in the bathroom was always blown, as hard as I tried to adopt the requisite costuming and strike the proper poses, I remained a round peg among all those square holes. Once again—thank God for Jacki. But Anthony, then and now, was always so sweet. Placid and sloe eyed and a little bit goofy, like a cow in tight black jeans. We did most of the listening while Cam did most of the talking, telling us, eventually, about his increasingly shameful memories of college exploits. Ashamed not by what he did so much as what he avoided. Any time he got close with a girl, he said, the mental calculations would begin. That he had all these metrics, arbitrary and unavoidable, that dictated whether or not he’d risk the vulnerability of really showing up for someone. Though maybe that’s my own conclusion. Because when I did ask him why, when I urged Cam to investigate the roots of this old pattern, he could only say, albeit with total certainty, “I don’t know why!” That Cam of all people, this staunch character, so forthright in his speech and demeanor, could be so perplexed by his own actions seemed, to me, impossible. “I just can’t imagine being such a mystery to myself,” I said, and while I don’t think that hurt his feelings, he did almost immediately change the subject. It’s increasingly possible I’m too familiar with myself. That in translating my life into words, in shaping my goings on into something resembling narrative, what I mistake for understanding might, just as easily, be only projection. A set of moving images playing out on a screen, cleanly and clearly enough to entertain. If only. All the things I don’t know about myself, I’m sure, could fill a book.

The sun was in Cam’s eyes so I told him to move, to stand someplace more comfortable, somewhere I could finally tell him what I’ve never managed to say. It was the end of the weekend and we’d spent the day up in North County, driving to the top of Mount Greylock and wandering around Mass MoCA for a couple hours. I had the Pittsfield depot pulled up on my phone and knew exactly how long it’d take us to get there. And I told myself that when there were twenty minutes left of the drive, that’s when I would start the conversation. Until fifteen minutes, on second thought, seemed best. And then eight minutes seemed even better. Or, then again, maybe never at all. Cam pulled up to the curb and got out of the car to hug me goodbye and, throwing on my duffel bag, I was reminded of the weight of this weekend. With the sun setting right behind me, I couldn’t have been much more than a shadowy mass to Cam, who could barely keep his eyes open. Suggesting we move to the sidewalk, I told him how happy I was that we had such a nice time together, that we were able to put that disagreement behind us, and apologized, again, for telling him he should’ve been more curious. Pointing a finger at myself, playful and damning, I said, “I know the common denominator.” Perfectly receptive, friendly in the truest sense of the term, he echoed my relief, and explained that he just wanted to offer something different from the same old cliches I must’ve been hearing from everyone else. And I commended him for that, that he really does possess a singular perspective in my life. Which would have been the perfect time to tell him, once and for all, what kept me from sharing all of myself during that fateful first year of friendship. To reveal, at last, the secret that was once in my heart. But it suddenly seemed beside the point. Because looking at Cam there on that sidewalk, at the glint in his huge blue eyes and the smile curling at his lips, breaking through all his burdens and nerves, the responsibilities and the rancor—there was such warmth. I looked at his face and I saw nothing but love.

“‘A possibility’” said Ethan, in a group text message with our friend Rachel, quoting my non committal response to their suggestion of drinks after the play we were all seeing that night. “My god, Brian! Grow up and hang out with your goddamn friends!” Knowing Ethan, this translates roughly to “I love you, buddy.” Looking fabulous in these great jackets, purple and handsomely cropped for Ethan while Rachel’s had polka dots, we took our seats at the Greenwich House Theater for The Beastiary, starring Miller, an old colleague of ours. Once upon a time, we all worked at the museum together. When Rachel asked me a question about my new life in my new place, Ethan said, “Shh! We’re saving that for later. When we all catch up!” Bawdy, grisly, and hysterical, medieval in its trappings but modern in its sensibility, with puppets and a pregnant nun and an old lady possessed by the dark magic of unicorn blood, The Beastiary is one of the more exciting nights of theater I’ve had in a long time. On our way to Julius’ afterwards, we agreed that, even in a world where we didn’t know Miller at all, we’d still believe she stole the show. With three seats opening up at the bar the moment we walked inside, we were right across from the grill, providing Ethan with the burger he wanted and leaving my jacket and tote bag reeking to high heaven for days to come. After Rachel talked about getting married this summer and Ethan shared that there’s a new boy in his life, like a medieval fable all our own, I said, “You’re the blushing virgin bride, he’s prince charming—and I’m the bitter hunched crone!” Not five minutes passed by without some acquaintance of Ethan’s coming over to say hello. Ethan knows everybody. One of these passing friends told us he was going as Elphaba for Halloween and I asked if he’d be keeping his eyes visible or concealed, a joke rooted in discourse too pointlessly contemporary to bother explaining, and, of course, they laughed. But promptly leaning into Rachel’s ear, I whispered, “You’re like ‘What language are they speaking?’” And without missing a beat, Rachel said, “Gay!” They’re two of the funniest people I know, Rachel and Ethan, but there were more than laughs that night. Not realizing the wound was still so fresh, thinking I’d moved out of the apartment much earlier in the year, Rachel’s hand on my leg was gentle but its touch was huge. They asked me if I’ve had sex yet and were surprised by my answer (“no”) and confounded by my outlook (“and not any time soon.”) Ethan promptly made reference to my “iron curtain” and I didn’t feel offended. Rather: understood. But when he asked what I hoped to get from this next chapter, despite my countless conversations about it, the thousands and thousands of words I’ve written, really and truly, I did not have an answer. “Then why?” Rachel asked, her voice almost childlike, making no effort to mask the sadness of all this. “Why break up at all?” The more days go by, the less sure I become. Parting ways at West 4th, as Rachel stayed up on the C train platform and Ethan and I walked down to the M, at the same time and in the same arch tone of voice, Ethan looked at me and said, “Bitch…” just as Rachel leaned over the railing and said, “You two better not be talking about me!”

The last to take my seat at a desk serving as a dining table, joining Isaiah, Estefania, Grace, and Sara for this dinner with Sophie at her apartment, I pushed in my chair and my knees knocked against the underside of the desk. Filled to the brim with red wine or apple cider, everyone’s glasses immediately spilled half their contents all over this beautiful piece of wood furniture. But, grace be to God, none of them toppled over. Isaiah beat me to the kitchen where he handed me some paper towels and I pointed to the front door, telling him, “Alright, I’ll see myself out now!” For the first hour or so of the meal, I mostly just listened. Maybe I really didn’t have anything to say, but most likely I was just still embarrassed. Eating Sophie’s matzo ball soup and sweet potato latkes in her Hell's Kitchen tenement—all of us pointing out, with gleeful expertise, the 19th century ghosts of its original features—we talked about sensory deprivation and praying the rosary, who we’d switch places with for a day and how it feels to look at New York City from inside a train crossing the bridge. We all had plenty to say, eventually me too, but it was Sara who did most of the talking and I know we’re all grateful for it. She’s a Miami girl, as cool as can be, with a phenomenally throaty voice that took her a long time to appreciate. In every single way, Sara is so beautiful. She told us about going to hardcore shows growing up and how hard it was being one of the few girls ever in attendance, about being the youngest sibling in her family, and visiting the ancestral hometown of her Puerto Rican family where an old shaman guided her through a certain kind of experience that allowed Sara to embody her grandmother in the moment she gave birth to Sara’s mother. “Well, it’s like how we were inside our mothers when our mothers were inside of their mothers so, in a way, that is something you’ve already done,” I said. A Cancer woman, ever the deep feeler, Sara said, “Okay, well, now I’m gonna cry.”

We were in the break room a couple weeks ago, me and Sara, when she admitted that after meeting Austin for the first time, back at the bitter end of summer, she cried. It was the night when Austin and I had tickets for Between the Temples—the very last movie we’d see in theaters before I moved out. With some time to kill after getting off work, I joined a couple other Educators at a bar around the corner, Sara included. But Austin got to the neighborhood earlier than I expected and, after trying and failing to get in touch with me, he had a feeling where I was—and he was right. Taking a seat in the bar next to Sara, it was like our conversation hadn’t existed before he got there. Austin fit right in and, soon as I finished my drink, we left them laughing. And there in the break room, well after the fact, Sara said to me, “When you guys left that night, me and Sophie started talking about relationships, you know, being in something long-term with someone and I just—dude, I started crying!” They’re back together again but, for a year, Sara and her boyfriend broke up. It was hell, she’s said. And I have a million questions for her about it. But why the sight of me and Austin heading off to the movies, even just peripherally, was enough to make her cry—I didn’t need to ask.

Waiting for me in front of the St. James Theatre, I spotted Austin further up the sidewalk and thought, “He looks so different.” His very silhouette, in three weeks time, had seemed to change. The fit of his jeans and his denim shirt, the boots he had on, his hair—it all appeared brand new to me. He looked like a man. Once again, that very next night after dinner at Sophie’s, Austin and I had tickets for a show. It’s just that this night, for all we know, really was the last time. “I’ve been waiting to show you this in person,” said Austin, as we took our seats in the second-to-last row for Sunset Boulevard. Down in North Carolina, Austin went through a tote of old keepsakes in his grandmother’s attic, coming across things he hadn’t seen in twentysomething years—including this composition notebook in his hands. It was from the first grade. Flipping through its pages to show me his illustrations of Dorothy and the Scarecrow, already so artful at six years old, and the stories he wrote in shockingly neat print. He was so happy to share this with me—and so was I. But then, once he put the notebook back in his bag, with another half hour til curtain, like Joker part deux indeed, all I could think about was how little we had to say. I asked Austin if he had Halloween plans this weekend and he said “No.” And not five minutes later, I asked if he had any Halloween plans at all. Once again, he said, “No.” If this is doing either of us any good, these attempts at maintaining some kind of presence in each other’s lives, I really don’t know. It’s many things, this new relationship of ours, but as I struggled to decide where to fix my gaze, sitting here beside someone I slept beside for years, this painfully familiar stranger—I knew it wasn’t fun. After the show, we took the C train downtown, together but only for so much longer. Closer every moment to my dreaded transfer, as 42nd Street became 34th became 23rd, with no way of stopping this moving train, I wondered if this is what dying feels like. “I guess this is the last time we’re seeing each other,” I said and, despite the arm he immediately put around me, Austin didn’t disagree. And I knew in my heart, pummeled as it was, pummeled almost to dust, that this was the right thing. But once I got home, over text, try as I might, I couldn’t resist telling him how angry I felt. “Sadness I get,” he said. “But it’s hard for me to understand the anger.” And he never will, I fear. In bed that night, I wrote him a message I could accept as my last. Saying, without saying, that we should stop talking while saying, in words, what I still needed him to know. That I’ll leave the sheets he lent me down in the vestibule of his building, that I’ll go through those old grocery store receipts and determine if I need to pay back any of those $300 he spotted me last month, that I hope to do an oral history with him, eventually, but only if he wants to. That he will always loom so large in my heart and—like the refrain from a song on a playlist he made for me so many years ago—“I will smile when I think of you.”

Out in the hall, I heard a door shut as one of my roommates went into the bathroom. I’m certain she heard me, crying there in bed. Before I moved in, and before she opted to live in one of the smaller, cheaper rooms in our unit, my bedroom used to be hers. And when she passed by my midnight sobs heaving through her old door frame, is there anything she remembered?

Given how much Ashleigh hates living in Park Slope, I know she would’ve gladly met up anywhere else that Friday night. But I came to her, in an ultimately selfish act of selflessness, desiring as long of a commute home as possible. “...somehow I’d be doing alright, if it wasn’t for the nights…” Breathing her in during our hug hello at a cocktail bar called Saint Eve’s, looking as beautiful as always, Ashleigh told me this is one of the very few family-unfriendly spots in her general vicinity. Both of us like kids, that’s not the issue. Rather, it’s the parents that drive both of us insane, proving just as cruelly myopic here as they were in Clinton Hill. Of course, Ashleigh recognizes the beauty of Park Slope, and how lucky she is to live there, but as she said to me, in her desperate bid to escape brownstone Brooklyn for the evening, “I feel like I live in a different country.” Working from home, Ashleigh didn’t have to cope with a new commute but John Michael did. A personal trainer, he needs to get to all different parts of Manhattan, more often than not, before daybreak. And Ashleigh has such guilt about that. That since it was her idea to give up their established lives in Los Angeles for something different in New York, it’s also all her fault that they left their previous apartment in the East Village for something so lamely far away. Shouldering blame that John Michael would never want her to feel. And Ashleigh knows that. If only she could believe it. “Oh, please,” I said to her, “If I choose the restaurant and someone hates their meal, I want to step in front of a moving bus.” We talked about how much our mothers have in common, two Taurus women with their love of live music and struggle with parent-child boundaries. About the invitation from Kyla to go down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and how bad we feel that that might not be our idea of fun. Talking to her about the merits of attending church, and how it equipped Austin and his family with this calm resilience I wish my own could possess, Ashleigh took me by such pleasant surprise in agreeing with me. She also thinks faith is a beautiful and necessary thing. For the longest time, Ashleigh used to make me so nervous. Really struggling to think up things to say to her during the altogether rare instances we were ever one-on-one. But after twelve years of friendship, after already knowing each other for so long, the conversation we had that night—it was our most meaningful by far.

The beloved kitchen table in my old apartment must have been thrown out and I only learned about it because of an Instagram Story from my ex-roommate’s best friend. Scrolling on the subway platform, I was suddenly confronted by a photograph of Austin sitting in the living room, over by the window where our dinette table always used to be. This vintage chrome and formica colossus that I loved so much—gone. “This type of modern life is not for me,” sings Madonna, in the video accompanying my tweet about all this. And while Austin didn’t engage with the post, he did send me a message. Just beginning a Saturday at the museum, I was talking to Jarod in the break room when Austin reached out to me. Telling me not to fear, that the table is safely stored in the closet and that he’s keeping it safe until I need it. And if I’m being honest—that was just what I suspected. But really believing we’d said our final words to each other for a while, it was shocking enough just to see his name on my screen—let alone read what came next. “Also, I panicked and fibbed on Thursday when you asked if I had Halloween plans, I do,” he said. “Kiera and I are having a little Halloween get together. I feel bad for not just telling you on Thursday and didn’t want you to see something online and then be upset that I lied. I’m sorry for not being honest.” Right then and there, I lost my mind. Stepping away from Jarod, as his face fell into the shadows of concern and pity, and some sadness all his own, I felt suddenly like an animal, twitchy, paranoid, barely able to think, at once both the predator and the prey. Sliding the door shut behind me, I entered a part of our break room that’s technically reserved for silent studying—despite its glass walls and zero sound proofing. I rattled off a dozen texts despite my shaking hands and when Austin didn’t respond as quickly as I would’ve liked, I called him. After a couple moments of silence on the line, as he read the messages I’d just sent, Austin said, “I don’t know what to tell you.” Rage, true rage, mighty and unmooring, came home to roost.

Standing in a corner with my back turned to the rest of the break room, as close as I’d get to privacy, and periodically checking a clock on the wall as my first tour of the day ticked ever closer, Austin and I fought. Telling him I was so hurt that he lied, that he kept something from me when I’ve asked him so many times, during this brief, doomed friendship, to tell me what he’s thinking and feeling. But that above all else, I was furious he could possibly have fun tonight. That wasn’t just upsetting to me—it was inconceivable. “How, Austin?” I asked, so many times. “How?” Knowing Al was home from Ireland for the week, I asked Austin if he was going to be at this party and, after a telling beat of quiet, Austin said, “You need to get over that. He has nothing to do with any of this.” On a summer night last year, when something irrevocable broke in our relationship, a hairline fracture that’d shatter us for good several months later, it was during a night out with Al. They only know each other because I introduced them and while it’s Austin’s belief that “at 30 years old, you cannot say ‘he was my friend first,’ that is embarrassing,” try as I might, I cannot see Al’s decision to attend that party as anything but a line drawn in the sand. That said—I don’t disagree. It is embarrassing. Because even in lying, Austin was just trying to be good. Still taking care of me, babying me, long after he was obliged. “If I could take your suffering and give you peace,” he said to me, “I would in the blink of an eye.” But I wouldn’t know peace that day, I couldn’t. Lamenting that this fight, this horrible, bitter fight, now had to be our final correspondence, our last conversation, I shot to kill and told him I hoped this party was worth it. “I love you, goodbye,” I said, hanging up the phone before he had the chance to say anything else. Too afraid of what would happen to me, of what I’d be capable of doing, of how I’d manage to survive this long night ahead of me, if I heard the bruised and patient truth of his “I love you, too.”

Whether it was drinks, or dinner, a night of theater, or my trip out of town, every night for the last two weeks, I had plans with somebody. That is not in my nature and I was so grateful for it. But I was also looking forward to an evening without obligation, a night when I could shower with plenty of time left for nothing to do, whiling away the hours before my head hit the pillow with dry hair. Sometime soon, I wanted to be alone. God laughs, but never so bitterly. The three tours I led that afternoon, much to my surprise, proved a valued distraction. Instead, it was the break room, brimming with the promise of imminent Saturday nights out, where I’d remember the newfound scorn in my guts. It was just before work day’s end, steeling myself for the loneliness to come as I packed up my bag, that Sophie walked over and said, “Brian, I’m getting dinner with Grace and Erica—come with us.” There was no concealing what I felt that day, the struggle of getting through was on my face and it was in my mouth. Everybody knew, they had to. But even if this was a concerted effort, if this offer was prompted by worry instead of some friendly coincidence, it was no less a blessing. We went to a Vietnamese place on Grand Street and when Erica decided on bún riêu, Sophie and I ordered it too. It was Grace who pointed out to me, a while ago now, just how much Erica loves food, but that so much of that joy has to do with sharing it, and knowing that the people in her life are enjoying whatever they got. Anytime Grace eats a meal with Erica, she feels that love. But it was also Grace, once our topic of conversation that night veered inevitably to parents, who said, “I mean, my mom will call me and I’ll answer—I don’t always want to but I do—and it’ll just be about…nothing! Like she’ll call me just to ask, ‘Did you have dinner yet? What did you eat? Are you full?’” Love is so hard. It’s so, so hard. As brisk as could be, increasingly aware of this subject’s shelf life, I told the girls about Austin’s party, and his lie, and how I can’t help wondering what else he’s kept from me these last couple months. Mid-sentence, Sophie interrupted me. “But listen to what you just said: ‘Austin is not a liar, I know that.’ You know that about him. So why wouldn’t he be telling the truth about everything else? Why make yourself believe that?”

The last time I stood here on Pier 45, it was a summer night and the sun was still out and old New Yorkers were dancing the Argentine tango, crawling around to a mournfully gorgeous song as they held each other near, their palms and their hips like spoons in a cutlery drawer. Now it was dark, and my jacket was too thin for the wind, and that night’s dance lesson finished up just as I began walking down the pier. We all went our separate ways after dinner but I couldn’t go home. It was only eight o’clock at night. So I walked up Essex until it became Avenue A, took a left on 10th Street, and headed west all the way to the river. I’m always walking, there’s nothing I love more, but not like this. I wanted to walk myself to depletion that night, to a point of total exhaustion—that I’d walk for so long, I just might disappear. There are these photobooth pictures of us that we kept in a frame, hanging over our bed, and last month I had a dream that Austin took it down from his bedroom wall. It prompted me to look through the little pockets on the back cover of my journals, and the pine wood box that houses this exact kind of ephemera, searching for my copy of these pictures, something that famously comes in a pair. But I couldn’t find them. Not anywhere. I have no idea where we are. The party guests were surely just beginning to show up, people who might be seeing the apartment, and Austin’s room, for the very first time, and if it hadn’t happened already, if our smiling faces behind that dusty glass hadn’t already been swapped out for someone new—maybe this was as good a time as any. If I were him, that’s probably what I’d do. That night when Sara cried after he found me in the bar, it turns out Austin got to the neighborhood early for a reason. But I didn’t know that, not until I checked my phone and read my missed messages, by which point it was too late. Austin had said to me, “You off work? I’m here. Wanna go to the photobooth on Orchard Street before the movie?” With my back to the churning waters, moving moving moving, and never to return, I faced the city and took my first step.

No need to turn on the light, knowing my way even in the dark, I closed our bedroom door behind me. Over at the living room window, I removed its screen and stuck my head outside. Some of the trees in these backyards stand twice as high as the brownstones and the same wind I could see in their branches I felt in my hair. “Thank you, God,” I said. A couple years ago, during a brief but distressing period when our landlord wanted to sell the apartment building, I went downstairs to take out the trash and found two women sitting high up on our stoop. Their names were Millie and Georgia and they used to live here. I couldn’t let them back into their old unit—they lived on the third floor, not the second—but that’s not why they were here. With their choice of gaps in the century-old baseboards, I watched Millie and Georgia stow away these little glass vials, each one with a paper scroll inside. Letters from the present to their pasts. I swear they were angels. These two girls out in the cold who insisted I tell my landlord just how much I love living here. Reminding me I had nothing to lose. But it was more than that. A lot of great things have happened to Millie and Georgia and they said they attribute so much of that to their time living right here. “But,” Austin would always remind me, “Didn’t they say that all those great things only happened after they moved out? Once they left?” That is what they said. And now I’ll know if it’s the truth. That next day, I was moving out. But I couldn’t sleep. Leaning further out, far enough to frighten any other sleepless neighbor staring out their window, reveling in this same quiet, I left something behind. Down to the ground, I spit.

Easing the shlep by leaving the doors wide open, I could hear the teachers downstairs in the preschool. It must have been some sort of orientation because the kids weren’t here. It wasn’t the first day, not yet, but up in New Hampshire it was—and Brian Burns reported to Gilford Middle School all over again. Some seventeen years after I attended my first day of eighth grade there, my dad showed up that morning for his new part-time gig as the custodian. Life is a circle. One of those preschool teachers downstairs is this blond named Ashley whose moccasins and Northface zip-up always reminded me, startlingly, of all the girls I went to high school with. I would’ve bet money she was from some comparably barren stretch of northern New England—but, in all these years, I never asked. Austin was outside guarding the double-parked van and, from inside the living room, paralyzed by the decision of which box to bring downstairs next, I could just make out the words “conscious uncoupling” after Ashley asked him, “You guys moving?!” Turns out, she’s moving too. Or at least moving jobs, teaching this year at a school in Ridgewood. “Go figure,” I said, actively in the process of moving all my stuff to that same neighborhood. “Maybe we’ll see each other around. And have a shared common enemy of a parent over there too.” I will miss so much about this place but I will not miss those parents. The careless cruelty of all those Clinton Hill mothers and fathers—it’s not a moment too soon. After checking to see that she was gone, and quieting his voice, Austin said to me, “Connecticut. I asked that teacher where she’s from. She’s from Connecticut.” I was wrong. But that’s not what mattered.

I watched Austin fill in the space I left behind. Other than a tote bag of perishable groceries I forgot on the kitchen floor, a realization that didn’t occur to me, wrathfully, until we crossed the border into Queens, everything I owned—with Austin’s help—was now in my new apartment. But the rental van needed returning to Clinton Hill. I had to bring it back where it started. Anytime I told someone I was moving to Ridgewood, they’d talk immediately about all the food. The pupusas I needed to try, the varenyky, the Serbian meat pies. Plenty was waiting for me. And yet I asked Austin if it’d be okay for me to stick around and eat a burrito from the place on Fulton. Over at the bookshelf, taking advantage of all this newly open space just for him, he said that was fine. Those couple hours, our final few hours, went by mostly in silence. Austin, still shifting around his titles, seemed so content. And I felt like I was dying. I can’t believe I even had an appetite. But once I washed my dishes, wiping down the kitchen counter in my wake, I found Austin sitting still on the couch, looking right at me. A lot was about to be said. “You’ve given me so much to be grateful for.” “I’m going to miss you so much.” “I love you completely.” “You will always have such a special place in my heart…nobody else—nobody.” But somehow the saddest sentence of all was “Once I pack the perishables again, I’ll need to leave pretty quickly.” In a patch of woeful, wheaten sunshine burning hot through the window, we tasted each other’s tears on our lips. Stowing my face in the nook of his neck, our sobs crashing into each other, I wrapped my arms around him and felt certain there’s no such thing as enough time.

Austin sat with me on the stoop as a little car on my little screen inched closer and closer. But like sentries guarding some vacant ruin, he looked up the block and I looked down, silently. I don’t think we could bear it, any other way. We always went in two different directions. Whenever I spent the night at his apartment, back when we were first dating, come morning it was the J that got me home and the L that took him to work. He’d walk one way on Jefferson and I’d walk the other. But in the growing distance, whipping around like little kids, we’d turn back our heads to look at each other, over and over until we were gone. Sometimes, from all the way down the block, I could hear his laugh. But as the car pulled away from our home of the last four years, and I put my arm out the open window to wave goodbye, I didn’t think to look back. To stick out my head and see Austin for as long as I possibly could. Maybe some part of me, the wisest part, small as he may be, knew better. That if I did, I’d be doomed to the underworld, or turn into a pillar of salt, or just weep harder than I wanted to in front of this stranger driving me to Queens. Olajide was his name. I looked at his eyes, fixed on the road but reflected back at me, and wondered how many times he’s said goodbye to someone he loves.

It was a dead end most everywhere I turned. It was my first full day living in Ridgewood and I was trying to figure out a route for my walk. Back in brownstone Brooklyn, I’d just loop up and down all the tree-lined blocks that got me to Fort Greene Park and repeat the same trek on my way home. Eight nonstop miles, simple as that. Here, there are cemeteries, streets that might as well be highways, and a railroad that cuts the neighborhood right in half. Just when I thought I was getting somewhere, I wouldn’t. But even then, a most pleasant surprise, I liked what I was seeing. Given how many young people I know who live in Ridgewood, I guess I was expecting this neighborhood to mirror my experience of Bushwick where there’s three hordes of hyper-affected ketaministas for every one regular family. It’s grotesque. But this wasn’t. The Ridgewood I witnessed felt almost wholesome, like something out of the past, lovely even in the moments when I thought, Why do I feel like I’m suddenly living in New Jersey? Because it is pretty residential, with its little gated yards and driveways and, strangest of all, American flags. But when it’s adorning the homes of, presumably, immigrant families, who am I to look that in the face? I saw old men sweeping their sidewalks and this one old lady, on a lawn chair in the sun, with five tight curls on her otherwise bald head. And eavesdropping on every possible conversation, oh, the voices. Other than a small handful of my older coworkers and the occasional Lawn Guyland visitors, it’s not often that I hear a strong New York accent. That cot-caught distinction, that variability on brother and father, those rimshot t’s and d’s—it’s an all too rare embrace. But it was everywhere. Of course, my father grew up in Queens. Sharing a bedroom with his four brothers in a Kew Gardens NYCHA building. He’s still got it, even after all these years, but when I listen to him speak, I barely notice. It’s not the accent I hear—it’s my dad.

Starting it on a Thursday night, but finishing it on Friday morning, Sadie McKee was the first film I watched in my new place. It’s a Joan Crawford movie from 1933 with a rags-to-riches working gal kind of story that would become her signature. As I tweeted, plagiarizing the Criterion Channel’s film synopsis in the process, “Much like Joan Crawford, I endure personal trials and heartbreak with the chic sophistication that makes for a Depression-era icon.” High and dry in New York City after getting two-timed by the striving Lothario of her salad days, Sadie eventually marries a loathsome tycoon but ends up, right in the nick of time, with the goodhearted lawyer who loved her all along. The film ends on his birthday. Presented with a cake all aflame, the lawyer looks at Sadie looking at him, a fire all her own burning in those weary, vampish eyes, and as someone says, “You have to blow them all out or your wish won’t come true,” a song begins to play. It was “Auld Lang Syne.” I would’ve expected tears but, instead, I laughed. How couldn’t I? Time and time again, over and over, there it’s been—that song, following me around. A prophecy, a curse, a prayer. I suppose this really is a new year.

On a Saturday night in Greenwich Village, we celebrated Ashleigh and John Michael’s engagement. Three days earlier, I got a text from Nick that read, nervously, “Have you been made aware of this?” I had. Honora first told me about the party last month, while we were together for Juliette’s wedding, sharing as many details as possible before Ashleigh walked back out of those CVS automatic doors. But that was it. Surely there were tasks to delegate in the meantime, organizing to be done but, in the end, all I did was show up. Maybe my friends understood this was a fraught time and kept a wide berth. Or maybe they just know me. Honora, Kyla, and Sarah all came to town for the occasion and everyone looked fabulous. “We really are just getting hotter and hotter” is something we tell each other a lot, like every other aging friend group. Ashleigh wore this long red lace dress purchased that same morning and, after something was said about her being sample size, I exerted my gay privilege and scoffed, “Bitch.” And apparently I looked good too. Going straight to the party from the museum, I’d been showered in praise all day long. Over and over, from people I least expected, I heard, “Brian, I love your shirt.” I did too. It’s my very favorite. It just isn’t mine. When I was still in the throes of packing all my stuff, Austin offered to take care of my clothes in the closet. Slipping a dozen shirts at a time, still on their hangers, into trash bags with a hole cut in the bottom. A white trash garment bag. And hanging them back up that night, in my new bedroom’s closet, I lost my breath. There, amidst all of mine, was something of his. A baby blue short-sleeved button-up with these big polka dots all over. I’ve never known Austin without this shirt and he always looked so cute in it. It’s my favorite thing he wears and he knows that. And all day long, going about my life in Austin’s image, all I heard was how great I look. It’s possible Austin tucked away that polka dot shirt on purpose, leaving me, quietly, with something I adore. How beautiful if that’s the case. But even if it isn’t, even if it was nothing more than a mistake—oh my goodness, how beautiful is that.

Taking off her sneakers after her daily game of pickleball, my mother—who has two jobs but, very much of her own volition, still only works part-time—said, “I’m tired of being the poorest friend.” After telling Shannon I was going up to New Hampshire for a week and a half, she asked what I had planned and I replied, “Haha.” The whole point of visiting New Hampshire, for me, is to do nothing. Or my idea of nothing. Waking up at seven so I could write for a couple hours and still make it to Lake Winnipesaukee for peak UV before clocking all nine miles of my walk just as the sun began to set over the mountains. Easier said than done, however, when all this me!-me!-me! time has to operate around my parents’ schedules. Sitting down to write as soon as my dad left for his job at the middle school only for my mom to come home from pickleball fifteen minutes later. From behind my computer, I watched my mother grab a yogurt from out of the fridge, riding high on endorphins and vitamin D as she said, “Obviously, it’s nice, cheering each other on, but do we need to say ‘good one!’ or ‘awesome!’ after every hit? Every hit? Really?”—and somehow I felt like the working mom. Inconvenienced, albeit fondly, by this beloved intruder. But I can’t complain. My parents, expressing just enough guilt to keep themselves off the hook, were about to leave for a weekend-long music festival in New Jersey. I’d have the house all to myself, something I somberly figured was a thing of the past once my dad retired. For four days straight, I could do whatever I pleased. I could walk around the house naked, dance like an idiot, sing from the topmost reaches of my lungs and let dishes pile up in the sink. And there was some of that. But mostly there was mourning. I cried every day. Licking wounds that, to my surprise, were only just beginning to bleed.

The MTV Video Music Awards were torturing me and I wasn’t even watching. Even as a teenager, actually constituting its intended audience, I rarely ever tuned in. But once I was with Austin, we always would. For him, it was just fun, a way of keeping tabs on the newest stars even if he already knew all their names. For me—not so much. Amounting instead to this reminder, grimmer every year, that I chose being world-weary back when I should’ve just been young. Of course, it wasn’t really the VMAs that had me feeling so tortured. How could it be? Everything’s rooted in something. What tortured me was Twitter. During our first week apart, Austin hardly posted anything. But we were in touch, still regularly texting each other, and I was grateful for that—even if it did already feel different. Then he started tweeting. Granting me this casual access to an interior world where I no longer lived. It was just little asides, pithy observations, nothing substantial, let alone emotional. He seemed perfectly fine. That was the problem. And when I refreshed my feed and found the latest tweet from Austin about Benson Boone being hot—I saw red. Loathing this mustached 22-year-old singer who, ten seconds earlier, I didn’t know existed. That I could be so rattled by this isn’t just ridiculous, it’s dysfunctional. It is insane. But past midnight and already in bed, ignoring my better judgment after typing and deleting this message more than once, I said to Austin, “Currently in a very stressed and angry place. And I’m wondering how you’ve been feeling.” Within seconds, he responded, “I’m okay. Sad. But not stressed or angry.” That was not what I wanted to hear. Maybe no answer would ever be good enough, that there’s nothing he possibly could’ve said to make me feel even a little less alone. I understand that. But I cannot accept it.

That next night, Austin and I talked on the phone. All through the summer, during this grand experiment in unraveling, we were commended for our maturity. A constant chorus of praise from most everyone in our lives. Some more baffled than others but nevertheless admiring our staying on good terms and living under one roof. For managing to survive the sweetness of staying together while nevertheless drifting apart. Bravo. But pacing in circles around my parents’ house, as my woe turned to pleading turned to fury, I listened to Austin speak so rationally to me, so coolly, and I felt like a child. I needed to know he hurt like I hurt, I needed to feel that, to hear some requisite tone of voice that just might prove our guts were stuck in the same vice. Because, yes, he did tell me he couldn’t sleep, that he was tossing and turning every night only to wake up at six. That he hadn’t watched a single movie, or finished a book, or worked up the energy to go into the office let alone meet up with friends. That he felt sad, immobile, lazy, and depressed. But he was also trying to stay positive—and I could not make sense of that. Desperate for some impossibly perfect answer that could land squarely in my heart, I pushed and I pushed and I pushed—and he exploded. Howling at me through the phone, I felt his anguish and his sorrow but, more than anything, I felt his anger. There was no catharsis for him in that explosion, no relief. There was only resentment. I tried to explain that if we’re staying in each other’s lives, I’d need honesty from him, a window into how he’s really feeling, like how things were, all those years ago, when we were just friends. And it was then, still seething, that Austin said, “That is impossible! That’s over!” Oh. Oh, oh, oh. What a fool I’ve been. Before we hung up, Austin said he made a decision. That until I was back in New York, when we could reassess the possibility of friendship, we had to stop talking. If I really needed him, he said, I could call—and it took all I had not to ask, “But why don’t you need me badly enough to call?” I suppose a break-up is a break-up—and Austin’s done this before. He will survive, he needs to, and he knows that. I have no idea.

Warning her of my general state of mind, gracing Lindsay with an “out” if she so desired, I drove my dad’s car down to Concord and met up with my sister for dinner. We’d get together a couple more times that weekend, and with Vincent too, spending Saturday afternoon on the beach and Sunday night at her place. Vacationing in Lake George the week prior, after Lindsay and her husband told Vincent they were headed to New York, he asked if they were going to see “Uncle Bub.” And after explaining state versus city to him, my three-year-old nephew responded, “Oh right—he lives in Brooklyn. I forgot!” A sharp and funny baby who already has dinosaur names and entire story books committed to memory, I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true—he’s brilliant. “And when he is that smart, when he really seems to know exactly what he’s doing,” said Lindsay, at dinner that night, “How could I not take it personally? Even just a little? When my son is looking me in the eye and saying, ‘I don’t love you.’” At 35 years old, there’s a lot on Lindsay’s mind. Misgivings aplenty about choices made and decisions yet to come while parenting a whip smart toddler and remembering a lost baby. And all the time, she’s angry. Nodding, I said to her, “I am so angry.” We are Kristine’s children, of course. We talked about that. How we feel doomed by all that fury, by all her rage. And then I was reminded of something our mother told me. Her father was a horrible man, an abusive and violent person who stoked constant fear in his wife and children. I don’t always see them as a family—Nana and my mom, her one little brother and three older sisters—but as individuals, alone, who were doing everything they could just to survive that house. And sometimes I worry they’re stuck there. That they never learned how to leave. But I brought all this up with Lindsay to share something specific, telling my sister how our mother told me, in the oral history of her life, “Hopefully, Nana met someone that we weren’t aware of and was able to have some fun years. I mean, she was a waitress and attractive and, you know, after work sometimes, you have a drink with your coworkers and maybe there was some flirting going on. I hope there was. For her sake. But…I don’t know.” If I understand this correctly, what became us was already inside our mother when she was inside of hers. Nana carried Kristine carrying us. And looking at Lindsay from across the table, as the same tears fell down both our faces, I hoped we had less to bear.

Finally managing to pull her truck into a tight spot at this lakeside bar, as I looked on painfully all the while, I hugged my high school French teacher hello and said, “That’s exactly what being pee shy at the urinal is like.” Louise looked gorgeous. Breezy and youthful and just a little bit of a mess. Like tousled hair. A perfect storm. And she smelled just the same, a fragrance, whatever it is, that brought me right back to her classroom. Long enrolled in Spanish, I started taking classes with her as a junior because of my crush on a boy who was treasurer of the French Club. Boys may come and boys may go but—qu’il est bon, le bon Dieu—Madame Louise lasted. Over martinis, “pornographically” dirty per her request, we caught each other up. The last time we saw one another, when her son was nearing puberty and she was nearing retirement, much was in the air. As a mother, as a teacher—and as a partner. For a long time, she was in a relationship with a man named John. But no sooner did we eat the first of our vodka-soaked olives than I heard her reference someone named Roy. Boyfriend-girlfriend in the eighth grade, their paths didn’t cross again until a recent (and strangely specific) forty-first high school reunion. Never married, he’s never had to consider meeting anyone halfway, if such a thing is even possible. They’ve got differences to negotiate but it seems like work Louise is happy to do. As she said, “With John—I lost my voice.” And there was possibly a lot up in the air for me too, that last time we saw one another. Back then, Austin and I were fighting so much—fighting over something, all told, I never really learned to get over—and I didn’t know if we’d last. But we did. Until, of course, we didn’t. I told Louise we broke up. A lifelong educator, committed and gifted at that, she said all the right things. But what struck me deepest that night wasn’t anything I heard, not really. It was something I could see, there, in the swelling of her chest, the corner of her lips, and in the glisten of her eyes, stony blue and brimming over. Listening to me, she looked so proud. And she should be. I’m her student.

Hardly a week since Ashleigh’s engagement party, I looked through Kyla’s snapshots of our cradled drinks and kissed cheeks. There’s nothing like a film photo. Endlessly flattering in its smoothing of the bad stuff and enriching of the good, it’s also got that crucial, aching ingredient of time’s passage. The best pictures ever taken of me took months, years, to see the light of day. It’s a rule. But Kyla must have sent off her photos the moment she got back to New Orleans. And while she insisted they’re “still cute tho,” in almost every photo of me, I’m cut off at the neck. I have lost my head—but not the shirt.

Down in Asbury Park for that music festival, within walking distance of Jillian’s apartment all weekend long, my parents saw my oldest sister one time. Dropping off some odds and ends at her place, Jillian only had five minutes to spare before taking a work call. I don’t think they even went inside. Efforts were made to see each other again but nothing came of it. Back home in New Hampshire, listening to my mom talk about this, I hated what I was hearing. Not the details, per se, but her tone. There wasn’t just pain in her voice, there were callouses. Jillian was already in college when we moved to New Hampshire. Suddenly 400 miles away from us, she spent her breaks from school living first with our Aunt Patti and later with her boyfriend and his family. At 20 years old, there was not a home she could go back to—not easily, at least. Sometimes, in the heat of the occasional argument, Jillian will say we left her behind. And my parents, this night more than usual, cannot grasp that. Arguing that kids go away for college all the time, that leaving home is a normal thing to do, a common choice. I wanted them to understand how New Hampshire was never really an option for her, even if they did offer it. To understand why Jillian, all these years later, might still feel so alone. It was useless and I knew that. But still, I couldn’t help saying, “Considering I threatened to kill myself before we moved and never got brought to a therapist, perhaps the two of you could’ve been paying closer attention.” My dad went a different kind of speechless while my mother looked at me, cold as dawn, and said, “Well, the hospital doesn’t send you home with a manual when you have a baby.” The room went silent and it stayed that way. But then, when she was ready, my mom asked how things have been with Austin. Sitting down beside me on the couch, our bodies in perfect contact with each other, she rubbed my leg and joined me in my tears. If we were any closer, I’d be sitting in my mother’s lap. And tanning in the backyard that next day, but coming back inside sooner than he must have expected, I found my dad watching a live performance of Bruce Springsteen on his phone. And with the plastic water bottle in his hand, he hid his face from me. I asked why he was upset and, in time, my father said, “It’s just…music…it’s so powerful.” With all his heart, and with all of mine, we know it is.

On my last day in New Hampshire, for the first time all summer, I went in the water. Technically closed for the season, it was me and a dozen other diehards on Gilford Beach, trying to enjoy what was left of summer as all around us—solemn as a loon’s call—we listened to the heaving sounds of destruction. Downwind from the demolition, breathing in God knows what, I watched an excavator truck tear apart the old shack that housed the bathrooms and concession stand. With its red cedar shake and ancient porcelain toilets, all splinters and chipped paint, it fit right in. I thought about its replacement and how ugly it’s going to be. Lake Winnipesaukee was as warm as it ever gets but still—it was cold to me. Never one to dive in, I walked steadily further out until I had no other choice but sink under the water. It really is a holy thing. Waist deep, with my feet touching the bottom, I cupped my hands and brought a palm full of water up to my heart. Once…twice…and then, the last time, I heard the truck start gnawing at the metal roof of the shack. Up until then, the roof had been cast to the side, something to deal with later, for good reason. All that crunching and scraping of metal on metal, it was painful. Violent, even. A new sound that made so much noise.

As one test at a time was added to my patient portal, I looked at the results of my blood work and wondered how soon I’ll drop dead. My first day back in New York, I had my physical. Showing up to my 8:30 appointment after a terrible night’s sleep, waking up from a bad dream at three only for racing thoughts to keep me up past five, the timing was less than ideal for an evaluation of body and mind. There’s this quote from Joni Mitchell, talking about what it was like recording her album Blue, where she says, “At that period in my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.” That much is clear. I lost five pounds in a month without trying, I’m still struggling to breathe, my bad cholesterol is through the roof, and—with an optimal count of zero—my nucleated red blood cells are “usually a sign of a life threatening condition.” But before I knew any of this, while my blood was still hot in its vials and I headed straight from the doctors to work, I couldn’t help it. Right there on the sidewalk, I sobbed. How badly I wanted a stranger on Broome Street to reach out and touch my arm, to ask if I was okay, to care for me. And how badly I wanted to disappear. Waiting for the light to change, I felt completely alone in the world. A couple days later, my doctor called me and said, “We’ll take these labs seriously, of course, but honestly? Looking at your results? I’m confident it’s mostly just a stress response.”

At Roberta’s, I ate pizza with Roberta. She and her husband were in town from Chicago, visiting Cara, younger sister to my friend Keely, the whole reason I’m so close with this family. At Keely’s suggestion, before my move to New York, I lived in Chicago for a summer with her Swedish grandmother. “My halcyon days on the porch,” I said, faux-wistfully, hugging everybody hello amidst the immediate allusions to my time spent, indeed, on the enclosed back porch of Mormor’s Lincoln Square walk-up. With a five month old baby at home, Keely couldn’t join her parents on the trip. Putting her phone’s speaker right against my ear so I could listen to these special little coos the baby makes anytime she hears someone sing, I asked Roberta what it’s like seeing her daughter be a mother. Limitlessly generous in every way, quick to laugh and quicker to solace, Roberta was crowned the beer chugging champion at a college party and, as of a couple years ago, became a certified doula. I got a call from her one night this summer, out of nowhere, just to ask how I was doing. “Alright, you two, throw ‘em back,” said Eric from down the table, only kind of kidding. Everyone else was long finished with their food and drink while me and Roberta still had full glasses of wine. Letting the pain be painful, and the hope hopeful, offering me so much with every heavy exhale, she asked if I felt any regret about the decision and I told her—in many, many words—no. At some point, Roberta said, “So, Eric and I dated when we were young but…you do know he wasn’t my first husband, right?” It took time and a lot of effort to become the kind of person who could show up for the relationship she has now. To have the feelings without the feelings having her, as the saying goes. It’s meditation that brought her there. What it’ll be for me, I don’t know, but there has to be something. There has to be. Because if Eric had been her first husband, if they kept dating and got married before she ever got to start all this hard work, when she thinks about the possibility of that—Roberta said it breaks her heart.

“You can keep it,” said Austin, feet off the ground on the bed he helped me assemble, a favor he offered without my asking, saying it’d be too difficult to manage alone. This was our second time seeing each other since my return to New York. On my first day back, he asked if I’d like to go see The Substance with him. Washing my hands in the movie theater bathroom, unsure if Austin was here yet, I looked in the mirror and there he was, stopping short and reflected back at me. We hugged and, with all the instinct of an inhale, I went to kiss him. But he turned his cheek. Seeing the look on my face, Austin laughed, burdened with contrition, and said, “Sorry.” Before the movie began, he asked me if I took his blue polka dot shirt. I hadn’t brought it up, I wouldn’t dare, too comforted in not knowing—but he saw Kyla’s pictures. It was just a mistake. I wanted so badly to touch him but I kept my hands to myself and, as soon as we got down to the platform, his train was already pulling into the station. Our commutes home are different now. “My ex-boyfriend just got here to help me with my bed frame,” I said to Rachel and Hannah, my new roommates, as they poured each other wine in the kitchen. “If either of you needed a reason to feel better about yourselves.” Opening the door to him, Austin greeted me with a kiss on the lips. He apologized but, this time, it was his inhale. We’ve put together a lot of stuff, Austin and I. Bookshelves, desks, bar carts and television mounts. He has the brains while I’ve got the brawn and so we made it. It really would’ve been such a pain setting up this bed on my own but, together, it took no time. We laid down. And gently, with such care in his voice, warm as can be, Austin asked, “How have you been?” We weren’t supposed to ask each other that kind of question anymore, that was the new rule. That if we had any hope of being friends, there could be no discussion of our feelings, not yet, not while mine are still so raw. And, I have to believe, his too. But here it was, exactly what I wanted, a chance for a conversation about loss with the person I’m losing. And it was perfect. He told me to keep his blue polka dot shirt, that it was mine if I wanted it, but his offer was the greater gift so I gave it back. That night, I felt the first sticky dabs of salve smearing all my heartburns.

Or so I thought. We saw each other again just a couple days later, having already purchased tickets to see Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow in a Broadway play. Meeting up with him beforehand for dinner, on the corner of 51st and 9th, Austin turned his cheek. He had plenty to say, much more than I did, telling me about the books he’s read, his 90-year-old Nana’s second baptism, and how he and Kiera have rearranged the furniture in their apartment. But the care in his voice from Saturday night, by Tuesday, had cooled back down to careful. Talking to me from such a distance, cordial and clipped, I watched his eyes shoot toward the door every time a new person walked in the restaurant. He seemed totally invulnerable. If I didn’t know any better, that’s what I’d think. His youngest sister also got baptized that weekend and when I asked if the decision had remained the same, to avoid telling her about the breakup in hopes that, one day, she’ll stop asking where I am, Austin looked at me and said, “Did you tell Vincent about it?” If she can be spared confusion, if the sadness of goodbye and the pang of false promises can be avoided, that’s what needs to happen and I respect that. His family knows best. But when Austin insisted he was only kidding, that obviously there’s no comparing the third grader in his life with the toddler in mine, that it was only a joke, I wondered how long it will take before I can find any of this funny. Partially obstructed but front row nevertheless, Austin and I took our seats, trembling in anticipation of sitting so near the raging velocity of LuPone. She reminds me so much of my mother. And of course, Austin knows that. After almost every line that came out of her mouth, he’d look at me. Sharing in the laugh, gauging my response, paying me his attention. Only occasionally did I look back at him. But I know that in every turn of his head, every last one, there were a thousand words. Earlier that night, arriving at the restaurant a couple minutes before he did, I waited for Austin out front, looking up and down the block until finally I saw him. And I smiled. Closer every second to this street corner we’d agreed upon, of all the clothes in his closet, of all the shirts he possibly could have worn that night, buttoned-up and baby blue, Austin was in polka dots.

It took me eighteen stops on the M train, from Fresh Pond to Bryant Park, to choose what I wanted to see. On my way to meet up with Sophie for an afternoon at the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection, I combed through its 476-page list of every single subject heading. “This gives an overview of the richness of the collection,” it reads. “However, the subject headings assigned to pictures are often different from what you would expect.” Every Wednesday, her day off, Sophie spends some time here. With a different folder for every subject heading, each of them bursting at the seams with hundreds of photographs, Sophie said we’re allowed to look through four at a time. And for the next several hours, other than the occasional nudge toward an image we knew the other would like, we hardly spoke. With gentle fingers and prying eyes, I looked through the photos in “payday” and “reflections” and “hair washing.” “Symbols (good luck)” and “writing (action)” and “Bible (Virgin Mary).” Pointedly clearing my throat, I set my latest folders down on the table, making sure that Sophie noticed my “love” and my “sorrow.” And her laughter was all the sweeter for its faint creak of sympathy. “Can’t have one,” Sophie said, “Without the other.” After saying our goodbyes, I decided to take a different way home. From 42nd Street all the way down to 14th, I walked along Park Avenue. It was cloudy, with a cool gloom in the air, and while I wasn’t sad, not explicitly, I did feel strange. Like a right shoe on the left foot. Starting it over the second it finished, I listened to the same song over and over, singing the lyrics right out loud. If somebody heard me, I didn’t care. And if no one was listening, I’d be all right. “...you plant the seed and I’ll watch it grow, I wonder when I’ll start to show, I wonder if I’ll ever know, where my place is, where my face is, I know it’s in here somewhere, I just wish I knew the color of my hair…” The seed of bitterness is in her mouth and she’s deciding whether or not to swallow. Past five o’clock by then, amidst the first wave of dinner reservations and commutes home, the streets were busy, crammed with people—and I looked them all in the eye. These strangers, these endless passersby. Headings of many subjects. I don’t think I missed a single one. And I wondered if everybody knew this already, if all these people already understood what I’d just learned. That there was a lot to see in “sorrow” but there was so much more in “love.”

Not yet six in the morning and I was eating some oatmeal that already was a couple hours old. People are their principles as theory in action. The preparation of this breakfast may have cost me a final thirty minutes of extra sleep but it saved me from spending fifteen dollars at LaGuardia. And so this staunch character ate his gruel in terminal B. I used to love airports. Happily showing up three hours early for my domestic flights just so I could be a stranger among strangers. Drinking coffee and writing in my diary and watching the people go. And while that’s still basically all I ever do, I’ve lost all love in my heart for traveling by air. If I had my way, I’d never step foot on a plane ever again. A tall restless-legged germaphobe who travels coach on discount airlines, I’m not expecting comfort. But it isn’t the means I find myself increasingly dreading. It’s the end. Because boarding this plane, headed to Chicago for a connecting flight to San Francisco where Honora was waiting with Ashleigh and John Michael to drive us four hours further north to Juliette’s wedding, already I was thinking, “I miss New York.”

“No, no, it’s all good—you don’t owe me that,” said Honora, after I apologized for never personally telling her about my breakup with Austin. She wasn’t with the rest of us at that restaurant in Williamsburg a couple months back, when a question from Sarah left me with no other choice but to spill the beans. Something I was, ultimately, grateful for, getting to let everyone know in one fell swoop. Or almost everyone. I’ve been friends with Honora for 12 years. I absolutely owed her that. With Ashleigh and John Michael in the back, and Honora behind the wheel, we were well on our way to Fort Bragg. I’d only been to California once before, joining Shannon for her trip home during our senior year’s spring break. Touring Alcatraz, Shannon and I were walking around the grounds when suddenly we ran into Tony—a Croatian-born Swedish exchange student who went to Emmanuel with us for one semester. During which he slept with one of our closest friends. It’s a small world after all. And on karaoke night at a Pismo Beach dive bar, I narrowly avoided a hate crime after singing “I Touch Myself” to a crowd of cruel-eyed townies. I was so shocked to learn there were people like that in California. But it’s Shannon’s protectiveness I remember the most, that and her anger. She became my sister that night. Driving by a hotel called The Dudley, Honora sent a picture of it to Shannon before asking me where she’s living and what she’s up to these days. They’ve fallen out of touch. My male brain, gay as it may be, couldn’t begin to comprehend the complexity of friendship between women. But in Honora’s voice, and later on in Shannon’s texts, I swear their tone was one and the same. I wish I could do something to bring them closer again. That if I do owe anything to my friends, this could be it.

Steadying herself on my arm to take off her heels, Honora walked barefoot down the rest of the path leading to the waterfront altar—where Juliette and Liz’s very famous wedding photographer was waiting to document her unshod arrival. “Cool,” said Honora. Taking our seats and looking back over our shoulders, we watched the brides make their way down that same path, through a field of tall, golden grass. Ashleigh was already crying. But when Juliette came fully into view, looking truly perfect, I had no urge to cry—rather, I wanted to scream. Feeling so euphoric, so gleeful, so proud of this friend, this old, old friend, who’d already succeeded at what she does best: creating something beautiful. And she was so present for it. Present enough to not just look me in the eye as she proceeded down the center aisle but to do so with a wink. Standing at the altar, she looked at all of us and said, with a Gwyneth Paltrovian smirk, “I need a tissue.” Vows were exchanged, rings were warmed, and we pelted the newly pronounced brides with rice. Forced to fire their butch lesbian DJ after a string of one-star reviews suggested this emcee might be in crisis (she showed up to a recent wedding wearing red flannel pajamas), the reception wound up being more of a seated dinner than anything else. Which still would’ve been lovely even if we weren’t seated across from this one aunt who referred to Juliette, repeatedly, and somehow warmly, as “that little bitch.” During the speech from a maid of honor, as she was telling us sweet stories about Juliette’s mom and grandmother, this aunt looked over at us, made a gun with her fingers, and shot herself in the head.

The four of us rented this perfect little house, a yellow ranch with a pink porcelain toilet and paintings of bare assed ladies hanging on every wall. It was right on the water but we didn’t realize that, not until we pulled into the driveway that first night and saw, right there in front of us, the sun setting over the ocean. A couple minutes on foot through the backyard was all that separated us from these craggy cliffs dropping straight down into the Pacific. Home from the wedding that night, in the pitch black, the four of us walked out there. Looking up at stars burning brighter than I’d ever seen, even in New Hampshire, we tried to find Taurus, and Leo, and Sagittarius. If I’m phobic about anything, or at least anything concrete, it’s being in an isolated house at nighttime. I should have been terrified. But I wasn’t, not so long as I had these people with me. And yet, waking up early that next morning, I did everything I could to slip out of the house unnoticed. I walked down to the cliffs and, staring at the water, I saw a seal. It felt so good to be alone.

Jolted awake every five minutes—or so it felt—I would’ve thought there were still hours left to go but, sneaking around the window shade, I noticed the first hints of dawn. This red-eye from SFO had reached JFK. Sharing a ride home with Ashleigh and John Michael, we got in a car driven by a woman named Lourdes. …And I feel like I just got home/And I feel… A couple days later, back at the museum, I was talking to Grace. She’d also just returned from a trip, spending a week with friends in Alaska. A native New Yorker, a Queens girl, Grace grew up here. All her life, she said, whenever she got back home from a trip somewhere else, she’d resent it. That her shoulders would tighten up the second her plane hit the tarmac, already on the defense, the offense, already so mad over this reunion with the crowds, the filth, the familiarity. But during her week in Alaska, despite all those trees and rivers, despite the moss on the rocks and some seals of her own laying on a buoy, surrounded by all that grandeur, all she could think about was home. I asked her if she was happy to be back in New York and Grace said, “I am so fucking happy to be back in New York.”

And after more than a month away, his five weeks in North Carolina come and gone, Austin was also back in New York. He landed around noon but I didn’t see him until later, not until I was home from work. That morning, I overslept, and my oatmeal made a mess of the microwave, and milk leaked all over the fridge. Racing into the kitchen to wash my dishes, already late for work, I found Kiera, our roommate, quietly cleaning up the coffee grinds she’d spilled all over the stove. A plague on both our houses. Different people in different ways asked how I was feeling to which I said, more or less, “Same as always.” Opening the door to our bedroom that evening, we smiled at each other. Austin seemed so small, laying there on a bed that suddenly looked so big. How quickly, I guess, we forget. I made dinner that night, meatballs with rice cooked in pickle brine and salted yogurt on the side. It’s his favorite thing I make. I used to cook every single night for us. A lockdown necessity that stuck. But then I got into the habit of living off the leftovers of a huge pot of soup, cooked once a week, just for me. I barely enjoy it, let alone anyone else. If I were to count up all the meals I made this year for me and my boyfriend, I could do it with one hand. But as we sat down to eat this dinner, Austin was nothing but grateful. He offered to take care of the dishes but I wanted to do what we’ve always done—for Austin to wash and for me to dry. Same as always. I felt a little out of practice that night but only for so long. In time, I remembered. Exerting myself after what was already a long day, with a rich dinner in my stomach and our potentially mold-riddled air conditioner on full blast, I lay there beside Austin, already asleep. And for the first time in a long time, for the first time in five weeks, as a matter of fact—I wasn’t wheezing and the pain in my ribs was gone. I could breathe.

“Brian, how are your finances?” asked Ian, from the other end of the table, out to dinner with Nick, Ashleigh, and Shannon. My other Shannon, that is. Visiting from San Francisco, she was in town for the week. I hadn’t seen her in years and, when I stood up to hug her hello, she was so much taller than I remembered. Someone asked how she likes San Francisco and with a heartfelt exhale, Shannon said, “I love it.” I know so many people, too many people, who don’t like where they live. It was this line of thought, home and housing, that had Ian asking about my finances. He is from Connecticut, after all. “Well, I have to say—I’m sad. Because it really does seem like my era of cheap living is coming to an end.” They all laughed, not that I was kidding, though maybe that’s exactly what made it funny. I have never spent more than $825 a month in rent. It’s unheard of, even if most everyone in my life has to hear a lot about it. Just about everytime I see Koko, she’ll say to me, “I’m always telling people, ‘I’ve got this friend Brian who works, like, three days a week and lives in Clinton Hill and spends nothing. I have no idea how he does it.’” But in my consultation of Craigslist and Listings Project and the occasional Instagram Story, something’s started to feel inevitable—September will mark the turning point.

They all agreed on one more drink someplace else but I needed to get back to the dog. Telling me to come inside to say my goodbyes, Ian joined Nick and Ashleigh into the bar. But me and Shannon stayed outside. She was still in the middle of telling me about this interview with Patti Smith that she loved so much. How Patti talked about the presence of her mother, and her husband, and Robert Mapplethorpe in everything she does, despite all these people being long gone. I said that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. “You seem to be doing okay, Bri,” said Shannon. “But are you? Are you sad?” Reaching out to touch my arm, Shannon had so much to offer—while also saying she knew I needed to leave. I was dog sitting, just a couple days into a weeks-long stay with Maya the Chihuahua and I try to stay at her apartment as much as I can. Earlier, when I first took my seat at this restaurant, situated on a block of the Lower East Side that I very happily can’t escape, I said, “I want my heart buried on Orchard Street.” And looking at Shannon out on the sidewalk that night, reflected in the tears in her eyes, the same color blue as mine—I could see the streetlights. Under our feet, the ground broke.

Walking down Washington and crossing Atlantic, Clinton Hill became Prospect Heights. Both “Brian” and “Burns” mean, among other things, “hill.” We become our names. Outside the building, I rubbed my palms against my shirt, trying to keep them as dry as possible for the inevitable handshake. In addition to seeing the bedroom, I was here to meet the two other people living in this three-story house—a middle-aged gay couple who have their art studio down on the first floor, their bedroom up on the third, with a small but fully furnished room for rent on the second. Over the last two decades, they’ve rented it out to nine different people. Dancers, writers, fashion students. Someone who identified as “queer” when it was still a pejorative and a straight boy from the Midwest who stayed for two and a half years. “No, no, I’m used to it,” I told the couple, looking at me looking around the room, perhaps appearing smaller than ever given my height. “I’ve been known to say that I live a ‘nun’s life.’” They really laughed at that and I suppose it is funny—the first time someone hears me say it. And there was more where that came from, a few more opportunities during the house tour for me to punctuate their remarks with some smirking little bon mot. I’m good at that. But then, sitting down at their kitchen table and presented with a glass of water, even if we all wanted this to be a conversation, we understood it was an interview. I tried to explain how I’ve spent so much of my adulthood, so far at least, in other people’s homes. That in dog sitting, and living with Keely’s grandmother in Chicago, and telling the stories of real families in recreations of their tenement apartments, I’ve come to better understand my own place in the world. But I failed. Barely finished with this half-cooked thought, I interrupted myself to say, “As creepy as that sounds!” The warmth on their faces cooled to something cautious, something pitying, even. Listening to their stories about the past tenants, it was clear they wanted someone intriguing, someone with personality. An individual who would inspire new fascinations and perspectives. But even at my best, the couple times I did manage to finish a sentence, I fear I was nothing more than polite.

“I walk up this stairwell and think, ‘This is where I did some of the most miserable manual labor of my life,’” Austin said, on our way up to Caroline’s top floor apartment. Walking up those same steps, I also had a thought—is this the last time I’ll be here? I didn’t share that with him, but I don’t think I needed to. Renting a ten-foot cargo van from a West Village garage a couple years ago, Austin and I helped Caroline move twenty years of life out of her country house upstate back to her Carroll Gardens walk-up. With Caroline sitting illegally on the floor—and, at one point, with a gin and tonic in her hand—I prayed we didn’t get pulled over. I’d never driven a vehicle so large. Let alone while weaving through Sixth Avenue traffic and switching lanes on the Parkway. It was stressful and it was exhausting and it was one of the best days of my entire life. We learned so much about her. The consummate Englishwoman, mannered and prim even after all these years in New York City, Caroline was still Austin’s boss at that point. But boundaries were no match for sentiment. Everything she owned had a story and we listened, enraptured, to every one. Opening up an early-eighties music magazine to a spread about the London punk scene, she pointed a finger at the photographer credit. Leaning in close enough to smell that vinegary sting of old ink, we read Caroline’s name. Just when I thought I couldn’t love her more. Austin has known Caroline since he was 18, when she hired him to work reservations at a restaurant, all those years ago. But for whatever reason, he hadn’t told her what happened with us, not yet. So when we arrived upstairs, and gave Caroline our drink orders, and a friend of Caroline’s daughter asked us how we knew each other, I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. But with ease, and something resembling honesty, Austin said, “We date.” And then the stranger asked us how we met.

“On Facebook in 2015,” said Austin. “He commented something funny on a mutual friend’s post and then I looked at his picture and thought, ‘He’s cute.’ So then we became Internet friends. For years. Totally platonic. Just friends. But then in 2018, he moved to New York and, on his first full day here, we saw A Star Is Born in theaters. We started hanging out after that and just never stopped. He’d come over to my apartment every night and lay on my bed and we’d just talk and talk for hours. And all my friends were telling me, ‘He’s got a crush. He must. He loves you.’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no—we’re just friends.’ But then we have tickets to see Mitski one night and we drank some champagne before the show and, during the set, I put my arms around him. And he lets me do it! And I’m thinking, ‘Okay, sweet, we’re gonna go back to my apartment and, you know, make out!’ So that’s what we do, we go back to my apartment and we’re down at the front door and suddenly Brian says, ‘Alright—I’m gonna head home!’ So, yeah, we don’t talk about it until a couple days later when I tell him, ‘So—I didn’t mean to do this, it was never my plan, I promise but…I have feelings for you and…I think you do, too.’ And then Brian says, ‘That is so sweet but—I don’t.’”

We had a small crowd at this point, laughing and cooing at all the right moments. Not just the daughter’s friend, but another woman named Kathy, and—with freshly mixed drinks—Caroline herself. We’ve told this story so many times to so many people and this unrequited twist always comes as such a surprise. What they thought was the conclusion was only our midpoint. And same as always, after Austin started the story, I finished it.

“I was more gentle than that, of course,” I said. “I just felt like he was my best friend here. And I was worried that if we took that step, and things soured, I’d lose that. I didn’t want to take that risk. But he was so great. You know, telling me that I could come over tomorrow and we could hang out like always and everything would be the same. And it was! It really was. But then a couple months go by and he’s telling me one night about some date he went on with some boy and I thought to myself, ‘Okay, why am I absolutely seething with jealousy right now?’ And then we’re laying in his bed—fully under the covers, mind you, clothed but still—and we’re watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Like, two days before Valentine’s Day. And Austin says, ‘Okay, I know I said that the ball is in your court and that, if your feelings ever changed, you’d have to be the one who brings it up but…what about that ball in your court?’ And then, well—the rest was history. And, uh, that risk, you know, my worries about taking that risk on our friendship…it was totally worth it.”

Asking Caroline how I could help, as her party moved from the living room up to the roof, she handed me a beer and said, “You can give this to Marc for me.” Once upon a time, Caroline and Marc were partners. Living together in the East Village, they broke up while she was still pregnant with their daughter, but got back together just before she was born—and separated for good a couple years later. That was every bit of 25 years ago. But the same day I met Caroline for the first time, right up on this roof, I also met Marc. He’s always invited.  “Brian, I’ll have you slice this up for us,” said Caroline, handing me a platter and the chocolate babka I’d brought along with me. I got it from a kosher bakery called Moishe’s. It’s like a time machine in there, with its fake wood paneling and linoleum floors. The self-serve diner pot of coffee against one wall and old New Yorkers paying for their black and whites in loose change. I watched a customer say, “Hell, why not, how about two of those, I’ll take two” only for the ancient lady behind the counter, all whiskers and motherly scorn, to say, “Two?!” I was grinning ear to ear, like an idiot, standing in that bakery. “That’s still there? Moishe’s? On Second Avenue?” asked Marc, after I told everybody that story. The Moishe’s I was talking about is on the Lower East Side. The one he was thinking of, as it turns out, isn’t there anymore. After forty years in business, it closed. Marc told us that when he walks up and down Second Avenue these days, he can’t look for the clubs or bars or theaters he once loved. Because they’re not there. All that remains for him, now, are the buildings. And in the archways, the cornices, in the remnants of long gone marquees, dimly familiar but etched in stone, he tries to remember. “I wasn’t just living in a neighborhood, even then I understood that,” Marc said. “I was living in a history.”

Cam reached out, texting me, among other things, “I hope you’re doing okay.” All these months later, he learned about the breakup not because I told him—but because he read about it. It’s no fun to start a conversation with such a downer, I could place the blame there. But that’s not really it. He and his wife and their baby moved to Massachusetts this summer, leaving their first house as a family for a new one someplace else, and I knew next to nothing about it. I’d hardly talked to him. But here he was, starting a conversation I was too hesitant, too guilty to start—and it took me an entire week to respond. Cam’s perspective in my life is a unique one. Straight, punk, male, he’s truly peerless. And I cherish that, I cherish him. But as I read his messages, combing through his two-cents on where he thinks I should live and the kind of guy I should be with, I didn’t feel counseled so much as course-corrected. Nevertheless, I drafted up a mostly jaunty but requisitely firm response that would, surely, warrant his white flag. Instead, we fought. I told him, “If you’d asked me more questions over the years, maybe you would’ve known about the many facets of my personality that have always been there.” And he told me, “I’ve appeared in your writing more often than you’ve actually initiated a conversation with me.” We’ve since made up, Cam and I. But I was sick to my stomach going to bed that night. His suggestions I could disagree with but not his feelings. Feelings that, suddenly, had me thinking of all my fights with Austin after a night out where I felt I never had the chance to speak. And all the times I wished my dad had something more to say. Everything Cam shared about me, I recognized as the truth. I’m nobody’s responsibility. If I want to be among the living, I have to put myself there.

But how?

In Queens, coming to see a place I might live, Mary appeared to me. Full of grace not just once but twice. Assuring me the deliberation was heartbreaking, the couple chose someone else for the room and so my search continued.  “I know it’s not Brooklyn,” said a girl named Rachel, reaching out about a room opening up in her apartment. “But Ridgewood is the Brooklyn of Queens.” Still dog sitting Maya, I left one person’s home to go see another. And on my way out of her building, I thought about that couple, and that little room in their beautiful home, and all the beds I’ve slept in, alone, that weren’t mine. Already, I could see the blessing. Maybe now’s the time to start telling different stories about myself. Rachel brought me upstairs where she introduced me to her roommate Hannah. Blessed art thou amongst women, indeed. They’ve both been in the apartment for a while and have nothing but good things to say about it. Rachel and I have some mutual friends but it’s me and Hannah who seem to have the most in common. Both of us were born in New Jersey but her family moved to Vermont when she was twelve while, at thirteen, mine moved to New Hampshire. I’ve been thinking a lot about that move lately. All that change and all those goodbyes, all at once—and that it happened right around this same time of year. Maybe I’ll get to talk to Hannah about it one day. The bedroom is in the back and overlooks all these little yards, for houses mostly, but also a church. I looked through the window and the first thing I noticed, over a fence and behind a tree, was a statue of Mary. When I first arrived, before telling Rachel that I was here, I took a picture of the building next door. People live there, I’d imagine, but it’s also the offices for a radio station. Nailed to its facade, in an old wood frame, there was a drawing of the mother of God. And encircled all around her, like a halo, in Spanish and Polish and Russian and Arabic, over and over again, I read the words “Radio Maria.” A Madonna without child, gazing dreamily off to one side. And once I climbed that stoop and said that I was here—she would have been looking straight at me.

Coming back from an afternoon walk with Maya, I said yes to Rachel and Hannah. That I’d love to live with them in Ridgewood. Of course, the formal application process hadn’t even begun yet. Also, I’d be expected to pay a broker’s fee for a broker I never consulted. But if all goes as planned, I found a place to live. And l I began to sob. It was just me and the dog but still, with a paper towel, I covered my face to shield the sorrow. These wrenching, gasping heaves that the neighbor through the wall might’ve mistaken for laughter. That was the saddest I’ve ever felt, I think. Days later, at work, talking to Daryl, he said to me, “But Brian, do you know what I’m thinking about those tears? What I’m hearing from you? I think I’m hearing acceptance.”

Maya’s apartment is a five minute walk from ours. That makes things easy and it makes things hard. It was so different, doing this back in Boston, when I lived in Allston but spent every other weekend with a dog in the South End. Living out of a bag with no simple way of getting back and forth, I couldn’t afford to forget a thing. Meanwhile, a couple summers ago, when the power went out in the middle of the night—without a second thought—I got up, carried Maya for three blocks at three in the morning, and scared the shit out of Austin as we climbed right back into bed. If ever I needed anything, I could just go home. Juliette’s wedding was a factor but, really, it was these two weeks with Maya that changed our plans, that shifted the timing of our final goodbye. Figuring I might as well just look for a place in September if I’d spend so much of August off on my own. But just about every other night, I walked those three blocks for those five minutes to spend some time with Austin. Sometimes I brought Maya, sometimes I was on my own. Kiera is in Scotland, away on vacation for a couple weeks, so he has the apartment all to himself. By the time she returns, I’ll have moved away. Bidding our farewells, she said to me, “Austin and I are gonna make such a mess of this place.” It was said with laughter, and warmth, a winking understanding of my tidy, tidy ways. But she might as well have stabbed me in the heart. Because all these nights that I came over and looked around the bedroom, at the laptop in the sheets, and the soda cans on the desk, at a day’s outfit laying raptured on the floor—here it was. The mess I always forbid him to make. Austin, at last, can feel at home.

“How’d you like this summer?” asked my mom, calling me on her drive home from work one night. “Obviously there was a lot to deal with and I know you’re sad but—I hope you were able to enjoy it. Did you?” It’s not just that she loves summer, for me, my mom is summer. And I’m cut from that same cloth. When she was a teenager, my mother and her family went on vacation to Huntington Beach, visiting an older sister who’d just moved there. And in her own words, “I was a raging bitch that week.” There were a lot of photographs taken of her during that trip. And when I look at this 16-year-old girl, with the Farrah Fawcett curls and scowl on her face, I know her. In this one picture, the best one, fully reclined on a beach chair in her purple one-piece, my mother is tanning. Her eyes are closed and her skin is bronzed and she’s doing her favorite thing in the world. But if I look closely enough at her face, at the clench in her jaw, the tension around her mouth, clear despite the film grain—I recognize that anger. The happiest summers of my life still left me sad. Literal beach sand through the proverbial hourglass, it just comes and goes so quickly. This sweet, special thing. Talking to Jarod in the break room, I said, “It’s like my whole life, everything I do, it’s this exercise in slowing down time. All the dogs I used to take for the same walks everyday, these tours I do over and over again, all my routines, never wanting to travel anywhere, all of it. The summer before going away to college, my prayer every night, my literal prayer, was, ‘Please, God, may this time go by as slowly as possible.’ I hated New Hampshire! Why would I want that? But I did! It’s all I’ve ever wanted. To just—pause.” I think I know who I get that from. But regarding this summer, as much as I hate to admit it, it’s only time that will tell. Because there’s been a lot of sadness. I’ve been furious and I’ve been scared. I’ve known the solace of laughter, of nights out with friends, and how quickly that all disappears once I’m walking home alone. And yet, with as strong a will as ever, I wish this summer would never end.

I tried to tell Austin a story, but I couldn’t do it. All done dog sitting, I was back home. For a week, for one final week, Austin and I were together. We’ve started discussing what things might look like on the other side. Whatever makes me the happiest, says Austin, is what we should do. That the frequency—or infrequency—of our communication and our getting together can be dictated solely by my feelings. That’s what he wants. I said that’s very generous, and I meant that—but I also told him it leaves me feeling utterly alone in all this. Telling him I couldn’t begin to understand such rationality in the face of feelings that, most of the time, leave me feeling destroyed. Where am I in that logic? Where is he? Where is his destruction? After I all but demanded this, Austin explained he’s most scared of how he’ll feel in a month, of how depressed he’ll be once I’m gone. While, for me, it’s taking everything I have to survive what little time we have left. And he tried to make it clear that he wasn’t being blase, that I wasn’t looking at the been-there-done-that cool of someone who’s been through this before. I was looking at Austin, enjoying us while he still can. Sitting eventually in silence, I tried to hear that. But once laughter got back into bed with us—as, sooner or later, it always did—I tried to tell him that story. About a gentle moment with a stranger during my afternoon’s walk. There wasn’t much to it, half a story, if that. But I couldn’t do it. Opening my mouth, I choked on my words.

But walking west on Christopher Street, nearer every moment to the Hudson River and its reflection of a fractured sunset, as the two of us headed to dinner a couple nights later, I managed the impossible. Telling Austin about the woman who asked me, “What are you taking a picture of?”

I turned to see an old woman looking at me from the top of her stoop. If I’ve walked past her home once, I’ve walked past it five hundred times. Years ago, living in Bushwick, I’d take these long walks across Bed-Stuy in pursuit of trees and bricks and quiet. Peering through the linteled windows of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, I’d think to myself, “I’ll never be able to live here.” It seems I’m back where I started. The looped route of my eight-mile daily walk takes me past this old woman’s Clermont Avenue brownstone twice, there and back. And seated on a chair, she’s always outside. Sometimes she’s with other Black ladies her age, sometimes little children, sometimes alone. But we’ve never spoken. Not until that afternoon, when I stopped short on the sidewalk and pointed my phone straight up at the sky. Taking the headphones out of my ears, and apologizing for it, she repeated her question and I said, “Oh, just—the sky’s so blue today and it looks so beautiful through all the leaves. I was struck by it.” It was a beautiful day. If I didn’t know any better, with how cool it was, a high in the low seventies, I would have thought it was fall. Resting my foot at the bottom of her stoop, I got closer. Looking somewhere way over my head, and smiling, high on her threshold of home, she said to me, “That tree. I look at the arms of that tree, or at least that’s what I call them, the branches, I call them the arms. I look at that tree and I look at her arms…and I see wrinkles. There are wrinkles on her arms. She’s old. For a long, long time now—she’s been right here.”

Under the covers with sleep still in his eyes, Austin looked at me and said, “Maybe you shouldn’t have listened to ‘Brooklyn Nights.’” I was sitting on the edge of the bed and, even though I had my face turned away from him, Austin could tell how I was feeling. Awake for a couple hours by then, I was long finished with both my breakfast and the latest online effort to attract more readers to my 5,000 words on our conscious uncoupling to the tune of Lady Gaga singing, It’s not that I don’t want to love you/It’s not that I’m really over it, you know. Austin assured me it was just too early in the morning for him to get upset. Not that I faulted him his dry eyes, not when he understood precisely where my own tears were coming from. That afternoon, the ship would sail. There was a conflicting option, of course, a friend’s party that Austin initially seemed to prefer over this free sail around the New York Harbor. But he insisted he’d do whatever I wanted. And I wanted us on that sailboat. That’s the story I preferred. But there in bed, speaking for both of us, Austin said, “Would it be too sad?” Committed as ever to my daily constitutional, later that morning I was clocking in my usual eight miles around Fort Greene when I got an email from the South Street Seaport Museum. And through the sound of God’s laughter, I read, “We are sorry to inform you that due to unforeseen circumstances, your sail today has been canceled.”

So instead, Austin and I watched The Way We Were. “Would it be too sad,” indeed. The film was new to us but the season two finale of Sex and the City is not. It’s the one where Carrie is trying to accept Big and Natasha’s engagement, wondering if she can wish them well, let alone maintain any kind of friendship with Big. “Why her?” Carrie asks her friends to which Miranda says, “One word: Hubbell.” Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda all freak out, united in their love of The Way We Were. Samantha, meanwhile, has never seen it. And so Miranda explains that “Robert Redford is madly in love with Barbra Streisand…but he can’t be with her ‘cause she’s too complicated and she has wild, curly hair” to which Carrie pulls at her own locks and says, “Uh, hello? C-c-c-curly!” The episode, just like the film, ends outside The Plaza Hotel, where both sets of star-crossed lovers confront their sad sorry fate: it just can’t be. It’s rare that a movie makes Austin cry so it wasn’t strange to see him perfectly composed as Barbra began to hum over the rolling credits. I, however, cry at everything. But not that night. As, indeed, a Carrie, I can see myself so clearly in this story. Two people who love and respect each other but know in their hearts that they can’t be together? Duh. But maybe that was it. That my self-consciousness, my guilt, was what kept the tears at bay. At work the next morning, I told a coworker what me and my theoretically-soon-to-be-ex boyfriend watched last night. And with a disbelieving bark of laughter, they asked, “Are you insane?”

“Brian, I’ve been thinking about your dad,” said Daryl, the two of us alone together in the break room kitchen, right near the very end of our day. Usually, it’s music we talk about. He’ll assign “I Tried” by Angela Bofill or an album of Sarah Vaughn’s or Carmen McRae’s appearance on a 1962 episode of Jazz Casual and, next time we see each other, we’ll talk all about it. Conversations that so often lead to stories about my father, another man who loves music so very much. We have a lot in common, Daryl and I. Twice my age but nevertheless, we’re the only sons in a family of daughters, with mothers who rule the roost and fathers who seemingly never have much to say. When I first told Daryl about the breakup, he gave me all his attention. I can’t hold a note but the way he was listening to me—you’d think I was crooning. And it was well over a week later when Daryl said he’d been thinking about my dad, that he was still sitting on what I’d told him: that despite my father reaching out to me more frequently than ever these last couple weeks, he still hadn’t said a word about me and Austin. We have our go-to perches, Daryl and I. Almost always, he’s sitting in the same spot behind the kitchen table while I’m on this particular stool at the counter but, this afternoon, we were on our feet and right beside each other. And with our faces inches apart, his hand periodically reaching out for mine, Daryl said to me, “There is so much in his silence. It might not be in the language we prefer but that doesn’t make it any less meaningful. It took me a very long time to get that, Brian. And I don’t want it to take as long for you.”

Swapping my house shoes for sneakers, I walked downstairs with Austin to the front door of our building. We’ll still have some overlap in August, some time when we’ll be together in our apartment, if not our relationship. It’s not over, not completely, not yet. But in a way—this was it. He was headed to LaGuardia to catch a plane to North Carolina, where he’ll spend the next month with his family. And we’d come to the agreement that if anything happens with either of us, it would be all right. Permitting each other to live single. Though as I said to a colleague, “I don’t want to and…I don’t want to.” But that wasn’t on my mind, not at all, as a car pulled up to the curb and we took each other in our arms. “I love you,” I said to him, “And I love your family.” We cried and cried and cried. Austin was almost on the sidewalk when he stopped short and turned back to look at me. There will be no forgetting, not ever, that expression on his face. The car drove down the street and, with a parting wave through the window, he was gone. The night before, I fell asleep with my head on his chest. Me and Austin were always close sleepers but, in these last five years, I don’t think I’d ever done that before. It was a first.

Born on the Fourth of July, my nephew Vincent turned three years old. I was working. Making time-and-a-half, thanks to our latest union contract, but another day at the museum nevertheless. I’ll be spending more of this summer in New York than I ever have before. The last couple years, I was never in the city any longer than a month at a time. We’d go to North Carolina in June, come August I’d take care of Cam’s Shiba Inus in south Jersey, with two treks to New Hampshire in between. Now I’m single, and I worked on my nephew’s birthday, and Cam moved too far away to justify dog sitting. Ch-ch-ch-changes. But I didn’t have to be at work that Fourth of July, not really. I could have pleaded for coverage and accepted Jillian’s offer to come get me, joining her for the drive up to New Hampshire where our whole family could be together and celebrate Vincent’s birthday. But it would have meant being away from Austin during his last couple days in New York. And I wasn’t willing to do that. During each of my breaks, I called Lindsay, wanting to make up for my absence with the shallow wonders of Facetime. They were always in the middle of something. But once I was home from work and they were at a minor league baseball game, we finally got in touch. Lindsay handed the phone to her son and his brow immediately furrowed. I was sitting on the couch in our living room, shirtless and sweltering, the back half of our apartment roasting in the setting sun. Totally ignoring my sing-song happy birthday!, Vincent stared at me and said, “Why are you naked?”

And born on the fifth of July, Shannon turned 30. She was my big surprise last year. Home in New Hampshire to celebrate Thanksgiving—and, by association, my own 30th birthday—we’d just arrived at Lindsay's house when suddenly the basement door opened and there was Shannon. I hadn’t seen her in over two years. “Well, Shan,” I remember saying, “This is Austin. You know—my boyfriend of nearly five years?” They’d never met before. Watching them get to know each other, I felt like I’d coughed up my lungs or something, like some crucial inner part of me was out in the world and I got to see how it all works. And just as my parents did for her, Shannon’s mom offered to fly me out to Boise for her birthday. I could have been there. But once again, I wasn’t willing to do that. In my defense, there was a time when I really thought I’d be moving out at the beginning of July, when our definitive goodbye and my subsequent relocating was supposed to happen just a couple days before Shannon’s birthday. That was the initial schedule of this drawn out breakup. But those plans had changed—and with more than enough notice to accept that airfare and show up for my best friend. To do for her what she’d done for me. And I didn’t. I think I’ve disappointed a lot of people lately.

“I’d kill myself,” said Koko, over iced teas in Bushwick. Lacking my best friend that day, I met up with my oldest. Seventeen years ago, my family moved to New Hampshire and I’ve known her ever since. Though I really only got close with Koko, one year my junior, after I failed freshman algebra and had to re-take it as a sophomore. At last, I had access to this person I’d previously just admired from afar, finally getting to talk to this peroxided girl in houndstooth who brought such corrective color to our plain little town. Cool to the touch but inwardly combustible, Koko has been a New York City girl for over a decade now, with all the frankness that demands. “You never really had friends, did you,” she said to me once, years ago, the two of us coincidentally taking the same bus from Concord to Boston, where she’d continue on down to New York. A devastating remark from most anyone else but, from Koko, it only felt honest. Proof she’d been paying attention. I know we mean it, in our yearly birthday texts, when both of us say, “It’s comforting to know that you’re always here with me in New York.” Home in our home away from home. And yet we almost never see each other. Fellow Virgo risings and Aries moons, taskmasters equally beholden to our routines, I know better than to take it personally. Especially when it felt so easy to talk to her this afternoon at that cafe on Irving Avenue, seeing her for the first time in a while and telling her how these last couple months have been, on all the unavoidable torment and our still-comforting togetherness. Smirking at me from behind her sunglasses, Koko said, “Yeah…I’d definitely kill myself.”

Early to the East Village for drinks with Ashleigh and deciding to go look at the water, I made my way to the very end of 14th Street only for ConEd’s headquarters to foil that plan. But it wasn’t for nothing. Walking around, I’d been watching all the people that passed me by. Old Puerto Rican ladies, old Jewish ladies, old punk ladies, pushing shopping carts or adjusting the bath towels around their waists after a swim in the Dry Dock pool. Men and children, in their lawn chairs and their strollers, watching everything. Perfect New York faces, everywhere I looked. I could have kissed just about every stranger I saw. A couple weeks ago, I wrote in my diary, “Jarod can’t feel the presence of God in the city.” I can’t remember how we landed on this particular conversation—at work, no less—only that I was struck by it. If it’s only in the trees that Jarod can feel some grace, bless him for it. I just don’t agree. Because it isn’t just something I can feel here, it’s something I see. He walks down the street.

By design, I have a hot doctor. My selection of my PCP based solely on the merits of good looks rather than his one and only online review that described him as “cocky, arrogant, and skeezy.” And I clearly wasn’t the first gay guy to pull this stunt. Opening the exam room door and introducing himself for our first appointment, I could see the wolf inside of him. Sly and lascivious—but with a great head of hair. Taking a seat in front of the computer and asking for my medical history, I looked at his face in profile and noticed he was pursing his lips between every question. “Skeezy,” I’m not so sure, but he is definitely in love with himself. Why else become a doctor, I suppose. For a couple weeks, I’ve had a pain in my left ribs along with this strange difficulty catching my breath. The morning of the appointment, I called my mom to tell her about it. Once the baby, always the baby. Dealing with some digestive stuff, she too was trying to see a doctor. But she doesn’t have health insurance. On account of not working enough hours, she was taken off her plan—with zero notice from her employer. My mother will go this entire year uninsured. And she only realized this a couple months ago after getting a bill for some routine blood work. She owed hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Hanging up the phone, I pressed at the pain in my side. As much as ever, it hurts.

“I think worrying is the most human emotion, maybe even more than love,” said Sophie, as we took our seats for a clandestine production of The Seagull that we were expressly informed to call “an invited rehearsal” if questioned by any employees of this venue. Isaiah, our friend and coworker, had separately invited us to see him in this play and, without meaning to, Sophie and I both opted for closing night rather than opening. (There were two total performances.) I was so happy she was going. Leaving the museum together, we walked up Orchard Street and over to 2nd Avenue to buy Isaiah flowers. It was Sophie’s idea and, even though we split the cost, I made sure she was the one to present them. “Well, Sophie—what do you worry about?” I asked, as she laughed for backing herself into this corner. Not that she’s hesitant to share these things, not with the right person. She’s explained to me how people tend to revel, socially, either in breadth or in depth. Per this conceit, we’re both “deep.” But what’s perfect about Sophie is that she’d hear such a qualifier and, unabashedly, roll her eyes. More than anything else, she worries about her family. About her sister and her parents. I wondered if maybe that’s what attracts one person to another. More than our interests or attributes or anything else. Because as I said to Sophie, those are my very same worries.

Isaiah came to see me and Sophie before the show, telling us where to sit for the best view of him in all his scenes. Already in costume, I said to him,  “So very pre-Revolution!” And it was with immense relief that I read the Wikipedia page for The Seagull that night and confirmed it was, in fact, written before the Revolution. This production was directed by Isaiah’s boyfriend. Earlier that day, at the museum, Isaiah said to me, “You know, I’ve been thinking about that question you asked me last week—of what it’s like being directed by a significant other.” It was staged in the round with the actors visibly seated in the far corners and, as I watched his boyfriend introduce the play, I felt I was an audience to several things at once. It was really great. Even if Isaiah wasn’t the one playing old Uncle Sorin, I think I’d still feel the same way. Vibrant and alert with really considered performances from young actors who did it all for free. And even when the titular dead seagull wound up being a stuffed toy pigeon, it didn’t feel cheap—it felt jarring. Warranting a sincere double take. Necessity, the mother of dramaturgical invention. And, sitting directly across from us, the mother of the Ingenue. This woman had walked into the venue minutes before curtain with wine bottle in hand and, to everyone and no one, asked, “It said we could bring our own, didn’t it?” Already suspecting a family resemblance between her and the actress playing Nina, said suspicions were confirmed just as soon as this woman held out her phone and proceeded to take pictures during her daughter’s biggest scene. With her flashlight turning on in the process. Beside me, ever so softly, I heard Sophie groan. While we were congratulating Isaiah after the show, the mother joined us to do the same, making a couple remarks that had me laughing out loud. I realize I do that a lot, that I’ll cackle right in the face of people who aren’t necessarily trying to be funny. An apparent believer that all the world’s a stage, I guess, I do mean well by it. But I’m not so sure she took it that way.

Holding out his cigarette to spare me the second hand smoke, Jarod and I hugged goodbye out on Orchard Street. That next day, he was flying to Greece for the start of a two-week European vacation. In the years he’s lived in New York, he’s never taken this much time off from his jobs. “You work too hard” is something I tell him a lot. Though maybe that’s inappropriate. Not just anyone can make ends meet off 24 hours a week, I realize that. I myself could be approaching the end of that era. September’s coming soon. The week before he left, I met up with Jarod at a bar in Ridgewood. He’s a good listener and a great talker. There were tears in my eyes as I told him about this specific passage from Annie Ernaux’s Happening, a quote long ago committed to memory, where she goes into a church and tells the priest she’d had an abortion. “I immediately realized this was a mistake. I felt bathed in a halo of light and for him I was a criminal.” We talked about our mothers and he talked about his father. “Not a week goes by,” Jarod said, “When I don’t think of a new question I’ll never get to ask him.” Jarod doesn’t really cry, I know that much about him. But I wish he would. And if somehow I knew what it would take, of what I’d need to do, I’d stop at nothing to make him weep.

Four years ago, on July 15th, Mia was born. Lindsay recently had a coworker ask if Vincent is her only child. A painfully common question. In the past, she’d call him her only living child as gently as she knew how, only for the person on the other end to get uncomfortable and change the subject. “Just twisting the knife of grief in deeper,” wrote Lindsay, “Solidifying the isolating feeling of being a bereaved parent and piling on guilt that I’ve made others feel even an iota of my sadness. But today, I answered without hesitation, ‘No, he’s our second. Our daughter Mia passed away in 2020.’ I’ve learned the last few years that the world’s discomfort surrounding death, specifically pregnancy loss and infant death, is not my responsibility to bear. Mia is my child and as her mother, it is and will always be my job to honor her life, to say her name, and to let people know she is a part of our family. Mia was stillborn, but she was still born. My first born.” We have never been the same. And I try to understand that as a blessing.

“It’s a gay operetta set in a bathhouse…,” said Isaiah, asking if I’d like to join him to this show in the East Village with his spare comped ticket. Reading its online description, I said, “I can’t believe somebody beat me to ‘weaving together lessons from Dr. Maya Angelou, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Deepak Chopra, and Eckhart Tolle.’” Read: grew up watching The Oprah Winfrey Show. Unsure at first if anyone else was coming, if this evening would be a matter of breadth or depth, I was happy that it wound up being just us. On our way to the theater, we stopped for a bite to eat at that restaurant on 1st and 1st called One and One, sitting at a table on the sidewalk. I had a Narragansett while he had a Coke and when he suggested sharing the fish and chips Friday special, I said let’s do it. My long history of violently vomiting after eating deep-fried food no match against my desire to be agreeable. That and the faintest stirrings of nerves. With the sun in his face, Isaiah never took off his sunglasses and it took everything I had not to search for myself in their reflection. Talking about his first months in the city, and his occasional regrets about not taking fuller advantage of opportunities presented to him, I said, “Well—we’re all 18 when we first move to New York.” He got here at 22 while I was almost 25. Always the late bloomer.

With a fog machine creating the illusion of steam, not to mention an aroma that had us all feeling a certain kind of rush, a man walked out on stage wearing just a towel. Going through the motions of locker room behavior as more characters emerged, their teeth brushing and face washing a mere charade until the down-and-dirty could really begin. And so the towels started coming off. The actors weren’t naked, rather they wore bodysuits with these huge phallic rigs most closely resembling a rubberbanded t-shirt waiting for tie-dye. Either that or the Christmas pork loin. Bawdy and occasionally original, with an aptly climactic cum dump, it was downtown theater to the hilt and I’m happy I saw it, happy I made it to the end. Because for a moment there, I wasn’t sure I would. Watching this gay operetta play out before me, just a couple songs into the show, I started feeling something close to panic. Back at the restaurant, Isaiah asked me if I’m at all excited about dating again. I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no. Instead going off on this meandering yarn that likely had Isaiah thinking, “Jesus Christ.” But sitting there, a captive audience to this passion play, this fever dream, to these bodies reaching out and touching each other, something was clear despite the fog. I’m scared. Consulting the program later on, I looked for the song that had me verging on a nervous breakdown. It was called “Demon Twink.”

On my walk home from the train that night, I cried.

Austin and I have stayed in touch. He’s still the first person I hear from in the morning and the last person who hears from me before bed. Like always. But there was a day, weeks ago, when hours and hours went by without a word. That wasn’t totally unusual, a lull in our back and forth, not really. But these are unusual times. Talking to my mom on the phone that afternoon, asking how I was doing, I said, “I haven’t really heard from him much today and…I don’t know, I just wonder if he’s beginning to…to distance himself.” He wasn’t. I know now that wasn’t the case. But it will be. Whether I’ll realize it in the moment or not, there will be a day when we text our last “good morning” and “goodnight.” Sooner or later, there will be distance. I have no idea how I’ll feel once it actually happens. Until then, I think I’m still grateful for the rehearsal.

We’re gonna miss the boat, I thought to myself, as the seven of us blinked at the unexpectedly cordoned off J train platform at Delancey-Essex. With the Pioneer setting sail at 7:00, we needed to be at the South Street Seaport by 6:45—and it was almost 6:30. After briefly considering taking an uptown F to West 4th so we could doubleback downtown on the C to Fulton, Erica suggested we just get a car. Racing out of the station two steps at a time, I think it was Isaiah who said, “We’re gonna be like Barbra running to catch the ship…” And I really did fear it was about to rain on our parade. After me and Austin’s failed sail, Grace—who got me the comped tickets to begin with—asked if I’d already rescheduled for another day. And when I said no, she started plotting. Picking a date for a Saturday sunset sail and assembling a select group of people who not only enjoy each other’s company but whose company is enjoyed by specifically Sophie. For the first time since moving here, Sophie would spend her whole summer in New York. In previous years, for most of the season, she worked on Catalina Island. And when Grace first asked Sophie if she’d like to join us on the sailboat, she said no. That it would only serve as this solemn reminder of where she is and where she’s not. But catching Sophie one evening just before she left the museum, I said, “So, as you may know, I was supposed to take a very, very sad sail last month. And I’ve still got these two tickets with no one to join me anymore. So even if you make a totally last minute decision, it’s yours. We can be sad together on that sailboat.” It made me so happy when she changed her mind. Even if it was more for my sake than hers. And maybe that’s exactly why I was leaning in close to Erica’s phone, trying so hard to make sense of what the driver was telling us, taking charge in a way I almost always avoid. Hearing him say something about “Fabco Shoes,” I pointed us in that direction where, thank God, we all piled into the car—Erica, Grace, Cat, Sara, Isaiah, me, and Sophie. Eye on the target and wham. Boarding the 139-year-old schooner, and saying yes to the deckhands when they asked for volunteers to help lift the sails, away we went.

The night before, over drinks, Grace shared a story about fighting with an ex-girlfriend during a visit to Paris and how all Grace wanted to do was go back to the apartment but the ex insisted they go watch the Eiffel Tower. She doesn’t cry very much, hardly ever, but that night, looking at something that was supposed to be so moving and so joyous—Grace cried. The beautiful things will be the hardest, I’d imagine. But this night was easy. Getting settled around the companionway, the seven of us forming a perfect circle, we spent the next two hours paying almost all of our attention to each other. There we were out on that harbor, privy to these sweeping views of a city we all call home, a city whose history we’ve learned so much about. But besides some shots of Lady Liberty and a group picture when the setting sun was too gloriously diffused to ignore, as we sat in that circle, talking and laughing, eating the sheet cake that Sophie baked for us and fishing out spears of mango I’d shoved into a mason jar—I suppose we could have been doing it anywhere. But I didn’t want to be anywhere else. As Manhattan loomed larger before us, the ship docked and we touched dry land, reuniting with all its sounds and colors. Sophie and I ended up walking a little ahead of everyone else, not on purpose though maybe with a shared intent—both of us more interested in going home than heading to a bar. We talked about how much we love Erica, and how hard Sara made us laugh, and how we both could tell that Grace was trying desperately to keep her cool when seven o’clock was ticking closer and closer. Sophie had a nice time. She had fun. I did too. And when I asked her if it still felt sad despite all that, laughing, with a true smile on both our faces, Sophie said, “It was still sad.”

I asked Austin to walk away from me. With the sun setting straight at us, I told him how far forward to push his shoulder and how far back to turn his head. “Chin down” and snap snap snap. Posing him tonight for the photograph I’d post tomorrow, when this 30-year-old turned 31. We were outside the Metropolitan Opera House, at Lincoln Center, where Austin’s silhouette proved just as upright and handsome as all those travertine fins fanning out before him. Light and shadow, flesh and stone. A pretty picture. Like Orpheus looking back at Eurydice, despite tickets for The Hours we had in hand. “Can we show a little decorum, boys?” I said to Austin, cocking my head in the direction of two guys across the lobby. Openly and luxuriantly, they were making out. God save the opera queens. Sipping champagne before taking our seats, I made the mistake of asking Austin if he’d been here before. Last year, I joined some friends from the museum to La bohème—having completely forgotten all the times Austin said he wanted to attend the opera together. “It’s funny because, earlier today, I was thinking—okay, what are all the times when Brian really wronged me?” He was, for the most part, just kidding. And while I tried to roll with the punch, laughing it off, I felt hurt for hurting him, and worse still for forgetting about it. And yet it was Austin who said, softly, “I’m sorry.” Whispering in that beautiful tenor of his, a voice that rings clear as a bell.

Watching as my own feelings began to etch themselves onto Austin’s face, his expression screwing into something sadder than I could bear, I assured him he had nothing to be sorry about. Trashing our plastic champagne flutes and entering the theater, I wanted us to have a good time. For this evening to be special and sweet and easy. That even if his memories of turning 31 prove mostly glum, he could at least recall this night at the opera as something good. Last month, Austin and I broke up. It wasn’t my idea, not completely, and it wasn’t really my intention either, but I was the one who started the conversation. Sitting across from each other in bed, surrounded by piles of clean laundry waiting to be folded, as happy sunshine and the yips of schoolchildren flooded in from the window, we unraveled. I’ve been feeling some ambivalence lately, I said to Austin. Telling him I was unsure if our relationship, my first, should also be my only. Little did I know, there was only one conclusion—one honest conclusion, at least—to a conversation like this. Because Austin would tell me, eventually, that he’s shared some of these same thoughts over the years. Sparing me sole responsibility. But not before saying that during my moments of jealousy, or self-consciousness, during my moments of cruelty, he’s thought to himself, “This is how someone who’s never been in an another relationship treats their boyfriend.” But first, there were only tears. Wrenching, crushing, shattered tears. Both of us just so sad. So interminably blue. His hair still wet from the shower, Austin was propped up against our pillows, his arms crossed over his bare belly, which heaved with every sob. He looked about 6 years old.

I’m so compatible with this, I thought to myself, halfway through The Hours, the second of two total operas I’ve ever seen in my life. The piece is in English but I still needed to consult the subtitles ticking away on the seatback in front of me, confirming that I really did just hear Renée Fleming yodel, “We need platters! For the salmon! And the deviled eggs!” Because if I heard such a thing in the general stylings of the modern musical, sung in that inescapable post-Rent mewl, I’d be less than moved. But as opera, I felt this laundry list of party-planning transcend the banal and greet the divine. And it was hysterical. Because, of course, it’s all so deadly serious, so grand, so highbrow. And also so fucking ridiculous. Austin and I, with utmost respect, were a laugh a minute. In on the joke, even. Because when all this sincerity is playing out on such a purposely over-the-top scale, why cringe? Rather: feel. In the final moments of The Hours, the three women, these characters who only ever orbited around each other, bound to their respective eras and heartaches, finally stand together. And as hot, stinging tears fell from my eyes, I listened to them sing, “Here is the world, and you live in it, and you are not alone.”

Standing over our kitchen trash can, not long now until the first guests would show up for Austin’s birthday party, I was peeling carrots for crudité. Almost four years in this apartment and we’d never thrown a party. Partly because all we had in our common area was a dinette table that sat four—in theory. Two of our four chairs would immediately buckle as soon as anyone took a seat. But, a couple weeks ago, Austin bought some furniture. Bringing life to the living room with a couch and a couple chairs. The pieces were delivered on a day I was at the museum and, unlike the bookshelves and desks and bed frames that have arrived over the years, all the things we’ve assembled as a pair, he put these together on his own. I was the one who always resisted bringing anything else into that living room, so insistent that rugs or loveseats would only get in the way of my keeping house. But it looks great. This home we’ve shared, furnished for a future we won’t. None of his party guests knew what happened with us. As far as everyone was concerned, we were still together. And the thing is, as far as we’re concerned, we are still together. Because up until I find a new place to live, we’ve decided we might as well just keep enjoying each other. Why forsake a good thing? That is the question.

“We’ll call it a Victor/Victoria,” I said, holding aloft the two very different bouquets I’d shoved into our one and only vase, a floral bounty that came in tow with Kevin, Austin’s oldest friend in attendance. Within an hour of the eight o’clock start time, with Heather the first to show and Pascalle the last, everyone was there and the games could begin. Starting off, naturally, with Austin Blake Mays Trivia. Each guest supplied with their own little notepad and marker, Snatch Game style, Austin kept score while I asked the questions.

“How many siblings does Austin have?”

“Austin’s favorite book has a three-word title. What’s the second word?”

“Lady Gaga’s seminal album, Born This Way, was released on May 23, 2011. On that day, Austin did what for the first time?”

(Five. Poisonwood. Came out and/or kissed a boy for the first time.)

Printing out all the materials earlier that week, he’d already quizzed me on all the questions, and the only answer I fudged was the number of books he read in the previous year. Numbers were never my strong suit. “What is Austin’s dad?” was another one. Obviously aware of the answer (“pastor”), I opted for an ironic, “Aries?” His jaw dropped. Rifling through his sheets of paper, Austin showed me the answer he’d already written for that exact question. “A pastor and/or an Aries.” Laughing, we shook our heads at each other, at this shared language of ours, as something woeful tugged at both our smiles.

A tiebreaker eventually crowned Jessica the winner. Her prize? A framed picture of Austin as a little boy. WASP-weary and Lisbon sister blond, Jessica is the rare 20something I’d confidently call a “wit.” Possessing this haughty, droll air that I usually fear was lost to the 20th century. And yet here she is, boys—a Dorothy Parker for the Zoomer ages. Cornering me in the kitchen, she said, “So, what’s this I hear? What did a little birdy tell me? That you think my ‘sense of humor is something no straight man could ever fully appreciate?’ How about something I don’t know.”

“My gifts! I almost forgot,” said Austin, spotting his pile of presents on the nightstand. After bidding adieu to his friends and cleaning up the living room with Kiera’s help, we’d retired to our bedroom. It was past midnight but, so long as there were gifts left to open, it was still his birthday. I was never any good at this. Growing up, I always struggled with what to get my parents or my sisters—on the off chance I got them anything at all. Many milestones coming and going without so much as a card from Bubby. I don’t know what I was thinking. But then, Austin. My first birthday together, our first Christmas and anniversary, I was so struck. Not just by the gifts he got for me, as perfect and specific as they were, but by the sentiment. He was paying attention to me. That’s really all it takes. With a specific order in mind, the small potatoes building toward the showstopper, I handed him his first present, wrapped in simple brown paper. It was an old issue of TV Guide with an Al Hirshfeld illustration of Sonny and Cher on the cover. And I tried to talk to him about it, to explain how I stumbled across it on eBay and already knew he’d like it before the serendipitous realization that this 1974 issue was dated June 1st. But I couldn’t make out the words.

Years ago, before a surgery that, thank God, worked wonders, my mom was dealing with this incredible back pain. I don’t remember why but I called her one morning, early enough that I was still in bed and she hadn’t left for work yet. And, listening to her, I heard that pain. She exists in my imagination, my mother, as perpetual youth, doubled over planting pansies or setting out on her six mile walk, schlepping a cooler out onto the beach. There’s no other way. Hearing my voice break that morning, so saddened by my sadness, my mom said to me, in an uncharacteristic whisper, “Oh, no. No. Don’t get upset, please. Please don’t cry.” There was the same exact teardrop in my throat, then and now. The very same inescapable sorrow. Because I tried so hard to smile, to keep smiling, to give Austin these gifts that came, as always, straight from my heart. And it was impossible.

And that next day, when I finally told my parents that Austin and I broke up, through tears of her own, my mom said, “God, I haven’t felt this sad in a long time. I have such a lump in my throat.” Telling my Nana about it during our weekly phone call, our Thursday tradition, she said, “I’ve got that second bedroom, you come live here with me if you need to, okay?” And I let Jillian know. A couple years ago, she and Scott divorced. She was only 17 when they first got together. Their families, friends, cats, apartments, finances—all of it, for the longest time, totally enmeshed. Until my sister, at 35, was living on her own for the first time in her entire life. Telling me she was so sorry, and opening up her home to me too, Jillian said, “I know how hard this is.” And, of course, I had Shannon. She was the first to know, weeks and weeks before anyone else. I can’t keep anything from her. On his birthday, Shannon said to me, “I was nervous to text Austin, I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. I told him I love him. Brian. I never tell anyone that.”

Periodically looking over his shoulder to blow another playful farewell kiss, I watched from the landing as Austin walked downstairs and out of our building. His car to the airport was waiting. Off to North Carolina for the week, he was headed home to celebrate his younger sister’s high school graduation. I was supposed to go too. But a couple days after our breakup, settling into bed one night, Austin told me he was able to get a refund for my airfare. It was the right thing to do. And it hurt us both. “My heart was racing and there were tears in my eyes, canceling your ticket,” Austin said. He’d be telling his family while he was down there. His big, boisterous, southern family. I’ve known his youngest sister since she was 2 years old. I couldn’t bring myself to say her name, when I told Austin, “I don’t want to just…disappear from her life.” Nothing else made us cry as hard as we cried for her. My world is about to become much smaller.

Somehow, no sooner than we took our seats for dinner at a Williamsburg restaurant, our topic of conversation landed on breakups. I was with Ashleigh and Nick, but also Kyla and Sarah, the two of them visiting the city for the weekend. Initially, I would’ve missed out on this get together but nobody proved especially inquiring, let alone suspicious, when we hugged each other hello and I answered that perennial significant-othered question: “Where’s Austin?” That was a relief. This was the kind of news that would alter the course of the night and, even if we managed to eventually change the subject, I feared I’d still be the center of attention. Pitied and accommodated, like some bruised little bird. Alas—chirp chirp. “High school, then college, I just feel like we’re so conditioned to living our lives in these four year periods of time,” said Ashleigh, explaining her theory on breakups to the table. “And I’ve just seen so many couples who make it to four years and then—it’s over.” Nodding and smiling, I pretended to consult the menu. But then, perfectly intentioned, Sarah said, “Well, hello—five years over here. You’ve graduated!” I tried to keep the show on the road, cracking some stupid joke about being in “grad school” now, but then she asked how we’re doing. And with laughter, nervous and reflexive and totally out of my control, I said, “Well—we broke up!” A moment of silence. They were all completely shocked but it was Ashleigh who still appears most clearly to me. Across the table and at a slight diagonal, framed on either side by Kyla and Sarah, I said what I said and Ashleigh looked at me in such a way I’ve only seen in art. She was still as a portrait and not moving a muscle but, in her eyes, I saw eruptions. Something almost mystical in the disbelieving smirk just beginning to curl at her lips. It felt like I was looking an angel in the face. Or like the Mona Lisa had joined us for dinner, right here on Driggs Avenue.

And then, not two minutes later, the final member of our party joined us. As Ian took his seat, with hugs and kisses hello, acknowledging the years and years since he’d last seen Kyla or Sarah, I could tell I was being staked from the corner of everyone’s eye. That it was up to me how we’d proceed. Sans laughter this time, but only slightly less nervous, I said, “Ian, you’re joining us right in the midst of discussing the end of my five-year relationship.” As I recall, Ian said, “Oh, shit.” Cue everybody’s requisite questions and heartfelt assurances. That I’m loved, that they’re here for me, that I could come visit Somerville or New Orleans whenever I’d like. They were all so generous and I was so stingy. It was loud in there and our server was coming and going and I was trying to explain something to five people that I can barely accomplish one-on-one. Kyla, Sarah, Ian—they’ve never even met Austin. Hot in the face and losing patience, we broke off into smaller conversations just as I was about to ask for a changed subject. But leaning in, already understanding something I’d otherwise kept to myself, Sarah said to me, “B, the way you’ve been explaining yourself—it makes me think of your oral history with your parents. It reminds me of everything you told us about your mom. Of everything you learned about her life.” At a bar called Diane’s, during the respective moments we had to ourselves, Kyla and Ashleigh, separately, made that very same connection. They listened, these friends of mine, and they remembered, and then they read my mind. Heading out, Ian bent down to hug me goodbye and my half-finished beer fell to the ground. I don’t know who knocked it over, if it was him or me, but I was grateful either way. No one was waiting up for me but I wanted to go home.

“I’ve never seen you in a photo with other people,” said Ethan, responding to a picture from that weekend of me, Kyla, and Nick. As per usual with his cutting remarks, I knew he was saying this in good humor. And while I love this about him and can, at times, even keep up, my volleyed response wasn’t barbed so much as pitiful. Telling him, “If you thought I was a lonesome person already, just imagine how TRULY lonely I’ll be now that me and Austin broke up!!!” Ethan, immediately, called me. And I was amazed. Obviously, he’s a thinking and feeling person who understands when and how to be gentle. It’s not like I thought he was incapable of such a thing. I’ve just never witnessed it. But with silent consideration, without ever once interrupting, Ethan let me talk. At least until a certain moment in the conversation, a moment almost singularly designed for Ethan’s reaction, when I explained to him the emotional breakthrough I felt while watching none other than Barbra Streisand’s Yentl. After a beat, Ethan said to me, “Okay, you’re treading dangerous waters here, Brian Burns. Explain.”

On Barbra Streisand’s birthday, back on April 24th, Austin and I watched Yentl. It was my idea. Telling him, weeks in advance, that that’s how we should mark the occasion. Neither of us had seen it before, though I had come close. A couple years ago, dog sitting for the weekend, I texted Austin that I’d just, at random, put on Yentl. And he insisted I shut it off. Telling me it’s a film he’d always wanted to see, and that he wanted to watch it together, and with any luck in a theater. I listened to him. Thank G-d. Because it wasn’t a moment too soon that, at last, I watched Yentl. This sumptuous and strange movie musical that sings the praises of both religious study and the nude male form, with perfect pitch. It’s no surprise we loved it. But I had no way of knowing just how clearly it would speak to me. Pretending to be a boy so she could study the Talmud, Yentl finally reveals her truth by revealing her breasts to Avigdor, the man she’s secretly loved all along. His initial outrage stews into affection, and soon enough he suggests they elope, that they move to a new town where nobody knows them and find a new yeshiva—but only for him. And the light goes out in Yentl’s eyes. She loved this man, she still loves him, this good and thoughtful mensch who’s even willing to compromise, telling her she could study at night once he gets home, and that no one has to know. It’s everything and it’s not enough. “What more could you want?” asks Avigdor. “More,” says Yentl. And it was then, I think, that my heart broke wide open.

“Have you been telling people about the Barbra component?” asked Austin, the two of us eating dinner together on his first night back in town. I have. We both have. Because by the time I heard Yentl’s pivotal desire for “more,” I’d long been living in Barbra Streisand’s world. After spending much of the preceding month with her memoir’s audiobook, My Name Is Barbra no longer felt like some chronicle of her life so much as the Pentateuch itself. Every last minute of those 48 hours had me riveted and reverent. And questioning. Coming to understand that for Barbra, this consummate Taurus woman, pleasure is a life force. Devoting countless words to the foods she ate, the shots she filmed, the houses she decorated—and the men she loved. Or, rather, the men who loved her. At times to her bemusement, at times to her chagrin. And once or twice, to her total satisfaction. Men who, no matter what, were universally obsessed with her. I’m no Barbra Streisand. I know that. And I have no precedent for this. Never needing to batten down any hatches against some ceaseless tide of admirers. But as I listened to her memories of Jon and Pierre and Richard, to a whole chapter devoted to Marlon Brando, and then another to James Brolin, the whispers in my head got louder. Until finally—“more.” But now, when I think about all those loves of her life, the only specific story I can remember is about her very first. “I wasn’t particularly attracted to Elliott, until one day when I saw the back of his neck…and that did it. I’m not sure why. It was just a bit of exposed flesh, and I wanted to touch it. Suddenly he became more than a friend.” Don’t I know it.

Anyway, as Austin’s been saying, “It’s the gayest breakup ever.”

In my usual bid to avoid the parents dropping off their children at the preschool downstairs, I do laundry first thing in the morning. Committed enough to this 7:00 a.m. routine that certain faces in the neighborhood have become familiar. And it’s during my walk home from putting in the wash, one leg almost down with two still to go, that I always see this particular father and daughter. Balding and brace-faced, middle-aged and teenaged, every morning, he walks her to school. Or at least that’s the story I’ve assigned to them. Breaking from the usual mold of Brownstone Brooklyn Fatherhood, he’s not stylish or arty or hot. He’s just a dad. And his daughter adores him. Because each and every week, walking down Gates Avenue, they’re always talking. Always so much to say and always enjoying each other so much. That Sunday was Father’s Day and I was at work, covering for Billie so she could be home with her family. Finding him in our break room kitchen, I asked Jarod how he was doing and it took him a moment to understand what I really meant. When Jarod was 19, one day after Father’s Day, his dad died. We got to talking about it. I listened to him tell me about those final days, and their last conversation, and how all recollection of those following weeks is totally lost to him. Later that day, with his phone at the ready, Jarod asked me to repeat something I’d said to him. “The life’s work of the child isn’t to change their parents but to understand them.” If he was typing that up to send to a friend, or tweet to his followers, or keep just for himself, I don’t know. I didn’t think to ask.

Sitting out on Broome Street, on a bench in the sun, I called my father. They were on their way to Lake Winnipesaukee for the afternoon and he was in a great mood. Buoyant and bright. I’ve heard from him more this month than I usually do. Every couple days, via text, he’s been checking in on me. Asking how my day’s going, how I’m faring in the hot weather, what I think of the frame he got for the black-and-white film photo of Rufus, our long deceased Welsh Corgi. But not once has he mentioned anything about the breakup. Not even once. I know my father. I know his heart. Anytime I’ve cried in front of him, about anything, he’s cried too. He’s not being callous, he’s being careful. Loving me the best way he knows how. And I’m trying to understand that.

It was 3:30 in the morning and, laying in bed, I watched Austin move around our bedroom in the dark. He was just getting home. An old friend of his was visiting New York and he met up with her at a Greek restaurant in the Lower East Side for dinner. In the morning, he’d tell me all about it, and what kept them out so late but, until then, I didn’t know. Pretending to be asleep, I looked at him, his body dappled by the street light through the trees, and I wondered. What did they do? Where’d they go? Did he run into anyone he knows? Was it fun? Did he laugh a lot? Does any part of him wish it was already a couple months from now? When he could come home from a late night out and get right in bed without taking a shower? Is he happy? And how long will it take until I’m ready to wish all these things for him?

“‘I feel like she’s breaking up with me over the color of my sweatshirt.’” That’s what Billie’s sister’s boyfriend said, after that sister decided to end her mostly perfect relationship of seven years with him. My beloved French 40something mother-of-two coworker, Billie remains one of the few people at work who I’ve told. Not only does everyone know I’m in a relationship, most of the Educators know Austin by name. And then some. I’ll allude to his youngest sister in a story only for Cara or Estefania to interrupt me and say, “Wren, right?” It’s not professionalism that’s kept this a secret, it’s the opposite. But I needed some people to know. Taking advantage of a rare moment alone, I shared the news with Billie and she immediately took me in her arms, drawing her hand up and down my back, embracing me, like a mother. She listened so intently, her eyes never once breaking from mine, at least not until she started recalling loves lost, massaging the bridge of her nose and lamenting how all her early relationships came to such tumultuous ends. “I wish there was a way it could happen slowly,” said Billie. “You spend all this time with someone only for it to just end. I wish there could be a period of time, where a couple could come to terms with everything, and end on a good note. That there could always be a period of adjustment.” Never lost in translation, a denouement is a denouement.

I got two free tickets for an upcoming sail around the New York Harbor on an 1885 schooner called the Pioneer. Knowing time was of the essence, I immediately agreed to the offer, thanking Grace, a fellow Educator, for the hook up—even though Austin and I already had plans. A couple days earlier, he told me we’d been invited to a Pride party at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan. And when I let him know about the sail, and that it’s happening on the same Sunday afternoon as that party, it was clear where Austin really hoped to be. Not that I was making myself clear. Playing it cool, I acted like I didn’t care either way, that—sailboat or house party—I’d be fine. After all, he doesn’t owe me his time, not anymore. It’s just that there’s not much time left. He’s spending all of July with his family down in North Carolina. As of next month, we’re not just broken up, we’ll be living single. This weekend, for all we know, is our last. But if it’ll be the Pioneer’s whipping sails or the keening brakes of the C train, tourists on a teak deck or gay guys on the dancefloor, I still don’t know. It’s not Sunday yet. But we’ll be together, somewhere in New York, a city that I don’t know without him. I do not know New York without Austin. I can only wonder what will happen.

“Goodbyes are hard,” I explained to our roommate Emma, as she cradled a cardboard box under one arm and watched me cry. It was the first of May, marking the end of one lease, the start of another, and—after three-and-a-half years of living together—Emma’s departure. She was moving out. Austin and I have never lived with another person as long as we’ve lived with Emma. Besides our sisters. And she’s come to occupy a similar space, with all the intermittent affection and tension that implies. I’ve always relished the chance to describe her to people, once they get past the fact that I live in an apartment with my boyfriend and a roommate. “The coolest girl.” “The most active social life of any person I’ve ever met.” “The fourth Haim sister.” “Phenomenally gap-toothed.” She’d spent much of the last week packing up, the apartment steadily losing more and more of her good taste one day at a time, and yet I still took myself totally by surprise. Joining her out in the living room for a hug goodbye, try as I might, I couldn’t keep the tears out of my eyes. Emma is many things but a sap isn’t one of them. “Oh,” she said. “I’m—I’m honored!” There were easily two trips worth of stuff still left in the apartment but, white knuckling her belongings and just barely fitting through the door, she managed to do it in one. Blubbering, I closed the door behind her.

The first of May, it was also my mother’s birthday. Coughing so hard she had to call out sick, she wasn’t feeling well and our conversation on the phone was brief. A bracelet from some Brooklyn jeweler was technically my gift for her, but that wasn’t the only thing I planned to present. Last month, after watching something on Youtube, I noticed that Rosie O’Donnell had started uploading entire episodes of her old talk show. My heart leaping up to my throat, I gasped, verklempt with the promise of imminent discovery. And promptly left Austin to do all the work. “That was the longest shower of your life,” he said to me, as I returned from the bathroom, our TV paused on the very moment when my mother and Rosie O’Donnell were first greeting each other hello. Eureka. Family lore that had collected literal dust on a blank VHS tape, at last, has come to light.

It didn’t take Austin long to find the specific June 1999 episode of The Rosie O’Donnell Show with Donna Summer for a celebrity guest—and Kristine Burns as an audience participant for a game called “Rockin’ Reading.” In a lime green matching set, her Jersey Girl accent strawnger than any of us remember, I felt like I was watching some long lost film from my very favorite actress. After telling Rosie she loved her, my mom said she works as a seafood manager at Pathmark and—very much interrupting the cue to start the game—that she has three kids. Rosie sweetly asks how old we were and my mother says, “Jillian’s thirteen, Lindsay’s ten, and Brian is five-and-a-half.” Rosie would speak the words to a song and, if the audience member correctly completed the lyrics, they’d win a prize. Let’s just say—a certain denim jacket still hangs proudly in my parents’ cedar closet. Rosie wasn’t even halfway through saying, “Her lips are devil red and her skin’s the color mocha, she will wear you out…” when my mother just about jumped out of her base-tanned skin, drunk with victory. She’s lived the vida loca, hasn’t she. Keeping this discovery to myself until her birthday, my phone rang within minutes of posting the video. I can’t remember the first words to finally come out of my mother’s mouth, just that she was already cracking up. Totally hysterical. She could not stop laughing.

There’s this one part of this one tour at the museum where I ask my visitors if they grew up speaking multiple languages at home. Almost always, at least one person will raise their hand. And while not every visitor’s answer is something to write home about, the most uniquely powerful and devastating things I’ve ever heard have all been in response to that question. A woman who told us she’d rip up any letter from school before her parents had the chance to see it, not wanting her classmates to know these people were her mother and father. These parents, with their Yiddish accents and Old World ways, she said, were Holocaust survivors. Another woman, whose family fled Iran during the Revolution, said that her memories of that home were too dark to share with her children. But what she could share, what she wanted to share was her language. Speaking in Farsi to her American-born children—only for them to grow up into teenagers who’d respond exclusively in English. It’s a privilege, and at times a big responsibility, facilitating these conversations, but either way, I’m grateful for it. It’s also not just sob stories. That week, I had this old man say he's a fifth-generation Swedish-American, still living in the same Kansas town as his first immigrant ancestor. “They formed a Swedish colony out there,” he said. “And refused to learn English. The whole town, for generations, just speaking Swedish. But finally, their church was convinced to start leading services in English. And so they did. And then, six days later, the church was struck by lightning and it burnt to the ground.”

“Nothing’s impossible,” reads Barbra Streisand, in the very first line of the very last chapter of the 48-hour-long audiobook for her 970-page memoir. Even at one-point-three speed, it took me more than a month to finish—not that I ever wanted it to be over. Whether it’s a cliche of homosexuality, or just a prerequisite, I always liked Barbra. But what I didn’t know about her could, evidently, fill a very long book. And had I only read My Name Is Barbra, I’m sure it still would have moved me. But suddenly, having listened to it, I’m desperate to wash and dry her feet with my hair. It was hysterical and life-affirming and exhaustive—but never once exhausting. This aptly Talmudic tome about the many pursuits and obsessions of a woman’s life, and all its unanswerable questions. Returning, over and over again, to the power of truth, beauty, vision. And also McConnell’s Brazilian Coffee ice cream and nice teeth on a soulful-eyed man. Taking my walk, cleaning the apartment, waiting for the train, I’d listen to Barbra’s book, her sticky Brooklynese consonants soundtracking a month of my own life. But when only a couple minutes remained, I knew to finish it in private. Sitting on my bed, with the room to myself, I heard Barbra say “nothing’s impossible” and my chest buckled.

I’d already been crying but, now, I sobbed. Already feeling sad for that inevitable shift in pace of most any life’s story. How five young years can fill the entire middle third of a book, only for twenty old years to slip by in a couple pages. Barbra admits, near the end, how she’s accepted that her creative life is largely over. That even if she does accomplish anything else, it won’t matter as much as what she’s already done. She’s okay with this, or so she says. Because maybe she will still adapt Gypsy, or make that film about a love triangle at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, or destroy the master file of Ryan Murphy’s Normal Heart. Nothing’s impossible, right? But then again, with Barbra, even when it hurts, she only ever tells the truth.

And as fate would have it, that very next day, we already had tickets to see Funny Girl in theaters. Standing on the street corner, Austin and I waited for Sophie to join us outside Village East. I’ve come to use a kind of shorthand with Austin, whenever I’m talking about specific Educators at the museum. There’s a lot of us and I don’t expect him to remember who’s who, certainly not by name. So, instead, I’ll say “Nervous Energy Red Head” or “Straw Boat Hat” or “Lesbian Greta Gerwig Circa 2002.” And ever since Sophie told me that her mom kept a CD of The Immaculate Collection in the car, she’s been “Loved ‘Crazy for You’ When She Was Little.” She’s the best, Sophie. Remembering a conversation we’d had months before, she came up to me in the break room one day and said, “Brian, I have these Carnegie Hall tickets but I can’t make it to the show and I know you’ve never been so—they’re yours!” And that’s not the only time I’ve seen her surprise someone with something special. She greeted Austin hello with a handshake and I was so tickled by that. Surprised, even. A couple weeks earlier, walking out onto Orchard Street, I heard someone down the block shout my name. Leaving a restaurant with his boyfriend just as I was leaving the break room, it was “Gay Guy Whose First Word was ‘Rapunzel.’” Walking over for a proper introduction, I said to my coworker’s boyfriend, “I’ll shake your hand.” Walking away, I said to myself, “I’ll shake your hand”?! Just about baffled by my own formality. Not that it felt formal with Sophie. From her, it was perfectly charming. Within seconds of taking our seats, one of the old queens in the row behind us said the words “Judy Garland impersonator.” Be a person who needs people, indeed. I’d seen Funny Girl before but, somehow, Austin hadn’t. Listening to her memoir as soon as it came out, Austin was just as riveted by it and would record certain passages to play for me. Sharing these asides and turns-of-phrase he knew would make me laugh. And he was never wrong. There was this old lady ahead of us, with spiky red hair and a dozen bangles on each wrist. She was by herself. And as Barbra began to sing “My Man,” I watched this lady pull out a tissue and wipe away her tears. She cried through the entire song. And I wondered who she was thinking about.

“The resilient child is one who knows his family’s history,” wrote Austin, in the message accompanying my Ancestry membership, a present from him to me for my last birthday. It was just a six month membership, not that I’m looking that gift horse in the mouth. It only took a couple days to learn when and whence my Irish-Catholic people first arrived and that the Conways were Pennsylvania coal miners while the Burnses were Manhattan clerks. And well aware those six months were soon drawing to a close, Austin asked me if one account can make multiple family trees. I was over the moon. Something I’ve noticed about southerners is they often don’t know very much about who they came from. Or, really, that they don’t care to know. Perhaps ignorance is bliss when your great-granddaddies were white men living below the Mason-Dixon. “Say goodbye to the next three hours,” I told him, setting my computer on his lap, knowing from experience just how quickly the time whiles away once that tree starts growing. My family only’s been in the country since the 1860s or so, when our Famine-surviving kin first washed ashore. Austin, meanwhile, has a 7th-great-grandfather named James C. Cornett who was born in 1727—in “Virginia Colony.” And there’s pictures to show for it. Not from colonial times but still. Coming across so many 19th century tintypes of his ancestors who had names like “Fielden” and “Hardin” and “Thankful.” And all of them looked universally terrifying. Austin was already shielding his eyes with his hand, too spooked to look these people in the face, when I asked, “Have you ever heard of post-mortem photography?” It’s my hope, with the work I do, that I might inspire perfect strangers to consider all the people who lived and died so that they could be here and now. I won’t call it my life’s work, not while I’ve got dreams still left to come true, but getting into bed that night—mission accomplished, prophecy fulfilled—I felt a sweet and creaking ache in my heart. Finished, I laid down beside my boyfriend and all the ghosts we know by name.

I dreamed I was leading the tour where I ask that question about speaking multiple languages at home. Except we weren’t in the museum, we were in the front yard of some house in the suburbs and my visitors weren’t sitting on circa-1970 plastic-lined couches but metal folding chairs. The sun was setting. One of my visitors in this dream was a Swedish woman with short black hair and I asked her to tell us about “your favorite traditional Swedish summertime song.” She looked down at her lap, silent and serious, for what felt like minutes. And then she began to cry. If she had an answer, if there was indeed some summertime song in her heart, she didn’t say. Choking on too many sobs to speak. And as I watched her stand up and leave the group, walking off into the sunset, credits suddenly began to roll. What I thought was just a tour, in fact, was a movie. And, as I remember, my dream’s film was called And So She Said.

On a Friday morning, Austin’s niece was born. His two older sisters have three children each now, two boys and a youngest girl for them both—with another baby on the way. His oldest sister Xan is pregnant, expecting her fourth this fall. Back when we were only friends, and Xan was expecting her very first, I offered to drive Austin down to North Carolina so he could be there for the birth. It was no simple task. I’d have to take two buses, one to Boston and another to New Hampshire so I could borrow my dad’s car and turn right back around, picking up Austin from Bushwick before setting off on our 600-mile journey down to Wilmington. I was so happy to do it. And not just because we were best friends who, in recent weeks, had started making out. It was late at night by the time we pulled into our destination’s driveway. Cutting the engine, we stayed in the car long enough for the lights to turn off. Sitting there in the dark, in the south, next to this friend who, with every passing minute and mile, had become something different, something more, I heard him whisper in my ear, “Thank you.” Those words might as well have been brand new.  “Thank you.” They’d never sounded like that before, and they might never sound that way again. “Thank you.” Over the next couple days, I’d meet every single member of his family, including a newborn named Murphy. I hadn’t held a baby since I was 6 years old. Talking with his sister Hannah in the hospital hallway, just before we left for a drive around town, she said to us, to both of us, “Love you.” Her “love you” was so easy, so sincere, and I really only remember it because of how much it shocked me. That was five years ago. We’ve become something different now, Austin and I, we’ve become many somethings different, but all the same—“Thank you.”

On May 13th, 1993, thirty-one years ago now, my parents got married. Six months and a couple weeks later—and not a moment premature—I was born. The bride did wear white, albeit a white suit, an acknowledgment that this was a second marriage for them both and an accommodation of the bun in her oven. When our mother got together with my father, my oldest sister Jillian was 7 years old—but only technically. Streetwise from the jump, she was never “precocious” so much as “no bullshit.” So it didn’t take long before Jillian narrowed her eyes at this new baby brother and said, “Doesn’t it take nine months to make a baby?” Fittingly, she was first to mark the occasion that morning, texting our family’s group chat, “Happy anniversary, mom and dad!” They were flying home from a Caribbean vacation that day so it took a while for our mom to respond, eventually sending us a blurry picture of the movie she’d chosen for her inflight entertainment. “Watching Bub on our way home,” she said. With a beer tankard in my hand and period costuming on my person, there I was, during my star turn as an extra in Little Women. I never bring it up, mortified that anyone might think I’m at all impressed by my three total days as background talent. But, nevertheless, I am a part of things. In the film, circa 1861, I’m over Saoirse Ronan’s shoulder. And in their wedding photos, circa 1993, I’m behind my mother’s calla lily bouquet. If you know where to look, you’ll find me.

For the first time for both of us, Austin and I watched The Apartment. I loved it, and that ending most of all. It’s New Year’s Eve and Shirley MacLaine sits across from the adulterous boss who finally left his wife for her—but only because a jilted secretary spilled the beans. Longing for another man in an apartment on West 67th Street, the crown on her head and expression on her face all askew, it’s forlornly that she says, “Ring out the old year…ring in the new…ring-a-ding-ding.” The clock strikes midnight and the bar band begins to play, what else, “Auld Lang Syne.” There’s that song again. Hardly esoteric, I know, let alone for a scene very much playing out on December 31st, but still—it’s been following me around. Anyway, she leaves. And then there’s this shot, this absolutely thrilling shot of Shirley running down the street, past the many stoops and glowing window panes of a wintry Upper West Side. But the music’s changed. This race to happily ever after, it’s all horns and strings now, clashing bombast, interrupted only by a popped champagne cork briefly mistaken for a suicide’s gunshot. And even then, “Auld Lang Syne” would’ve been all wrong. It’s not about love’s promise, that sad, old song, it’s about love lost.

“We’ve got a plumbing emergency,” said Austin, in the middle of the night, waking me up as he got back into bed. Brown water was leaking through the air vent in our bathroom ceiling with soggy patches beginning to bubble up on the walls. With a raging, burdened sigh, I squeezed my eyes shut and passed the buck, leaving Austin to notify our upstairs neighbors and the guy who runs the preschool downstairs. Let alone our landlord who—say it with me, now!—lives in Australia. Turning on the light a couple hours later, I could barely see myself in the bathroom mirror, its surface totally obscured by the grimy residue from this ongoing mystery drip. Austin was leaving for work any minute but he’d already called the plumber and booked an appointment, making sure they had my number as the contact. All I’d have to do was get them in and out of our apartment. And I was apoplectic. Don’t feel too bad for me but this was my first day off after five days in a row at the museum and I was eager to get back to my writing, to having my own time back. Nothing matters more to me. But I also had this feeling. A feeling, deep in my punished Catholic heart, that God would laugh. And indeed—ha ha ha. But just when all hope seemed lost, the preschool owner came to our rescue. “There’s a swamp up here,” he texted us from the roof of our building. “A drain was clogged. I’m cleaning it out now and hopefully the leak will stop.” I could have kissed him on the lips. That night, I apologized to Austin, telling him I was sorry for getting so worked up. “Yeah,” he said. “Made me think, ‘Wow, I’m so happy I don’t revert to anger.’” Because while I cursed that leak, huffing and puffing, all too eager to attribute God’s will itself to my briefly inconvenienced day off, Austin couldn’t be bothered. A good man in my storm, that’s who he is. I should be so lucky.

Sitting on the break room couch with Jarod, he was telling me about this upcoming birthday party where he’d have to be in the same room as another friend he, purposely, hasn’t seen in a while. Familiar enough with his social circle, and connecting some dots, I said, “This is about so-and-so’s party, I presume?” Asking me how I knew about it, his face one big furrowed brow, I told him that I got a message from So-and-so a couple days earlier with an invitation to his birthday party. Doubled over, and just about gasping for air, like this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard in all his life, Jarod began to laugh and laugh and laugh. “Why would he invite you to his party?!” he asked, baffled, clearly, by this turn of events. Granted, I had only met this boy once before, at—incidentally—Jarod’s birthday party. So-and-so was sweet with a warm and open face but, upon reading the invitation, I was less than eager for the potential self harm of attending a not-yet-24-year-old’s birthday bash. Responding to his message, I said only, “Ooooooh!” Punctuated warmly with a balloon emoji but a noncommittal no all the same. I didn’t even think to bring it up with Jarod, not seeing it as anything but a thoughtful gesture from someone I didn’t know very well who nevertheless wouldn’t mind having me at his party. That doesn’t happen to me everyday. Once he caught his breath, Jarod explained why this was so funny to him. And, of course, it didn’t really have anything to do with me. It was social politics that had Jarod in stitches, that’s all. The invitation, not the invited. I understand that. But still, hearing that laughter cutting through the break room, it almost felt violent.

“Germs don’t have ghosts,” I said to my visitors on a Saturday afternoon tour, packed into the first floor hallway of the tenement. Standing a couple steps up on the stairwell, looming higher in the air than usual, I was doing my usual opening spiel. Telling everybody that they should avoid leaning against the walls or touching any of the apartment’s furniture but, with that signature air of irony which accompanies most all my workplace yuks, I said, “But you can touch the banister on our way up.” That, almost always, gets a laugh. But then, turning on a dime to gravitas, I tell everyone that this mahogany banister is totally original to the building, and that 7,000 people lived here over 72 years, and how that means, at one time or another, all 7,000 of those people would have also touched this banister. “So,” I’ll say, back to irony, “Join that history.” That, always, gets a laugh. And on this afternoon’s tour, one of my visitors riffed about 19th century handwashing, thus my quip. “Wait, no, ghosts don’t have germs,” I said, catching my mistake. “Or, I don’t know—do germs have ghosts?  Are they just like us? Haunted by their past? What do we think?”

Twice in a week, we were up on 45th Street to see Broadway shows. The Outsiders on a Thursday night, The Wiz the following Tuesday. Getting off the C train at 42nd Street, both nights I walked up 8th Avenue and passed by a hotel called The Row. It’s been repurposed to serve as an intake center for migrants as well as a shelter. But only for so long. Mayor Adams’s time limit on shelter stays is still in effect. Whether you’re a single 20something or a family of five, after 60 days, you’re out. And then what? Then where? Whether they were outside by choice, or, most likely, that there are specific hours when they’re allowed inside their rooms, I don’t know, but I couldn’t even guess the number of people I walked past. Mothers sitting on the curb, rocking somehow-sleeping babies in little strollers, back and forth, back and forth. Grown men and teenage boys who were using the scaffolding as a place to rest, or do pull-ups, or just watch New York City pass them by. I wondered what they make of it. Of all these people with their $150 show tickets, pushing past with their false idea of New York aggressiveness, off to spend the next three air-conditioned hours watching actors sing and dance. Do they resent this? Or are we a fleeting glimpse of precisely what they came for? Peering at all these people, these coddled and virginal American faces, totally ignorant to the undeserved hand-out of their predestined birthplace. Or maybe they don’t pay much attention to us at all. Too uncomfortable, too sad, too disappointed to devote the energy to yet another white boy walking on by, off to see the wizard.

Later, back out on 45th Street in the midst of the post-show throng, we were waiting for the light to change when I felt someone’s nails scratch at my arm. I turn to see a middle-aged white lady with graying blond hair tied up on top of her head, not in a bun but in a sprout. Like a toddler. She’s got her face turned away from me but, all the while, her nails continue to graze my arm, gently enough, at first, to suggest familiarity. And I’m trying desperately to recognize her. My brain searching for the features that could place her as someone I know. Figuring she was a friend’s mom or a visitor from one of my tours that week. But then, with these sudden and rabid strokes, fierce enough to draw blood, this stranger clawed her nails at my arm. “Oh,” I said. Not that I remember. It was Austin who told me, once we were on the train, how I initially turned to this woman with friendly expectation, open and available—only for the sting of shock to strike my face. “Just the most prissy possible example of assault,” I said to Austin, already cackling at the absurdity of it all. Only in New York, kids, etcetera, etcetera. But it was bizarre. Because it was only after her touch took its wild turn that, finally, she looked at me, straight in the eyes, with this dull, curled-lip grimace. We couldn’t have been face to face for any longer than a couple seconds, a lone tick-tock before we crossed the street and walked away. But looking down at my arm, it wasn’t her red scratches I noticed but my goosebumps. Head to toe, I was covered in them.

“Okay, Challengers vibes,” said Kiera, our new roommate, the Tashi to our Art and Zweig, as we all got into a car and headed off to Al’s party. It’s only because of Al that we know Kiera at all, let alone live with her, introducing us early last year at another party of his. A party that inspired me to think, for the first time, and for reasons still mostly unknown, “I’m going to be younger at 30 than I was at 20.” Tonight’s get-together was both a release party and a bon voyage, with Al performing songs from his new EP at this Red Hook record store before shuttling off to Ireland, where he’ll be working in the kitchen of an impressive restaurant in some small little seaside town. Talking on the drive there about our respective political awakenings, but in a fun way, Austin told me to show a certain picture of myself to Kiera. “I was a very radical thirteen-year-old,” I explained, searching through my camera roll and handing her my phone. It’s summer 2007 in Washington D.C. and I’m in a skintight Hollister t-shirt with shoulder-length, sun-streaked, layered hair. I’m in front of the White House but that’s not why I wanted my Aunt Patti to take the picture. Instead, I’m kneeling down next to an image of George W. Bush with a badly photoshopped turban and beard, this protestor’s poster reading, THE REAL TERRORIST. Not the most culturally sensitive way, in hindsight, of calling a war criminal a war criminal. But smiling ear to ear, I clearly didn’t know any better. She loved it. Austin and Kiera have really hit it off, these first couple weeks of living together, but I’ve been quiet. Friendly, I hope, but a little aloof, I fear. But more than once that night, spotting her across the room, watching her in conversation with some other friend of our friend, I felt that signature little quick kick of affection.

Without a cross-breeze to be found inside the record store, and only getting hotter as more people kept piling in, we were flipping through albums when Al came up behind us. “Hi, girls,” he said. Sweet, sweet Al. He once said to me, on the occasion of, at that point, our four year anniversary, “Obviously, as I see it, you and I are two apples from the same branch. But every time I’ve talked to Austin, I feel struck by what a uniquely special and amazing person he is. (Slay.)” It’s true. My other half, and I’ve been so much better because of it. It was with Al, on this one night last summer, the three of us meeting up for drinks, when something broke. Sitting at a bench in the backyard of a bar called Doris, while Austin and Al had so much to talk about, I found myself tallying the seconds before either of them looked my way, let alone spoke to me. And all my pitying refrains, those diffident old chestnuts I thought I’d let go of, just like that, sounded new again. We, eventually, got into a fight about it. A fight we’d already had too many times. Bells can’t be unrung, I’ve learned that. But it’s worse still to keep on ringing them. A sad, sad song. Something, incidentally, that Al’s rusty, plaintive voice is so perfectly suited for. Introducing enough songs that night as “Okay, this is about a guy who broke my heart” for it to become something of a running joke. But even with the aid of his banter, I struggle with lyrics. Always a challenge for me to comprehend whatever I’m hearing. To my ears, it’s just nonsense. Puzzles I couldn’t even begin to finish. But perfectly, and without catching a single word, how I understood, “I’ll hold onto you just as tight as I can/Before it all blows up in the end.”

He is so me, I thought to myself, time and again, watching my friend’s one-man show. It’s one of the scarier string of words, “watching my friend’s one-man show,” I know—but I was confident in Ethan. That and the venue was 600 feet away from my apartment. If whimsy struck, I could cartwheel there. Titled Dance Dance Revolution, it was Ethan’s treatise on togetherness, anger, friendship, boyfriend twins, and, indeed, dance. “It’s because of women like her that I live in New York City,” that’s something I say a lot. But watching Ethan perform, it appears I also have a man who fits the bill. Ethan—who, for promotion’s sake, I’ll refer to by full name—Fuirst is brash and, at times, cutting. I’m not sure he’s ever let me finish a sentence. And yet he’s totally unfeigned and, at times, even warm. (Read: a nice Jewish boy.) For an hour and a half, he was in perpetual motion and ceaseless monologue. Like an athlete, with a Westchester accent. A rhapsodic ode to all he learned from reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. Merging her research on rock concerts and Dionysius with sociological findings all his own, he took us from The Belasco Theatre to a Bushwick circuit party to a group chat that was never the same after the sudden loss of a dear friend. I’d later tell Ethan, among other praise, that the show felt “rabbinical” only for him to respond, gleefully, that he and his director referred to the opening section as “yeshiva.” What I felt, he intended. I’m eager to call this “bashert”—but I won’t push my luck.

Hearing Ethan say, “I hate authority, I only like rules when they are mine”—it was like looking in a mirror. Either that or the inscribed face of my future gravestone. Not to mention, mere moments earlier, when he said, “In the words of Ehrenreich, ‘Whatever social category you had been boxed into...carnival was a chance to escape from it.’ In the words of Madonna off the title track of her eighth studio album, ‘Music, mix the bourgeoisie and the rebel.’” Not that it took seeing his play for me to realize this. A couple months ago, I set Ethan up with my friend Jarod and, when it turned out they were too similar, I took it as a compliment. Like proof that I’d found some intense, gay, brown-haired birds of a feather. So much of Dance Dance Revolution was about Ethan trying to channel his “infatuation with big groups” into “giving one person what they deserve.” That’s where we differ. I struggle, being among the living. It’s never come easy. So when I have these moments of seeing myself in someone else, of getting the chance to say he is so me—it can feel good. Ethan can’t stand that about me. Because for someone who claims to struggle with a solitary streak, I do manage to see myself most everywhere I look. Regularly posting pictures to the internet of George Harrison or Jean-Paul Belmondo or Isabelle Huppert with a caption that reads, “Soooooo me.” This one time, interrupting my itemized list of all the ways Liz Lemon and I are just alike, Ethan said, “You’re always doing that! Always saying you’re so much like someone else! You can’t be like everyone!” That made me laugh, of course. It’s so something I would say.

Wearing all white, an outfit expressly chosen for the evening’s occasion, I met up with Juliette and her fiancée Liz for drinks. Just days earlier, after RSVPing to their summertime nuptials, I’d taken to the internet to ask whether it’s still a no-no for me—as a man—to attend a wedding wearing white. It, reportedly, is. Already seated at this downtown wine bar by the time I arrived, they were a captive audience as I pivoted in place, showing off every ivory inch of my ensemble. “Okay, upstaging the bride!” said Liz. Seattle-based lesbians with hyper-curated good taste, they were visiting New York for a couple days. Austin joined us soon enough, and Ashleigh, too. “I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Austin said to me, later that week. “It was so much fun, that night with Juliette and everybody. You were so funny.” That was sweet. It’s not like Austin never compliments me, or laughs at my jokes, if anything he’s far more generous than I am. But it’s not often he’s praising me for a night-out well spent. If anything, if every relationship has a perpetual fight, there it is. But he was right. It was fun. And I was funny. Juliette brings out that side in me, she always has. The perfect foil. So adept at playing the straight guy while nevertheless sparkling with a sense of humor all her own. God, I thought to myself, looking at this blond, smirking, business savvy friend of mine, She’s so Gwyneth. No wonder.

I was sipping coffee and chatting with coworkers, killing time on the clock until my first tour of the day, when our entire break room began to shake. Before we could even make sense of what was happening, a sufficiently commanding male voice yelled from downstairs, “Everybody out! Get outside!” I thought about it for a moment but, ultimately, left my coffee mug behind. There’s a unisex overalls clothing store next door and the girls who work there clearly had the same idea, seeking sidewalk refuge right alongside us. And after one of the shopgirls told us she’s from California and that it was definitely an earthquake, cue our east coast chorus of “What do we do?!”—all the while standing directly underneath countless glass paned windows. Before we got the go-ahead to return into the building, Jarod came walking up the block, his recently acquired Dunkin’ Donuts in hand. There we were, giddy with collective joy, liberal arts-educated cavemen beating our chests for feeling Mother Earth tremble beneath us—and Jarod hadn’t felt a thing. Four-point-eight magnitude earthquake and he hadn’t even noticed it. Sucker. Over our walkie talkies, I heard another Educator say, “This is Willa in the garment factory, um, should I continue my tour…?”

Sapphically at it again, just not in all white this time, I had plans to meet up with Martina and Laura. Boston-based lesbians with a more privately curated good taste, they were visiting New York for the weekend. “Marti,” as I’ve always liked to call her, whether she likes it or not, chose the place. A cocktail bar in the Lower East Side spitting distance from the museum, I was thrilled. I was late, though only by a couple minutes, but that was still more than enough time for Marti to realize the error of her ways. Texting me from inside, “What have I done?” After checking in with a bouncer, in humiliatingly broad daylight, I was told to wait in a line outside. For what, exactly, I wasn’t sure. Peering over the shoulder of the khaki-colored FiDi bro in front of me, I watched him search for bars nearby, long prepared with an alternate location by the time a SoHo girlie approached him and said, “Alex, right? Hi! So nice to meet you!” Finally, the hostess came outside to let me in. Kind of. “Please step into the vestibule and I’ll bring you inside from there. Next!” Pitch black and teensy tiny, I felt suddenly reacquainted with the birth canal. Fitting, I suppose, given my imminent company. Following the hostess as she slinked backwards down a corridor, cooing her little introductory spiel, I handed over my bulking, dishwater-gray Carhartt to the supermodel working coat check and, at last, joined my friends. “And they made this very clear,” Marti said, with a hug hello. “We only have this table ‘til 7:00.” It was 6:20. But that was fine. One drink for one hour with old friends, in my book, is plenty. “Leave ‘em laughing when you go,” etcetera, etcetera. I wish I wasn’t this way but—I am.

The museum hired eight new Educators. It’s a lot to get used to, as I remember. And not so much to the actual workplace as to our break room. Half of our every workday is made up of paid break time, playing out in this noisy and smart space filled with noisy and smart people. This little crucible of personalities with unique wellsprings of knowledge and, very much by design, the gift of gab to express it. Where a 24-year-old living with five roommates in Bushwick and a 77-year-old wearing a Cartier Panthère can share a loveseat and never run out of stuff to talk about. I love it so much—most of the time. Not all personalities on parade are created equal. But I’ve been at the museum long enough to realize that people who annoyed me at first can prove, before long, perfectly lovely. Nerves are often prickly. Or at least that’s what I’ll tell myself. Because right near the end of his very first day, suddenly taking a seat beside me, one of these new Educators looked at me and asked, in his strong Russian accent no less, “How old are you?” Privyet to you, too. I told him my age—only for him to look at me in complete and utter disbelief. Cocking his head and pursing his lips, as if to say, Ha ha, good one. A cruelty so immense it almost took my breath away. And so I said to him, “I look older, I know, I’ve been told, but yes—30. I am 30.” If he sensed my insecurity, he wasn’t discouraged, saying, “Oh, see, all these 20somethings working here, it makes me feel like an old man. I was hoping I’d have someone in my corner. I’m 41.” A moment of silence. But, I promise, there’s no hard feelings. And how could there be, when this is all so clearly my karmic debt. Simple as that. After an entire childhood spent chasing maturity, well, kid, here it is! Don’t have too much fun.

I went to Jarod’s apartment for his birthday party. He was turning 25. Going there straight from the museum, I was early but he insisted that was fine. This is crazy, I know, but I often show up to work as much as an hour before my actual clock-in. Mostly because I won’t have to do any additional labor because of it. A 10:15 tour’s not gonna start until 10:15, after all. But there is something to be said for it, for creating a dynamic instead of entering one. Like playing king of the hill, chicly contrapposto with coffee or cocktail already in hand, playing witness to someone else’s eyes darting around the room in search of a familiar face or somewhere to hang their coat. It’s all about control, baby. Jarod moved into this place a couple months ago and this was my first time seeing it. Looking around, I said, “It’s so…Latin American in here!” That cracked him up, though I wasn’t exactly kidding. The apartment has tile floors and very high ceilings and, from the lofty heights of his third floor unit, the squat vista of Ridgewood does have a way of looking like some Andean ciudad. I met a girl named Lisa who grew up in Reno, went to college in LA, and now lives in Boston. We talked, of course, about Boston. After I called my years as a dog walker “cinematic,” she asked if I’ve ever considered writing a screenplay about it. “Oh,” I said, “It’s written.” She thought I was joking. Jarod put together his own game of Jeopardy for all of us to play. There was one category just about his tweets, so many of which this room full of people had committed perfectly to memory. Word for word. It was almost uncanny. The party was really just beginning but, as soon as Jeopardy ended with my team coming in a close albeit crushing second place, I bid Jarod adieu. Wishing him a birthday kiss before night’s end. If he got one, he never told me about it.

Out on Orchard Street, we watched the eclipse. Me and Billie were both scheduled to lead a tour at 3:00, precisely when near-totality was forecasted. But thankfully nobody bought tickets, freeing us up to join the sunglassed throng. Visitors did, however, buy tickets for Jarod’s 3:15. He missed the earthquake and, now, he’d miss the eclipse. Billie was offering her glasses to passersby, letting strangers have the chance to join in on the moment. All invitation and warmth, she’s always this way. There was this one old lady who gladly accepted Billie’s glasses and looked up to the sky, smiling so big. “Yes, Brian, yes,” I heard our coworker Sara say, stoked to see me capturing this moment, subtly as possible, with a picture on my phone. 

Billie was named after Billie Holiday, a choice that required her parents to petition their local French government for approval. And it had just been Billie Holiday’s birthday, just the day before. I knew to make sure we had the break room kitchen to ourselves before asking Daryl how it was. Daryl stays up all night long each and every Friday, hopping from one jazz club to another. He lives and breathes music but his very favorite, his alpha and omega, is Billie Holiday. He’s constantly recommending artists and albums for me to listen to, and always so excited to discuss it the next time we see each other. But never once has he recommended anything of hers. I understand. She’s too dear, too important, too indelibly a part of who he is to share with just anybody. Daryl told me which songs he played yesterday, to mark the occasion. That he called his mom, and then got his sisters on the line too, and how each of them got emotional, talking about Billie. It’s a total blessing, we agreed, to love music this much. And what a pity for all those who don’t. Making it clear there’s no comparison—for his sake more than mine—I told him about seeing Truth or Dare in theaters last year on Madonna’s birthday. How I was surrounded by all these people laughing at all the right moments, quoting her quips and applauding her antics and loving her, just as much as I always have. Telling Daryl that, after discovering her as a 13-year-old boy, I felt like I had to keep her so private for so long, that declaring my love of Madonna would only serve to declare something about me. And so she held my secret. But there in that packed theater, watching a movie I’d seen a hundred times before, once and for all—we set it free. From the corner of his eye, I watched a tear fall down Daryl’s cheek.

The priest from my days at Emmanuel died. Father John Spencer was the college chaplain, presumably leading Sunday’s campus services every week, not that I know for sure. In my four years, I never once attended mass. But I would occasionally linger in the cathedral, late at night and all alone, jittery and fragile after an amphetamine-fueled day of writing at my preferred library carrel. I’d sit in one of the pews, less so praying than envisioning how strange I must appear to any given classmate passing by. Is that Brian Burns?!, I wanted them to think. One night, the door to the sacristy was open and I snuck inside. Touching the altar linens and peering closely at the vestments and vessels. But under the sad fluorescent lights, it all looked more administrative than sacred. Father John was always so nice to me. A truly joyful and kind man. Finding his obituary online, I read, “In 1993, Father John was appointed Director of the Jesuit Urban Center, welcoming underserved Catholics in the Boston area, many of them gay.” That made me cry. I never knew him like that, I still don’t, and I guess I never will—but I did always wonder. His penchant for consolation and friendship are, later on, attributed to his “unusual personal qualities.” There it is, I suppose. And God bless him for it.

I finished Once Is Not Enough by Jacqueline Susann, borrowing it from Isaiah after he said she’s one of his favorite writers and I said I’d never read her before. Bawdy and pulpy while always staying firmly on its feet, with a sincerity that took me by surprise, the novel reminded me of being little and stepping into my sisters’ bedrooms once they’d left for a night out with friends. Breathing in their perfumed world of girlhood. I’d already been looking forward to asking Isaiah what he thought the title meant, its significance eluding me right up until the very end. All alone on a cold Hamptons beach, our doomed leading lady January Wayne is considering true love, and how the unique happiness it inspires might, indeed, come only once in life. And that devastates her. Crying out loud, to no one at all, she says, “Once is not enough!” She’s right, isn’t she?

“Alright, everybody, we’ve got some loved ones in the house,” I announced to my visitors on a sold-out Saturday afternoon tour, all of whom, palpably, could care less. Comped tickets in hand, family-friend April and her cousin Holden and my cousin Kylee were here to see me in action. I put my face closer to Kylee’s and asked the room if they saw a family resemblance. As I recall, no one said a word. Asking everybody, right at the beginning, what might be included in a museum’s recreation of their childhood home, Kylee said, “Alcoholism.” With effortless facilitation, and not without a lot of practice, I responded, “The good, the bad, and the ugly!” It was fine, all told, it just wasn’t my best. And it’s so rarely my best, anytime I’ve got familiar faces on a tour who I’d like to impress. Everyone knows how much I love this job, how large it looms in my life, regularly subjected to stories about the strangers I brought to tears and their requisite showering of praise by tour’s end. It can’t happen every time, though. But to have a person in my life watch me do this work only to think to themselves, even just for a moment, “Wow—he’s actually not very good at this.” Unbearable. Of course, Kylee and April and Holden were nothing but complimentary, waiting down on the sidewalk to tell me I have the clarity of a teacher and the timing of a comedian. Holden asked if I’ve ever done stand-up and while I admitted to taking a couple improv classes, I also said I don’t find comedy funny. I wish I’d stop saying that. Anyway. I’ll try to believe what they said.

Twice in one afternoon, I was privy to someone bringing up Jia Tolentino’s essay on marriage. Or more specifically “the cult of the wedding industry.” And get this, meeting up at the IFC to see La Chimera just a couple days earlier, Austin texted me, “I’m out front. Next to Jia Tolentino.” What could it mean, what could it mean? The second reference to said essay came from Seth, who, until recently, worked for a certain national public radio show broadcasting out of Philadelphia. I also like him for his personality, I swear. After saying he played the French horn growing up, I told him about my high school crush on a boy who played the euphonium. “Well, if it makes you feel any better,” said Seth, after hearing that nothing ever materialized between me and this brass player. “The euphonium? One of the easiest possible instruments to play. It sounds pretty. But there’s nothing to it.” Is that a symphony I hear? Together for 11 years now, when his boyfriend started reading Jia’s book, Seth told him, “Okay, there’s an essay in there about getting married. Don’t let it scare you.” At his last job, so many of Seth’s colleagues were still with their proverbial—and, for some, literal—high school sweethearts. A romantic anomaly, normalized. For mostly writerly reasons, for the sake of my life’s plot, I told him that I’ve got some ambivalence about—what do you know—once being enough. And while I’m sure we both had more to say, our second round of drinks were finished and I didn’t want a third. But like a good producer, knowing any interview worth its mettle needs a kicker, he asked, “Well—what’s the plot?” And like a good subject, or so I hope, I said, “The rest is still unwritten.”

I saw Doubt on Broadway. Waiting for the train afterwards, I thought to myself, and then tweeted, and then texted somebody, “Meryl Streep is the best actress of all time.” I was in high school when my mom rented Doubt from Netflix and I loved it so much that I played hooky the next day to watch that DVD all over again. “God,” my mom said to my dad, watching it as a family, “She sounds just like your mother.” And she did. Meryl’s Bronx accent uncannily similar to Grandma Burns’s Brooklynese. My grandma who, upon meeting my mother for the first time, looked her up and down only to say, “Kristine.” It’s become a kind of comfort movie for me, twisted as that is. It’s not just the lines I’ve memorized but their intonation. If Liev Schreiber caught a cold that night, I was ready and willing to take over. Off-book. But it must be so thankless, truly, to try and do it any differently, let alone better. It’s like Funny Girl, in habits. But shining brightly despite it all—the writing. It’s so good, such a masterwork, with Shanley’s brilliance most evident during each and every turn of phrase from our leading nun. This tormented taskmaster, ambivalently authoritative, only liking rules when they’re her own. Ask Ethan what he thinks about Doubt, I thought to myself. Because hearing Amy Ryan as Sister Aloysius say, “Satisfaction is a vice,” I just about cracked my skull on a stranger’s kneecap, tossing back my head in chummy laughter. It’s not in the movie, that line, so I’d never heard it before. But just shy of too close for comfort, I felt it in my bones.

Killing time between my train’s arrival from New York and my bus’s departure up to New Hampshire, I walked around the South End of Boston. The neighborhood where I used to dog walk. Almost nothing about it has changed, which I guess is the one good thing about fully-realized gentrification. Affluence preserves. I almost forgot just how gay this neighborhood was, this brownstone-brother to Provincetown. That said—I couldn’t help but notice a lot more strollers than swish. But what I was really looking for was my old boss. I knew Nancy was out there somewhere, she had to be. Each and every morning of my (four day) workweek, I’d wake up to a text from Nancy with a thoughtfully-arranged schedule, meeting up with her a couple hours later for a hug hello, treats for the dogs, and snacks for her walker. Always making the time to take such good care of me, despite a full schedule of walks all her own (seven days a week). Leading up to my move away from Boston, our goodbye was the only one that made me cry. Taking a long, leisurely hour around these familiar streets, I stopped in Blackstone Square to eat lunch, keeping my eyes peeled all the while, to no avail. But cutting through Peters Park on my walk back to South Station, I spotted someone familiar far across the way. Their back was turned to me, and they were wearing long pants and a hoodie pulled up around their head, but at their heel—there was a dog.

Not wanting to spook either one of them, from a considerate distance, I asked Nancy if she was interested in a blast from the past. With Judge the brindle mutt leaping up at our sides, we embraced. I was a total sap while Nancy was largely stoic and in that way, again, not much has changed. And she’s still just as beautiful as always. Her very first question was about my relationship and she was so happy to hear I’m still with Austin. For her, she said, from now on, it’ll just be dogs. She’s done with men. I was telling her about my walk around the neighborhood that day, and how I found myself thinking about all the time I spent here as this scantily-clad pretty young thing, with hardly a conquest to show for it. With a gaze as gentle and calamitous as riptide, her blue eyes locked with mine, Nancy said, “You are still pretty. And you are still young.” Beginning to go our separate ways, with less time than ever to catch my bus, I couldn’t help telling Nancy how often she’s on my mind. She wouldn’t accept the compliment. But I hope she believed it.

My bedroom in New Hampshire is steadily becoming less mine. Twelve years removed from living at home, I’m willing to accept this. My dad’s concert posters line the walls, framed but on the floor, waiting to be hanged, while my mom’s paisley-print cold-shoulder blouses hang in my closet, waiting for spring. Foremost furniture flipper of the Lakes Region, my mother had my old nightstand and dresser down in the garage, staining and stenciling to her heart’s desire before hawking them on Facebook Marketplace. Knowing better than to throw anything out, she stowed away all the contents of my boyhood’s drawers in a big plastic tub. I wouldn’t even know what I was missing, if it all got dumped, but still—lacking the space in New York, I’m grateful for the storage. I came across these file folders, one for every grade of elementary school, each one bearing a random assortment of test scores and writing assignments. From the second grade, accompanying a write-up about my “favorite sister” Jillian, I drew my 15-year-old sibling in high heels and a halter-top—with cleavage. “Poor Lindsay,” said Austin. “But your handwriting is amazing.” Getting older now, by the fourth grade, I found a parent survey from Mrs. DiStefano, with questions for mom and dad about their child. Prompted to share three positive things about her son, my mom said I was funny, thoughtful, and a good listener. And when asked to write down one goal she would like to see her child achieve this year, I read, in my mother’s plain and simple print, “To bond with the other boys. Brian has two older sisters and he is much more comfortable with girls. He definitely needs more ‘male bonding.’” It’s a horrible thing, being the subject of speculation. Never once have I found comfort in any story that begins, “You know, I always had a feeling about you…” Because surely it was many things, that feeling about me, but I don’t suspect recognition was ever one of them. Oh well. I was a strange and charmless kid, too clever by half, and my mom thought running with the boys might make me some friends. I can see that. But I really have to wonder—what, exactly, was she seeing?

“How old is Lovey?” I asked Vincent, my two-year-old nephew, who without missing a beat said, “Old.” We were in the backseat of Lindsay’s car, en route to the house so we could put up the last of the birthday decorations for our mother. She still had a couple weeks left of her fifties but, capitalizing on the rare weekend when all three of her children were in New Hampshire, my mom decided to celebrate her 60th a little early. That morning, I joined her to a step class party, hosted by her favorite instructor, where she was feted by all her gal pals from the gym. Amy, the instructor, had a whole spread prepared for after the class, mimosas and trays of little quiches and a station with all different flowers to make your own bouquets. “Vicki Gunvalson’s in the house,” announced my mother, after a costume change in the single stall bathroom, her Hokas and lycra swapped out for high heels and a fuschia freakum dress. So many of the women there, most of whom I’d met before, made sure to say just how much they love my mom. Telling me they get such a kick out of her. That she’s a total character. You’re telling me. I do worry though, that she sometimes looms too large in my personality. Or, at the very least, that I talk about her too much, privy to the occasional Kristine anecdote that only warrants the most polite of chuckles. It’s mortifying. But when some yarn I have about her really does land, when her throw-aways and foot-in-mouths get the laughs they deserve—the jokes feel as good as mine. And how couldn’t they, when my mother begins so many of her stories, “Here, nobody else thought this was funny, but you will…”

We saw David Sedaris. A reading followed by a signing at a theater in Concord. It was a Christmas present from my parents and I accepted it warmly, not having the heart to tell them I don’t care for David Sedaris as much as I used to. I’m not pleased about that. For half my life, as far as influences go, he’s been it. The low overhead I’ve maintained with the menial wages I’ve earned in the constant pursuit of “material”—that’s all David. So how disappointing it’s been, and in just the last couple years, to witness this cherished wit become some crotchety old man. His sentiments are skewing increasingly conservative, yes, but that’s the least of my concerns. What breaks my heart is that anyone could write what he’s writing now. It doesn’t take a genius to feel different from people half your age, let alone threatened by them. So from the fifth row center, when David read how he once described cultural appropriation as, “Making a taco, but putting bleu cheese on it,” I had to stifle my groan. And not because I even disagreed with him. In this essay about taking a safari in Kenya (coming soon to The New Yorker), he writes about how silly it felt to think twice about a Masai tribesman’s offer to wear his traditional garb. That’s fair, and even interesting. But the humorist doth protest too much. In digging his heels, and claiming a side of this discourse, he makes himself just as corny as his much-maligned woke crusaders. Just as fragile as these politically correct phantoms who haunt so much of his new work. Upon finishing this essay, he told the crowd, “And see, the editors at The New Yorker, they want me to cut that line about the bleu cheese on the tacos. But what they don’t get is that…it’s funny! That line makes the whole house laugh. They don’t understand what people actually find funny. They just don’t get it.” Later on, he read an essay about the death of his childhood friend and it nearly brought me to tears. Applauding him, I wanted to scream right out loud, That’s it, David! That’s it! There you are!

Pretending she didn’t know that this wasn’t the actual end of the line, my mother tried to cut but I kept us honest. And as it turns out, nice guys really do finish last. We waited two whole hours for David to sign our books. I made it clear, repeatedly, that I’ve already had my lion’s share of interactions with him and that we could just go home. “I didn’t buy three copies of his kids book for nothing,” said my mother. And so—we waited. At one signing in particular, years ago at Harvard Book Store, I actually tried to be the very final person in line, hoping to have an unburdened exchange with this hero of mine. A couple other stragglers would eventually rain on that parade but nevertheless—I floated on air out of that bookstore. Just about out of my mind after a most-successful back-and-forth and an inscription that read, “To Brian—You know who you are.” It was, in truth, a joke about my nameplate necklace but, at heart, a sentiment I’d hold dear. But that was then and, crawling out of my skin, this was now. A Sunday night in New Hampshire, needless to say, I had nowhere else to be. But it still felt so miserable, waiting for him. Not at all excited but also not at all nervous. So when we did finally get to the front of that line, and David Sedaris greeted us hello, I had nothing to lose. And it was phenomenal. With laughter, and ease, and dare I say a sparkle in both our eyes, we talked about tote bags and Fran Lebowitz and the sweater on my back. I said I’d keep an eye out for him, walking around New York, and he told me I should say hi. My poor mother didn’t get a word in edgewise. Leaving the theater, I apologized for hogging all our time with him, but she insisted it was fun enough just watching me in action. “You were such a natural,” she said. “And he was so smitten with you!” Whether or not that’s true, who knows. I was just being myself.

Watching Harlan County, USA, Austin and I got into a fight. It was over something small, but it scratched at something fundamental, as fights always do. Four years ago now, just a couple days into the pandemic and suddenly living together for the first time, I made chili for dinner and we watched Children of Men. Both were my ideas, and Austin ended up not liking either one. Discussing this during therapy that week, over the phone and one room away from said significant other, Bushwick’s walls never feeling thinner, my retelling of this domestic slight made my therapist laugh and laugh. I loved making him laugh. But soon enough, of my own volition, our weekly sessions became every other week became unceremoniously never seeing him again. Though I feel like it’s just a matter of time. Not until I’m with him in treatment so much as bump into him in Brooklyn. Between his cultivated unibrow and Bianchi bicycle, we’ve got to run in similar enough circles. For example, the G. It’d take all I have not to approach him and say, “Okay, so, me and Austin? You remember? We’re watching Harlan County—you’ve seen that, right? So good. Such beautiful mountain faces on those men. I was shocked. Is that bad of me? Anyway…”

I’m becoming an early riser, particularly on days when I need to do laundry, specifically so I can avoid all the parents depositing their toddlers downstairs. There’s a $35,000-a-year preschool in our building, down on the first floor. If I’m up by seven, I’ve realized I can finish all the washing and drying before nine o’clock drop-off. Back when I thought I didn’t want to have children, I always used to say, “It’s not because I don’t like kids, it’s because I don’t like parents.” And while I’ve admittedly regressed to thinking I might not want kids after all, the rest still rings true. I try my hardest to stay out of their way, I really do, sympathetic to the difficulties of getting a three-year-old off to school. But I do sometimes have a job I need to get to. The teachers and the guy who runs the place, they’re all great. And there’s one or two moms who always smile as I sneak past, playfully rolling their eyes, as if to say, Take it from me—don’t. But the buck stops there. Or, really, the bucks start there. “They’re all a bunch of rich homophobes,” I said to Austin recently, regarding all the other Clinton Hill parents too busy with their wailing children to acknowledge me the way I’d like. As I recall, Austin said, “I actually don’t think that’s true.”

So close, I think to myself, each and every time I ride NJ Transit, and yet so far away. I got off at a station in this beautiful, little, north Jersey town, where Lindsay picked me up for an afternoon with Nana. Getting settled in Lindsay’s car, still another hour until we’d get down to Toms River, we called our mother. “What good children I have,” Kristine purred, not so much praising us as herself. Apropos of nothing, she started talking about smoke detectors. It was—once we pulled the right teeth—apropos of something. The house almost went up in flames last month while our father, three days after his hip replacement, was hopelessly immobile on the living room couch. Cooking eggs that morning, she forgot to turn off the burner, and eventually set down this huge, heavy, custom-crafted wood block on top of the stove. Hours went by. And when a cloud of thick, white, noxious smoke finally wafted in from the kitchen, my dad had no other option than to scream “KRIS!” loudly enough to get her attention down in the garage, where she was—what else—furniture flipping. She could laugh about it with us but that seemed like a recent development. Telling the story to her coworkers, she cried. “Some nurse I am,” she said to us. “Here I think I’m not gonna be attentive enough because I won’t want to make him sandwiches or something, only for me to go and burn the house down.” Telling this story to Nana that afternoon, she said, cackling, “See! This is why I don’t cook.”

I love Nana’s house. Pops of deep purple all over. Ceramic rabbits and roosters in great abundance. And always so nice and neat. My mom has this memory—as a high school senior, no less—of waking up to use the bathroom early one morning and, by the time she got back to her room, Nana had already made her bed. I wonder if my mom felt the same way I do, being in such a well-kept house. If we feel the same kind of peace. At one point in the oral history we recorded last year, my mother told me, “Nana was home everyday when I got home from school. Sitting on the couch, reading one of her ‘crotch novels,’ as she calls them. So, yeah, home everyday, which was nice to see. Because, I don’t know, for you guys, I wasn’t home everyday. And I know it was such a feeling of comfort when I…you know…so…” A teardrop in her throat, all choked up, she couldn’t finish that sentence. Asking what was upsetting her, she said, “Time goes so fast. I just hope that you guys are happy. I wish I had those days back again. When you were little. And just thinking about what Nana went through. With that unhappy marriage. It’s not fair.” Nana got really sick last summer and spent several weeks in the hospital. She had visitors, of course, my mom driving down from New Hampshire at one point, my Aunt Karen and Aunt Patti dropping by and sticking around as much as possible. But still, she was often by herself. And after hearing my mother tell me her mother’s story, after coming to understand more about this woman’s life, I wasn’t just sad that Nana was all alone in that hospital room—I was furious.

No more than ten minutes into watching Swept Away, I turned to Austin and said, “I don’t think I can do this.” Like most of Madonna’s star turns, I’d never seen it before. But it’s currently playing on Criterion as a part of their “And The Razzie Goes to…” program. Cruelly enough. And cruel it is. Looking like Carmela Soprano in Cruella de Vil quick drag, Madonna spends the first half of the film sucking villainously on cigarettes while espousing the free market and willfully mispronouncing “Pepe,” her leading man’s name, as “Pee Pee.” Operating on a plane of bitchiness that only actually exists in the castrated male imagination. I had to take a deep breath, several times. Madonna is not a bad actress. Biased as I may be, I really believe that. It’s just that she was all too often in the hands of a director who, at best, feared her or, at worst, wanted to punish this wicked, wicked woman for her wicked, wicked ways. Her own husband included. It’s all Guy Ritchie’s fault. Print that on a shirt, I’d wear it. Worst of all, he doesn’t even photograph her all that nicely. Fucking the director and for what? Austin had just finished the colossal Madonna biography that came out last year, written by a proper historian who treated the subject with the exhaustive, scholarly reverence she deserves. He was sad, he said, that Madonna changed so much about herself for Guy. I don’t disagree. And yet during those years when they were married, those years of concession and tea length dresses, she made some of the finest, strangest, and most self-possessed music of her whole career. What’s that about?

Our landlord emailed us. He’s raising the rent. At this time last year, when he—again—raised the rent, he told us, “I hate doing this. I know it affects lives and I don’t do it lightly.” He lives in Australia. As I often say, “My landlord lives in Australia—how’s that make sense?” All told: it’s a manageable increase and we’ll still be living in a very expensive neighborhood for a steal. Relatively speaking. All of us, me and Austin and Emma, not since our childhoods have we lived in one place for this long. But come May, when our current lease ends, Emma will move out. She’s the coolest girl with the greatest taste. Always going somewhere with someone, albeit to a different place and with a different person than the day before. It’s amazing. She’s amazing. She’s also, ultimately, a roommate. Journaling in my bedroom, I was writing about something she’d recently said that irritated me. Her remark was trivial, my irritation was nuclear. Diplomatic with her at the time, I clearly spared all my rage for the diary, scraping this diatribe of mine over, embarrassingly enough, several pages. Nursing my wrathful right hand, all gnarled up into an arthritic fist, I stopped writing just long enough to start feeling bad. Thinking of the many attributes that’ve made her a lovely person to live with. And so, with closed eyes, with fingertips grazed over mind, heart, and body—I said a prayer. Expressing my gratitude and acknowledging my faults, with an Act of Contrition for good measure. It made me feel better. Not thirty minutes later, out in the living room, I heard something crash, followed by Emma yelling, “Ow!” She was taking a seat at our table when the chair suddenly collapsed out from under her. I took my time walking out to the living room, figuring—I promise—that it would spare her any additional embarrassment. Still dusting herself off from the tumble, she was fine. With a consoling touch, I said to her, “You poor thing.”

Sitting across from Weixi in the breakroom, I held out my hand so she could read my palm. I’d been told before, by two different palm readers no less, that I’d live to be specifically 87 years old. She didn’t echo that same number, but it appears I’m still in it for the long haul. “Look! Wow! It goes all the way to your wrist,” she said, thrilled for me. Not unlike the classic “may you live in interesting times,” I wonder if a long life can be just as much a curse as a blessing. Either way—I’m knocking on wood. Admitting she’s not confident enough in her skills to interpret my career, I made the obvious joke that it must be bad news. I’ll have one child. A daughter. There’s a scar on my palm, right where the children lines are, but I didn’t tell Weixi. I got it from cutting open my hand on a shard of glass while dancing around the kitchen to “Open Your Heart” at 13 years old, knocking over a vase mid-twirl. If that tipped the scales toward my having a daughter one day—it had to be fate. She told me I’ll get married only once, and that it will be a long, happy marriage. After telling Jarod about this, sensing my ambivalence, he said, “All any of us want is one, long, happy marriage!” I know. I know.

Blond and breathy and grinning, Cloris Leachman gives one of my favorite Academy Award speeches of all time. “I’m having an amazing life,” she said, accepting her win for Best Supporting Actress in 1974. “And it isn’t over yet!” I think it’s perfect. Her audience, however, did not. Poor girl, she really floundered up there. At times sincere and at times ironic, and presumably because of precisely that, she rubbed the crowd the wrong way. Been there. I feel like I’m so often this same way on all my tours, straddling this very same line. Dewy-eyed with tongue-in-cheek. And it works, most of the time. But of course I will have the occasional group of visitors who refuse to like me. Total strangers nevertheless united in their disdain, not so much as cracking a smile on my behalf. Dying on the hill of their withheld endearment. Can’t win ‘em all. It’s our favorite night of the year, Oscar Sunday, and Austin and I both take it very seriously. Shannon texted me from this watch party she was attending, where the host talked through Kimmel’s entire monologue and announced to the room she’d never heard of Robert Downey Jr. before. “I’m about to book you a hotel room,” I told her. It was a great year for movies, with a great broadcast to show for it. A Sandra Hüller surprise could have been fun, and I would’ve loved for Ruffalo to win Best Supporting, and Mica Levi’s actual best score of the year wasn’t even nominated. But again: can’t win ‘em all. We fill out a ballot every year, guessing all the winners beforehand, with a “will win” column and an “upset” column. One point for the former, two for the latter. We tallied up our points as the credits rolled. With locked eyes and in perfect unison, Austin and I said, word for word, “Three…two…one…26 points!” A regular old Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand. As far as who’s who—I choose my battles.

“I just know he’s behind on his alimony,” I said to Austin, as we took our seats for Dune: Part Two, cocking my head in the direction of a fellow regular at our go-to theater. We’ve seen so many movies alongside this guy and he’s always, shamelessly, in the row designated for wheelchair users. Of course, so are we. It’s got these great twosomes of seats, perfectly distanced from the screen, with these big spacious gaps ensuring your nearest moviegoer is a cool eight feet away. Unless, of course, an actual wheelchair user were to show up. We’ve thankfully avoided the hot-faced shame of ever giving up these seats to people who actually need them. What we have suffered, however, is this fellow Regal Unlimited Member. Because I do truly hope he’s only spending $23.99 a month to see all these movies, considering he hasn’t actually seen a single one. Middle-aged and sloven but always dressed, bafflingly, in expensive, even cool clothes, he stays awake for the trailers but as soon as the lights go down, so does he. I could usually care less about people falling asleep, what with the far more egregious displays of incivility I’ve witnessed in theaters these last couple years. But this man snores. We were watching Dune, for God’s sake, the sonic equivalent of being trapped inside a steel drum rolling through the streets of Damascus for two hours and forty-six minutes and he’s out like a light. Like a baby—with sleep apnea. Hans Zimmer no match for his snores. At the end, Austin shook the man awake and chewed him out, telling him how inconsiderate he’d been of all the other people who came to see this movie, all the other people who were pretending not to stare at this confrontation on their way out the theater. Austin can be so fearless. Bleary eyed and horizontal, still totally reclined in his seat, the man looked up at Austin and said, “You should’ve woken me up!”

A friend of a friend’s mom went missing. Her family had no idea where she was for over 24 hours. Thank God, they’ve since found her. She was safe and sound all along, albeit a little off her rocker. But even before Austin and I learned about this resolution, in fact as soon as we heard about all this for the first time—we couldn’t help but laugh. “Isn’t it amazing,” I said, “that one of the most devastating and stressful events in this person’s life can be totally hysterical to us?”

On a 70 degree evening, I met up with Isaiah for drinks. He was in shorts and a t-shirt while I had my winter coat draped over one arm. Overshooting the mark, both of us, in different fashions. But we were perfectly comfortable inside. Pushing in my chair, I bumped into the table leg and made our beers spill a little. By the time I noticed, Isaiah was already up on his feet, rushing to the bar to fetch some napkins. Months ago, our beloved coworker Ruth came back to work after a couple weeks away, convalescing after a serious illness. I was standing at the kitchen sink when she walked into the break room with open arms, looking so amazing and healthy and herself. I could have cried. Not thirty seconds later, she dropped the coffee in her hand and it spilled all over the floor. “Well,” she said, “That breaks the ice!” We should all be Ruth. Having swapped screenplays with each other, Isaiah and I were here to talk shop. And we got to it—eventually. After discussing our key Virgo placements. And realizing we have pretty comparable solitary streaks. That and a complex with money, as informed by our parents and their, again, comparable work ethic. We had nice things to say to each other about our writing, and I meant every word, and I hope he did too. Walking to Delancey-Essex together, we were at the turnstiles when he realized he forgot his bag in the bar. I would’ve been so embarrassed if I did that, but I really don’t think he was. And of course—he shouldn’t have been. Waiting for the train, I got a message from my mother. “Please text me and dad. We read about the shooting in the subway in Brooklyn.” That was news to me. I hadn’t looked at my phone in hours. I told her I was all good.

Springtime is a busy season at the museum and management offered all the part-timers the chance to add a fourth day to our schedule. I’ll be working Fridays now too. Don’t feel too bad for me. Every Educator has their own unique set of days at the museum, which means every day has its own unique cast of characters, some of whom I rarely, if ever, see. For example: Lin. That said, Lin and I go way back, hired at the very same time and for the time being, each and every Friday, I’ll be seeing her. Close your eyes and listen to her talk, you’d think Debi Mazar was leading your tour of the tenement. Lin’s lived in the same house out in Queens for, basically, her entire life. A house that possesses an interdimensional portal down in the cellar, where the spirits of two nuns and a mad priest long ago came home to roost. Her birthday was this month, turning 60something, and—come the following Friday—she told me all about where she went and what she did and the friends who made it all so special. “But uh, hit a little speed bump in between plans,” she said. “I stopped by the house in the afternoon? And waiting for me on the doorstep? A card and dozen roses. So, uh, yeah—my stalker’s back!”

My mom’s got this new side gig, a couple hours a week spent offering samples at bars and liquor stores, most recently on St. Patrick’s Day at the Irish pub in our hometown, giving out shots of Guinness. That sounds like my hell. And hers, too. But—anything for a buck. Calling me one morning, she told me all about it. Within moments of showing up, the bartender yelled at her, “Okay, you need to get away from my service bar. And Guinness samples? Really? Today’s the one day when everyone’s already drinking it!” Takes a hostile bitch to know a hostile bitch, I suppose, because Kristine didn’t bark back. She saved that for the patrons. Namely all the old fogies fiending for some free swag. Most people just want a t-shirt, she explained, but this one old man swiped an entire sheet of temporary tattoos right under her nose. And then had the gall to come back up and ask how he can win the other prizes. “Well, we’re doing trivia soon,” she said to him. “Maybe you’ll win and we can swap out a shirt for that whole thing of tattoos you took!” And who hosted said trivia, one might ask? A woman’s work is never done.

Grabbing the microphone from the live band’s lead singer, my mother took the stage. Half the crowd was too drunk to pay attention while the other half shouted that they couldn’t hear her. “Yeah, said no one ever,” said my mother, quoting her own quip, cracking both of us up. It was an informal thing, my mother asking the crowd a dozen Irish-related questions and passing out swag to whoever answered first. Or whoever answered correctly first. The three leaves on a shamrock are said to represent “faith, love, and hope” or “The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” My mom would’ve accepted either one. Meanwhile, from somewhere in the throng, a woman guessed, “Live, laugh, love!” Witheringly, I’m sure, my mother said, “No.” I only wish I’d seen this for myself. Landing jokes and busting balls, in charge and center stage. My mother, right where she belongs. I hope she felt like a star.

A visitor asked one of the Educators about wedding traditions for Irish Catholic couples in the 1860s. A fun question that, alas, she didn’t have an answer for. Back in the breakroom, consulting one of our many content binders, she read aloud her findings. “Okay, typical marriage proposals at the time included ‘Would you like to hang your washing next to mine?’” We gushed. “Or ‘Would you like to be buried with my people?’” We screamed.

I had a dentist appointment. Six months ago, when I showed up to this Chinatown building for my first visit to the office, I boarded the elevator, pressing the button for the seventh floor—and went nowhere. The doors would close and the doors would open and I’d get spit right back out to the ground floor. I tried it again. And then again. Directly across from the elevator, there was a man working behind the counter of a pharmacy, a captive audience to my repeated failings. It was clear he would not be coming to my rescue. Trying the stairs, I hoofed up and down seven flights to no avail. Finally, I called the office and, laughing, the receptionist said I was their first appointment of the day and that they needed to flip on the elevator switch for their floor. Learning my lesson, I called ahead this time. That man was right where I left him last summer, sitting behind the pharmacy counter. Indoors and unabashedly: he was smoking a cigarette. I love New York. It’s a very efficient office. During that first visit, I completed intake forms, got x-rays, received a cleaning, and had a cavity filled—in 33 total minutes. About as much time as it took me to finally get up there. And yet the dentist and hygienist never seem rushed. Always making small talk with me, and in English, which is imaginably on my behalf, given how stilted they can occasionally sound. I’m grateful for that, obviously, and so charmed. Clearly very familiar with each other, their friendliness takes on this almost campy irony once it’s played out in, presumably, their second language. They really had me giggling. The hygienist got to the office an hour early that morning and, after making sure she didn’t clock in an hour early, the dentist asked how she passed the time. She ate some food she brought from home, an extra serving of the lunch she’d prepared for her daughter, who doesn’t like the cafeteria food. Last year, her daughter’s school only served meat one day a week. Chicken on Thursdays. But now, due to budget cuts, she said, there’s no meat at all. “That’s because we feed all the migrants,” the dentist said. “We pay our taxes and they give it all to the migrants and it’s budget cuts at our children’s schools.” There wasn’t any residue left from my cleaning but I took another sip from the plastic cup in my hand. Because even if I had something to say to that, how could I, now with my mouth all full up with water? I leaned over and I spit it out.

In maybe ten seconds flat, as my newest round of strangers assembled before me, it was clear I was about to suffer, and I quote, “the occasional group of visitors who refuse to like me.” It was a sold out tour, 12 people in total, and not a single soul picked up what I was putting down. I could almost smell how badly these people wished they’d had some mousy, easily-interruptible, quick-to-apologize brunette instead of the Educator they actually got. A barking, towering, increasingly prickly homosexual. Getting them inside, I explained that a family of six was the average size for these 325 total square feet—but that we also know of a single apartment that housed a family of twelve. “We’re twelve people right now,” I said, my delivery long ago perfected to all but guarantee laughter and surprise and thoughtful remarks from the more enlightened visitors about families who still live like this today. Like a herd of cows, they merely blinked. Never one to quit while I’m ahead, I said, “And what a happy family we have here! We gonna get along? I’m not so sure about that! Okay. Look around. And don’t touch anything!” There were some warm thank yous at the end of the tour, not to mention cash tips, but—too little too late. Waiting for me down on the sidewalk, one of my visitors said, “You know, that was good, but I gotta say—you really romanticized tenement life.” I laughed in his face. For the last hour, I’d talked about desecrating the Sabbath and 146 workers dying in a factory fire. The fearful precarity of being undocumented and a woman who cried sad, bitter tears upon seeing this dump of an apartment for the first time. Husbands who died leaving behind widows with young children. And a 19-year-old girl who left home and never saw her mother or father again. But I guess he didn’t catch any of that. Only ever listening to me when I dared discuss the togetherness and humanity and fleeting joys of these families. So many people come to the museum desperate to confirm all their beliefs that life back then was nothing short of wretched. It’s pornographic, I swear. This desire to know that everything was so miserable for these people, for these immigrants, but that they were raising children who—ta da!—all became doctors and lawyers. And I said all this to him. “Because if that’s your family’s story, God bless you,” I said. “But I’m just not gonna give that to people. Okay? It was never that simple.” He apologized but, as I walked away from that tour, I can’t say it felt like an accomplishment.

“Today, March 22nd, is my 41st birthday,” said a man, announcing himself to all of us F train commuters as he began his trek down the car. “Last year, on my birthday, this guy ran from the other end of the train just to kick me in the face. My birthday before that, I was sound asleep and I woke up to some guy pouring a bottle of water all over my head. If you can believe it. Anyway you can help me, folks, please.” I got off the train without giving him anything, but I should have. March 22nd, it means something special to me too. It’s our anniversary. Austin and I, together, for five years now.

During my walk to work that morning, for whatever reason, for a couple reasons, I put on “Express Yourself.” You deserve the best in life/So if the time isn’t right/Then move on. But come evening, meeting up in Midtown for dinner and a show, I listened to “I Deserve It.” A similar sentiment, as it turns out, albeit a changed tune. Standing out on 53rd Street, I saw Austin before he saw me, walking up the block in my direction. It’s not often that I get to see him like that, guileless and unaware, like a character in my own little movie. It’s like how it feels to watch him sleep. He’s never more beautiful to me than when he’s asleep. It only lasted a moment. Lately, I’ve found myself thinking about our very beginning. Back when we were just friends. All those nights when we had so much fun not doing much of anything, little did I know, Austin was developing a crush. Feelings of my own would come later but that’s a story for another day. Because there I was, like some character in his little movie, being totally myself—uncompromising and, if you asked me, unattractive—and he was still finding something to love. Anytime I’ve had a crush, I’d fashion myself in his image. Growing out my hair like his, dressing like him, pretending to like his music. Becoming my beloved. And it never worked. Or at least not how I ever really wanted it to. For Austin, I didn’t change a thing. Many hearts, many years have unraveled/Leading up to today/And I thank you. Looking my way, he smiled, finally.

From underneath the overhang at North Londonderry’s bus station, I watched the snow fall and used a plastic fork to pick at my tupperware of sardines, boiled potatoes, and seven-minute eggs. It wasn’t yet noon and I’d traveled many miles. Catching the 5:29 a.m. Northeast Regional out of New York, and then the 10:00 Concord Coach at South Station, and finally an 11:07 car ride from my sister, Lindsay. Poorly rested but over-stimulated, I barely had an appetite. Let alone for this concoction that had fermented in my Baggu over the last seven hours. But try as I might—waste not, want not. My sister pulled up to the station and I motioned for her to roll down the window. “This food I’m eating,” I said to her, “It smells.” Giving her the chance to wait warmly in her idling car while I ate my slop out in the snowy cold, like some kind of Dickensian tramp. I would have been all too happy to do that. But Lindsay, sweet Lindsay, oh consummate middle child, our Cancer peacemaker, insisted I get inside. We hadn’t so much as pulled out of the parking lot before Lindsay said, from the verge of upchuck, “Oh my God!”

Bringing with them a raw meatloaf on a sheet tray, our parents got to Lindsay’s house just a couple minutes after we did. We all stood around and looked at Vincent, Lindsay’s two-year-old, eating his lunch at the kitchen counter. He offered my mother—his grandmother—a piece of cantaloupe and, shaking her head no, dead serious, she said, “I’m chewing gum.” Up in New Hampshire for the week, I was visiting home.

“Alright,” said my dad. “I want you to guess how many total days I have left at work—”

“—Not counting the yearly company meeting,” my mom said, cutting my dad off, a man she insists never has anything to say.

“Okay, um—”

“And—don’t forget—he’s using up all his PTO to recover after the hip surgery,” my mom said. “Thirteen weeks. And then he’s just coming back for a little victory lap before officially retiring.”

“I’ll guess—”

“But he’ll be up and at ‘em by six weeks. The house is gonna be immaculate. All those boxes down in the cold storage, boxes up in the attic we haven’t touched since Jersey, it’s—”

“Forty-one days,” I said.

“Guess again,” my dad said.

“Okay—twenty-seven.”

“Guess again.”

“...Alright. Fifty.”

“Seven,” my dad, and mom, said.

Watching The Holdovers, my mom said, “He’d be perfect, Brian! You two are built just alike!” Dominic Sessa playing me in the movie of my life, officially approved by Kristine. If only he knew how hard-to-get said approval can be. Not five minutes later, during a scene where he’s getting a broken arm set, shirtless, she said, “Okay, no, he’s actually a lot skinnier than you.”

Sitting close to my dad on the couch one night, I showed him everything I’ve learned about us. Austin got me an Ancestry subscription for my birthday, with an accompanying message, “The resilient child is one who knows his family’s history.” In 1865, James Burns left Ireland and came to New York City. He was 25. I was 25, the year I moved here. There’s an archived picture of one of his sons, William Henry Burns. If it mattered to me, I could probably see a family resemblance. His obituary states that he was “long active in politics on the Lower East Side.” My heart sang, learning that, it really did. Even if these men, ultimately, are merely strangers to us. But pulling up my grandfather’s profile, showing my dad where his dad shows up on all these different records—no less a stranger. His mother and a baby sister appear in the 1930 census but, by the following decade, they’ve both died. At 12 years old, he lived in an apartment with his father, his father’s business partner, his father’s business partner’s wife, and an uncle and aunt. “He never talked about any of this,” my dad said. “Never.” And according to the draft card that George F. Burns, my grandfather, filled out in his own handwriting, that apartment where he grew up with all those people—it was at 16 Broome Street. Every day I go to work, I walk down Broome Street.

Emily drove over to the house and we went on a walk together. In response to one of the many winter vistas I posted that week, she said, “Are you in Gilford?” At the same time in the same place, both of us were visiting home. Emily was my first friend here, my best friend. And now, it would appear, my oldest. Christmastime airfare from Portland proved too expensive so she came home this week instead, which also gave her the chance to go down to Boston and celebrate Stephanie’s 30th birthday. I used to be so close with Stephanie. In high school, we were each obsessed with these two boys on the soccer team who were both named Andrew. Blasting “Like a G6” over and over again, we drove an hour each way one night to attend their away game in a town neither of us had ever heard of. It’s pathetic, having a crush. But with her, it never had to feel that way. Emily reminded me of the day I told Stephanie, during our last summer at home, that the school she’d chosen for herself was a “for-profit college.” Getting walloped with shame upon recalling some stupid remark I made however many years ago, that’s one thing. It’s another to have no memory of it at all. Emily and I talked about our parents, and boys, and how this hometown of ours never really changes. We’re comforted by that, and haunted.

At 11:44 in the morning, I messaged Austin, “I’m very on the verge of tears.” And then at 11:45, a picture of a falling teardrop on my cheek. It was my last day in Gilford and I was so sad to leave. Sad about my dad’s surgery, and the end of his career. Sad that I might never have my parents’ house all to myself ever again. And not least of all—for having a really nice time. It’s pretty, being up here, but it’s not always easy. This week was easy. Shoveling the driveway, watching the last 15 minutes of movies on cable television, waking up in this house, this house where I had all my firsts, and peering out the window to check that both their cars were gone before singing and dancing around the living room. Writing, writing. Walking, walking. And back home in time to hear the familiar squeak of plastic grocery bags around my mom’s wrists or my dad slapping down a heap of junk mail on the kitchen counter. My parents, active and vital and contributive, workers, home from a hard day’s eight hours, and right back at it tomorrow. To be forever young, that’s all I want. I just can’t tell if I want that for them or for me. At the bus station that night, saying goodbye, we all cried. I’ll be the first person he talks to, just as soon as he wakes up from the surgery, that’s what my dad said. And more than once, my mom told me, “You’re a good son.”

I didn’t bother unpacking my bag. Back to New York one night, I was dog sitting the next, watching Maya the Chihuahua for a couple days. She’s perfect. Winsome and soulful and hysterical. Like if she looked at me one day and started speaking in perfect English—or, I suppose, perfect español—I wouldn’t be remotely surprised. I adore her. Big dogs can survive off brawn and they rest on those laurels, charmlessly. Small dogs have to be clever. We live in the same neighborhood but I spend the night in their apartment. It’s how I’ve always done it, ever since my Boston days, though I understand having a gay stranger bathe in your shower and sleep in your sheets isn’t for everybody. Not to mention everything else I’ve been known to do in a dog owner’s apartment. I was dog sitting Maya when her owners first got engaged and then again when they got married. And that’s not the first time this has happened. Years ago, for Lincoln, my dearest dog of all, he was on my watch when the owner proposed and then again when they tied the knot. Initially, I was supposed to be there for the wedding itself. The plan was that I’d join them up to Maine so Lincoln could be a part of the ceremony—albeit in my care—where they’d feed me and I’d stay in my own little cabin on the campground. I was so excited, but they changed their minds. Nevertheless: one for the books.

In the latest variation on this theme, now I was taking care of Maya while her owners were down in Miami to celebrate their one year anniversary. They told me to have a piece of their wedding cake. Its top tier had been sitting in the freezer all this time, waiting to be enjoyed one year later. It felt too special, too precious for me to eat, like I’d be messing with their good luck, and I told her so. But she insisted. “Indulge a bit,” she said. I sliced a single sliver each night, wanting them to think, for whatever reason, that I only ever helped myself to one piece. You can feel like a ghost, sometimes, taking care of a dog.

“I lived in Boston for a while so Massachusetts lives very warmly,” I always say, “right here in my heart.” It’s my refrain, anytime I have a visitor tell me that’s where they’re from. It usually goes over well, establishing an almost tribal kind of bond between me and even the most sea-weathered of mean New England mugs. I had this one Saturday tour where half the group wound up being from Massachusetts. I might as well have cartwheeled around the room, my response was so exuberant. They just kind of nodded at each other. But during a transition, while I was leading everybody into the next apartment, I heard one of them ask the other where they live.

“Nawth Hanovah.”

“Oh. We go to church theyah.”

“Awh yeah? We’ah friends with the priest!”

“Fathah Joe?”

“Fathah Joe!”

It was Lunar New Year and I forgot my red underwear. Weixi, one of my coworkers, another Educator, she’s from China. I asked if she was doing anything to celebrate and she said, “No, no, I’m not. It’s…it’s a family holiday.” Here on a student visa, she hasn’t been home in a very long time. Since it’s the year of the Dragon, and I was born in the year of the Rooster, Weixi said my underwear wouldn’t make a difference one color or the other. Not to mention the fact that I’m not Chinese. It had just been her lunar year, as a Rabbit, and when a friend asked if she’d prepared, Weixi insisted she didn’t believe in all that. Lowering her voice and putting a hand on her heart, she said to me, “I suffered.”

We got drinks with Ashleigh. John Michael and Nick came too, as always. I chose this new bar down on Chrystie, which I think is the most hysterical street name in all of New York. Showing up a couple minutes after I did, Austin disagreed with me—to him, it’s “Onderdonk.” This was his first time meeting Ashleigh’s boyfriend. John Michael and I, we’ve realized that he knows my brother-in-law’s half-brother. “Through the Massachusetts hardcore scene,” I want to say, but I fear that’s the lamest way of putting it. My brother-in-law—of the New Hampshire straight edge scene—still laughs about the text I sent him, some ten years ago, after attending my first basement show in Allston. “I feel like I’m home!” What I actually felt was a bruising obsession over a straight boy in a band playing at said basement show. Not to mention the likely literal bruise I had from my skull bashing against the ceiling’s water pipes. Back in December, Ashleigh saw Madonna. It was her very first time. And no sooner did we start talking about the concert than from the bar’s speakers overhead, like the voice of God on high, we hear, “And you can dance…for inspiration…” As freshmen, whenever we were in a particular state of mind, Ashleigh and I would sit on her dorm room floor, hold each other’s hands, and listen to “Live to Tell.” Like some kind of seance. I hadn’t thought about that in years and years.

And then, that next night, we saw another Ashleigh. Austin’s Ashleigh. Her boyfriend Joey was hosting a launch party for a new literary magazine at this East Village wine bar that was also a cafe but also a bookstore that also had its own independent press. From a small little town in rural North Carolina, Ashleigh has an accent so lilting and topsy-turvy it sounds Scandinavian. Like the way Swedes suck up all the air from their vowels. She and her boyfriend are both writers. There were these two English professors at my college who were married to each other. Professor Elliot and Professor Pope. I loved imagining their life at home. All the bookstacks. The graded papers in leather satchels. The dust. Professor Pope always wore a pair of sunglasses on top of her head, like a headband. I’ll never forget the day she told our Advanced Prose Writing class, “I have broken up with someone over missing peanuts in a cold Cambodian peanut and chicken salad.” Ashleigh is teaching at a college right now and I asked if she had any favorite students. Of course she does. All I ever wanted was to be somebody’s favorite. Five different poets read their work throughout the night. Regarding poetry—and, while we’re at it, musical theater—sometimes I wonder if I’m the most discerning critic extant or if I’m just a philistine. I’ll let that sleeping dog lie. Edy was the last performer of the night, reading a short story from a dead writer. Austin has been friends with Edy forever but we rarely see her, let alone since she landed a role in a massively popular Freevee hoax reality show. But catching up with her was hysterical and fun and easy, like always. She was drinking this huge fountain soda from Burger King and no sooner did she walk away than Austin said, “I love that girl.”

Jarod observed my tour about the Irish family, currently studying to lead it himself. He’s been at the museum for over a year now but this was his first time seeing me in action. Walking over to the visitor center, I said a prayer for kind and curious visitors who’d make me look smart. Thank you, God. There was this Irish couple—Ireland Irish—who were just perfect. Showing everybody this 1867 political cartoon wherein Thomas Nast depicted Irish immigrant men as simian toughs, the Irish guy kept making these pithy little remarks that were very obviously jokes. Not that I understood a word of what he said. Austin knows exactly what to look for in moments like these, when I’m reacting to something that I didn’t actually comprehend—it drives him up a wall. My favorite international visitors, bar none, always come from either Ireland or Mexico. I’ve always said that. So envision my immense validation the first time I happened to watch an old clip of Salma Hayek telling Conan O’Brien, “I love Irish men, I have this thing for them…they’re very passionate…they’re almost Mexican!” There were these three Elder Lesbians on that same tour and at the end, walking beside me down the stairs, one of them said, “Man, things have changed so much for you kids. I can see you and acknowledge you as a brother, right out loud. Not very long ago, it would’ve just been a knowing look as we passed each other on the street.” I think she got a kick out of me and Jarod’s rapport. We can get a little dandyish around each other. Just before they went on their way, she said to me, “You’re sweet, you know that? You are really, really sweet.” All praise, Jarod had lovely things to say, using a heartfelt string of words to commend my tour-giving—but I already forgot them all.

“Okay, Brian, I believe in love again,” said Grace, on Valentine’s Day, telling me about a date she had earlier that week. There was still snow on the ground from yesterday’s storm but I wore my pink suede sneakers to work. Austin completed my set of first edition Carrie Fisher books, I got him a first edition copy of Gilda Radner’s memoir, and we saw When Harry Met Sally… in theaters. There was this freak sitting in the row behind us. Party of one, needless to say, this grown man talked through the whole thing. Bellowing laughter, cloying “aww”s, constant commentary. Annoying people are annoying in every way. And then—oy gevalt—Katz’s. He stayed silent during the faux-orgasm, shocking us all, but he couldn’t resist quoting the famous following line. Incorrectly and a beat premature. From a couple rows further back, another moviegoer screamed at him, “SHUT UP!”

During my daily constitutional, I talked to Shannon on the phone. “And here’s the kicker,” I told her, “He drives all of us crazy the whole time, totally ignoring the multiple people who ‘shh!’d’ him—myself included—and then what does he do? With maybe two minutes left of the movie? He picks up all his stuff and walks out of the theater!” We laughed and laughed. Shannon knows the movie well, of course. But she knows me even better. Hardly needing—let alone wanting—a recap of the ending, she indulged me anyway. Listening to me wax poetic about the resolution of a leading lady telling her leading man “I hate you,” yes—but also about that perfect back and forth regarding “Auld Lang Syne.” How Harry asks if anybody actually understands what it means. And telling Shannon that Sally says, among other things, “It’s about old friends.” There was a lull on the line. And then Shannon said, only kind of laughing, “Oh my God—I’m crying!” We talked for two hours and one minute. It’d only been three days since our last phone call.

Sarah’s dad died. I was in the middle of a tour, looking at my phone to check the time, when I read the text from Honora. It’s only by a couple months but Honora’s the oldest out of all of us. When Lindsay lost Mia, it was Jillian, our oldest sister, who told me. It’s a big responsibility—and I know we’re all so grateful for it. I called Sarah but she didn’t pick up. The next morning, after a couple texts back and forth, she sent me a voice message. Telling me she hadn’t seen her father in a couple days and how, “Yesterday, I just decided to come home while my mom and my aunt went to see him. And the funny thing about that is…he passed right when I got home. Right when I parked my car and was looking at our yard and looking at our house. I didn’t know it—but that’s when he passed. And I thought of you because you, of course, understand things like me. And I just don’t think it’s a coincidence that he waited ‘til I came home. So, that’s how I am. It’s coming in waves. But it’s a beautiful, cold, sunny day here. Very Boston. No clouds at all in the sky, just sun. Blinding from the snow. It was like this yesterday too, so that makes a big difference as well. Love you.”

My dad had to go to the hospital. The previous week’s hip replacement was a success, he went home that very same day, but since then—his leg got all swollen. My mom texted us that it was lucky they went when they did. He had blood clots, from not elevating his leg high enough. They’re below the knee, which makes all the difference. Above the knee and the clots could break off and go to his lungs. Or to his heart. “They said his clots are on Route 106, not 93, if you can figure that out,” said our mother. Forever our Jersey Girl In Exile. My sisters and I were all so mad that this wasn’t explicitly detailed in the post-op notes. But as it turns out—it was. “I can’t lay flat in bed at night, which would have helped,” my dad said. “It hurts too much.” They rented a recliner for the next month and that’s where he’ll sleep. The last time I called him on the phone, all I did was ask question after question. “Is it painful? When’s PT? No PT until May? Why’s that? Are there exercises to do at home until then? How often? Do they help?” I was concerned and I was curious but I worry that all I did, in asking him all those questions, was make him feel old. I understand the alternative, now more than ever, but still—I can’t bear him feeling old.

After several months of bargaining, and two extensions on our contract, our union reached a tentative agreement with the museum. Not everyone was satisfied. Eating my trademark five-in-the-afternoon lunch, I was cornered in the breakroom kitchen by a couple Educators who asked if I’d consider voting no. “No,” I thought to myself, while otherwise proving diplomatic. I worried about that “no” though, paranoid that my satisfaction with the contract’s terms would cast me as some traitor to all my cash poor and praxis rich colleagues. That I was bending to the will of the manager in my brain. That might all be true. But the “no”s wound up being a small contingent and our Bargaining Committee members insisted it was best we ratify. Emboldened, and relieved, I told said Bargainers that I was happy to gauge public opinion. And sway it. Into many a hushed coworker exchange, I inserted myself. Gracefully, gayly. It was thrilling, if also a little frightening, being witness to my own art of persuasion. During a press conference last summer, when SAG first went on strike, Fran Drescher said something I’ve since committed to memory, “You know what?! Eventually?! The people break down the gates of Versailles and then it’s OVAH!” Watching that, I thought to myself, all too sincerely, “I have what it takes to be a union president one day.” And yet anytime my coworkers asked if I’d considered joining our Bargaining Committee, my usual response was, “Oh, God no, I’m too much ‘my mother’s son’ for that.” In as many words—a raging bitch. But a righteous one. And Kristine, I thank you for that.

“Listen to this,” said Ruth, my beloved 70 something-year-old coworker. “Josh is in town. We went to see a play. But first: dinner. Right? Restaurant’s down on 40th, theater’s on 50th, it’s cold. I say, ‘Eh, let’s get a cab.’ We get a cab. It goes nowhere. Times Square at 7:00! Of course it goes nowhere! We make it two blocks and say, ‘Forget it, we’ll walk.’ The fare was $12! Two blocks! Twelve dollars! On a cab that got us nowhere! Only in New York!” Later that same morning, I said something that really made her laugh. Turning to the Educator sitting beside me, I said to him, “Mission accomplished.” Even later that same morning, I kicked myself for saying that, for making what should’ve been a charming little exchange into something false and put on. Though maybe I’m the last to notice this. After all, whenever I talk to Ruth, try as I might, I find myself slipping into a New York accent less authentic to Brian Burns than to Bella Abzug.

In the sidewalk shed of a tiki bar on the Upper West Side, we drank tropical cocktails out in the freezing cold. My cousins were in town for the night, Erica from Philadelphia and Kylee from across the river. A Burns girls night out. April was there too, who might as well be a Burns girl by now. She grew up down the street from Erica and came to so many of our family parties when we were little. April brought her own cousin along, a boy named Holden who she only met a couple years ago. She explained how a relative of hers adopted a relative of his but I was only half-listening. In my defense, Holden asked me, three times no less, “Wait—what’s your name again?” Kylee was the last to arrive and, upon hearing his name, said, “Our very own Holden Caulfield! My first crush. Of course.” Only 21 years old and attending City College, Holden is a jazz musician. He surprised me, proving sharper and sweeter and more thoughtful than I first expected. It also didn’t hurt that I really cracked him up a couple times. Nobody appreciates gay men better than a certain kind of straight guy. He grew up in Folsom, to which Kylee said “Folsom Prison Blues” is her go-to karaoke song. “Cause it’s mostly talking.” She can’t sing and neither can I. When we first chatted about this get together, Kylee suggested that we all eat dinner separately and meet up just for drinks. We really are family.

Renting a car from a Midtown garage, early on a Sunday morning, I drove to Massachusetts for the funeral. Ashleigh and Nick were already there, having spent the night with Honora at her mom’s house. Fitting for a slumber party, they played dress up. Honora’s mom’s bridal gown for Nick and one of the bridesmaid dresses for Ashleigh. The latter was red, redder than red, bewilderingly red, with lace and shoulder pads and a drop waist that didn’t actually drop until Ashleigh’s ankles. Out for lunch, Honora and I realized both our passports are expired right now, which makes sense for us in different but ultimately similar ways. Warning us of its terrors, Ashleigh showed us her most recent passport picture. Unsmiling, per the barked demands of the lady at CVS, Ashleigh thinks she looks scary. I think she looks like the Divine Feminine made flesh. Clutching my chest, I said to her, “You’re like something out of a Fellini!”

Asking the funeral home attendant if we should sign the guestbook as a group or as individuals, we joined the receiving line. There was a basket of Lifesavers next to the guestbook and, eventually self-conscious about our breath, Nick doubled back to grab us some. Across the room, we noticed Sarah begin to cry. Honora looked away, quickly, turning her back, and cried her own tears. Telling her I was so sorry, I hugged Sarah’s mom. And whispering things in her ear I can’t even remember, I hugged Sarah. At the very front of the room, just before we reached them, Ashleigh kneeled down before the urn for a moment, and then I did too. I clasped my hands, looking at all these framed photos of Sarah’s dad, and prayed an Our Father.

Sarah and I had a moment together, just the two of us, driving her back to the house so she could change clothes and drop off flowers. More than anything else, we laughed. Her mom’s dog is blind and deaf and, once she got a whiff of me, wouldn’t stop barking. All my tricks of the trade are verbal, I realized. I was driving back to New York that same night, bringing Ashleigh and Nick with me this time, but we wanted to stay for dinner. It was at this Italian restaurant in town. “Open bar,” said Sarah’s mom to each of us, with a wink. We sat down at a table with Sarah, of course, but also her lifelong best friend, that friend’s fiancé, and some other relative. We all played nice, keeping the conversation open and democratic but, of course, we had the most fun with each other. I noticed, at one point, that the fiancé was watching us from across the table. And he was smiling, really smiling at what he was hearing. We’ve all done it. Talking to friends a decimal louder than necessary in hopes our familial repartee will fall on some eavesdropping ear, and leave them dazzled. Albeit with a precedent of regret: mission accomplished. Because really, it’s not like it took much effort for us. Being with each other, enjoying each other—it was the easiest thing.

We said our goodbyes. Last of all to this little girl who’d been running around all day. She’s Sarah’s niece, basically. Maybe 10 years old, she looked like an Olsen twin, trendy and precocious with her otherwise blond hair tinted purple. With Honora and Nick already halfway out the door, I was the only other person around who saw this girl reach out and grab both of Ashleigh’s hands. It was so sweet, so unprompted. Staring up at Ashleigh with this eager kind of adoration, she clearly had something to tell her. I would’ve guessed she was about to call Ashleigh beautiful, or profess she wanted to be just like her when she grew up. With glinting eyes, with a big smile, and with all the singsong cruelty of childhood, she said, “One day, you’ll be in a coffin.”

Covering my coupe a moment too late, it was a brand new year and my champagne was swimming with paper confetti. I still drank it anyway. After our midnight’s kiss under still-falling streamers, Austin said to me, “It’s your favorite song.” Just as soon as the packed restaurant’s countdown from ten ushered us all into 2024, the live band downstairs started playing “Auld Lang Syne.” It is kind of my favorite song. Mournful, and fuzzy, and slow. Like wearing my father’s clothes. What do you know, a man named Robert Burns penned the poem, kind of. Quoted as saying, “It’s an old song, of the olden times, which has never been in print until I took it down from an old man”—but still. A sad-eyed Burns boy knows a sad-eyed Burns boy when he hears one. Washing it all down with said champagne and two dirty vodka martinis, I ate raw oysters and colossal shrimp, french fries and crudité, pigs in a blanket and caviar on fingerling potatoes—for free. The perks of dating someone who used to work here, at Ralph Lauren’s restaurant. People paid something like $425 a head to be there that night, if they could get the reservation at all. Nina Garcia walked by us at one point and Austin said something to her and she replied, “What beautiful people at this table!” Sitting next to me, Austin’s friend, and one-time coworker, leaned in and whispered, “What a ham.”

I cleaned the apartment and went on a six-mile walk, hungover, before watching All That Jazz that night. The favorite film of so many of my favorite filmmakers, it was our first time seeing it. I’m of the mindset that however you spend January 1st sets the tone for every day that follows. We’ll see.

The next day, we had Caroline over for drinks at our place. Austin’s old boss, for over a decade and at different establishments, Caroline is prim (she’s English) but cheeky (she’s English), a total broad (she’s lived in New York for 35 years) with a girlish laugh that rings clear as a bell (we worship her). When Austin accepted his new job last year, I felt something like grief after realizing I’d no longer get to ask, “What did Caroline say today?” Her daughter was in town and, traveling separately, she got to our apartment first. She’s tickled we love her mother so much, even if she also hinted at seeing through the “they don’t make ‘em like they used to!” mystique that leaves me and Austin, more often than not, breathless. It’s hard to be our parent’s child. We had champagne and Caroline brought red wine and I loved the responsibility of keeping an eye on everyone’s glass. After seeing Funny Girl in theaters as a child, Caroline told us about being on holiday with her family that summer, on the island of Jersey. Somehow making her way into this big, empty ballroom at the hotel, she queued up “Second Hand Rose” on the jukebox and danced to Barbra’s song, all by herself.

I dreamed that I was in Al Gore’s backyard, explaining Vatican II to Blythe Danner. And also, that same night, that I was walking dogs in Boston again, that I was back to working for Nancy. I have that dream so often, and I’m always running late in it, either that or I’m lost. It’ll be six years, this year, since I left Boston. That’s just as long as all the time I lived there. Anytime we talk about it on the phone, Shannon and I always agree, that as much as we might miss it—no way.

I’ve been wheezing a lot, more than I have in a very long time, since I was a kid. Telling myself it was walking pneumonia, or bronchiolitis, or RSV, I started taking some amoxicillin my mom bought for me from a Mexican pharmacy last time they were on vacation. Texting her to mark the occasion, my mom responded, “Eat yogurt.” I still had to call out sick. It was a Saturday and I love Saturdays at the museum so much. The visitors are excited to be there, the specific crew of Educators are my very favorite, and while not every tour is great, it’s only ever been a Saturday when I’ve led my very best. I worked my usual couple days that week, sharing friendly enough “Happy New Year”s with my Monday and Thursday colleagues, but it wasn’t until that following Saturday that I found myself being greeted with “Brian!” after “Brian!”

In our breakroom, sitting on the couch, I was talking to Sophie. I’d asked her earlier that morning if she had any resolutions for the new year and she said tap dancing. “As an already too-disciplined person,” I told her, “I should probably try being less resolved.” I don’t remember how but we got to talking about singing, at which point I told her I’ve thought about taking voice lessons for years now. “Just for myself.” Sophie grew up in the church. Her mom’s a pastor. I talked to her about all the times I’ve gone to church with Austin’s family, to see his dad preach, and how fascinating it is to be surrounded by all that New Testament Joy. And how so much of that joy seems to stem from singing, without shame. Explaining that my inability to sing feels like some kind of emotional block. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic. Sophie asked me, “Have you ever heard of Sacred Harp singing?” I hadn’t. It's this tradition that came out of New England but somehow made its way down south, where a chorus of people assemble in a square wooden church and—facing each other—sing very, very loudly. Participation is key, that’s what Sophie said. That Sacred Harp is participation. You’re not singing for an audience, but for each other, and for yourself.

After wandering around The Met for an hour, trying and failing to find The Costume Institute, I asked for directions. I wanted to see the Women Dressing Women exhibit. Naturally. Not a day goes by at the museum without my saying the words “garment industry” or “ILGWU” or “schmatta.” Visitors love to lie and tell us that their great-grandmother survived The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. It’s constant. Who knows, maybe it’ll be the same thing a hundred years from now, when a million different people all have the same exact story about an ancestor who worked in The Twin Towers but called out sick on September 11th. History is just the stories we tell. I was a little underwhelmed by the exhibit but maybe that’s just me, more interested in sweatshops than ateliers. In the contemporary wing, I very briefly crossed paths with this gay guy and a couple of girls. They could’ve been 15, or 19, or 26 years old, I really don’t know. It’s only getting harder for me to tell. I heard the gay boy say, “She’s the reason that I know art” and my immediate thought, inexplicably, was that “she” was “Lady Gaga.” I shared this with Austin and he said, “How do you know he wasn’t talking about, like, his art teacher?” Of course, I don’t. Anyway, it made all his girlfriends laugh and I felt so proud of him. Like I was his godfather, or his guardian angel. And there was something almost mystical about it, I swear, the warmth I felt in hearing his sibilant little voice and knowing there will always be more of us, that there will always be new gay guys.

“I watched Saltburn last night,” my mom said to me, over the phone.

“Uh oh,” I said.

“I guess I don’t know the names of a lot of these new actors. Obviously. Because the whole time, I’m on the edge of my seat, waiting for that scene, you know—the full frontal! Yeah, well, I thought it was Felix who’d be doing it! Not that other one! Ugh!”

Looking in the bathroom mirror that night, I saw an eyelash on my cheek. I made a wish and, the very next day, my wish came true. It was delivered in the form of an email. I guess most dreams come true these days via email.

There was a Marlene Dietrich exhibit at the International Center of Photography. I told the girl at the front desk where I work and she let me in for free, which always makes me feel bad—we don’t offer so much as a discount to anybody. Most of the 250 photographs of Dietrich spoke for themselves, but one of the very few accompanying placards read, “Her choice to look away from the camera here is an expert one, compelling the viewer to gaze closely at the shape of her legs. ‘The legs aren’t so beautiful,’ she once claimed. ‘I just know what to do with them.’” What a woman. Back in Boston, when I was dog walking, this rich, middle-aged, lesbian couple stopped me on the street one day and asked if I could take care of their pug for an afternoon. It took all I had not to squeal, “Of course!” I showed up to their apartment just as Sylvia was leaving and she said to me, “Okay, honey, fridge is all yours, help yourself. Cash is on the kitchen counter for you and—do you smoke? I left out a joint, too. If you want! Whatever! Alright—mwah!” Returning from my walk with Henry the geriatric pug, I spent the next hour splayed on their white leather couch, stoned out of my gourd, listening to a live Marlene Dietrich album from 1959. “Mein Mann ist verhindert, er kann sie unmöglich sehen,” I growled along, in perfect tonal unison, feeling more than usual like the paragon of 20th century homosexuality. I looked at every single photo in the exhibit twice. Marlene was so stunning, so clever and handsome. Reminding me, unsurprisingly, of Madonna, but also Bette Davis, and also Caroline. I do have a type.

I would have comped his ticket but Al paid for it himself, supporting the museum with his own $30 just like every other visitor on that 3:45 tour. And the people were good, thank God. Try as I might, it’s always the group that makes the tour. Al and I didn’t let on that we knew each other, which is a fun way of going about it. Naughty, even. After he took a picture of a Catholic icon in the Italian family’s tenement, I told him, “Now, do the sign of the cross!” Another visitor overheard that and laughed. Afterwards, chatting in front of the visitor center, Al said all the things I wanted to hear. That it was so impressive, seeing me in my element like that. That I was so myself, but also not myself, or more than myself. Telling me, “It was like watching a singer who you know, like a friend, like watching your friend perform on stage.”

Austin and I went to a bar called Sharlene’s on a Friday night for Eric’s 30th birthday. Per his “Partiful,” 59 people had RSVP’d yes. We were both amazed by that. Logically, the place was packed. Hugging Eric hello, I asked if there’d been any tears today and he told me, “I haven’t cried in five years.” With all the privilege of the unmedicated, I said, “Release is overrated.” He couldn’t disagree more. Austin and I didn’t know anyone else there, not at first, and I immediately regretted coming. Feeling so self-conscious to be standing off in a corner, with only my boyfriend, not speaking to each other. It sucks to be tall sometimes. Always in someone’s way, always taking up too much space, always visible. Objectively, unavoidably visible. Spotting Nolan over at the bar, Austin led the charge in his direction, and everything got better. Not five minutes later, I felt a familiar hand on my back and turned around to see Cole, the indie darling himself. He couldn’t have been sweeter, or more excited to see me. Talking about an upcoming role of his, I asked if he’s eager to play such a villainous character and he said, “Well, you know, I can’t really see him that way…” I love actors. Later, he asked where in Boston I’m from. Last month, at a Christmas party, another friend alluded with certainty to my Massachusetts roots. Be still my heart. Of course, I’m not from there, not really. But maybe I am.

There was enough accumulation to end the depressing record of 701 days in New York City without measurable snowfall. I was thrilled. Thinking it was done for the day, I went for my usual afternoon walk only for the storm to pick back up again. Everyday, I see people walking up and down Washington Avenue, back and forth from the train on Fulton to the shelter up near Flushing Avenue. Asylum seekers, mostly from Mauritania, or so I’ve read. So many of these men wear the same hats, or t-shirts, or carry the same bags, each bearing the same graphic of a masked Lady Liberty, flexing her arm with a recently administered band-aid. It reads, “I’m an NYC Vax Champ!” I guess there was a greater supply than demand. It was so special, seeing these grown men spinning around in circles on the sidewalk, filming videos on their phones, capturing something they might never have seen before. I wonder what they said, when they sent these videos to their loved ones, to all the people who must feel just a million miles away. One of the men I saw recording the snow—he was wearing sandals on his feet. Further down the block, I saw a woman pushing her baby in a chintzy little stroller. I can’t know for sure, but I got the sense she was also very new here. That same day, that morning, a recent order from Mayor Adams officially took effect—migrant families must leave city housing after 60 days. I wondered if they had a place to sleep tonight. Her baby, a little girl, was in a coat and a hat, but her face was totally exposed to the weather, to the wind and snow. It felt like 20 degrees that afternoon. I looked up at the mother and she was looking right at me, looking me straight in the eyes. They say that’s God. I believe that to be true. And yet I just kept on walking.

There was this late addition to my tour about the Irish family, an adult daughter and her mother who joined the rest of us after I’d already begun the program. The daughter gave me nothing to work with, but the mother was engaged—and chic. Red leather gloves and a designer bag, with expensive looking blond hair and an unplaceable European accent. Nodding at all the right moments and sustaining eye contact, she was really with me. Giving every indication she was in total lockstep with my interpretation of why and how Irish immigrants experienced such rapid mobility versus the still ongoing oppression of Black Americans. At the tour’s end, I’m leading the group down the stairs and out of the building and the mother is right beside me, speaking quietly enough so only I can hear. “So, why is it? Is it just prejudice?” she says, talking about that Black experience. “Or is it because the family unit is so broken for them?” It’s the strangest thing, and it happens all the time. Finally removed from the prying eyes of strangers, the visitor who bit their tongue all hour long now has the chance to tell me what they really believe. Presuming, somehow, that I’ll agree. “Our maid, she’s been with us for 32 years,” the mother said. “Jamaican. And she’s always said, ‘These American Blacks. They’ve got a chip on their shoulder!’” It took my breath away, hearing her say that. And before I could even think of a response, she’d put on her gloves and turned on her heels and she was gone. I had the chance to do the right thing and I didn’t, I could say that. I could also say that, after an hour of expressing this history as clearly as I know how, she’d only ever see what her eyes wanted to see. Maybe there’s only so much I can do.

There were these other visitors on that very same tour who stuck around afterwards to chat with me—Helen from Galway, and Matthew and Christine from New York. They told me how moved they were by the tour, and asked where they could read my writing. Christine found me online and I thanked her for their curiosity. She responded, “You were the talk of the town for our dinner thereafter. Matthew—a composer—said, ‘His beat. The silence after his sentences, and the timing of his silence, gave us the space to reflect on the weight of the family’s experiences.” Telling me, “You are wise beyond your years.” Later, meeting up with Austin at the movies, he was just as touched as I was by her message. And just as tickled that it’s even possible for me to still be wise beyond my years. I said to him, “That could be the last time anyone ever says it to me.”

We saw The Zone of Interest that night. It was horrifying and it was phenomenal. And it made me think of this family I saw on the train sometime last year. It was a mother and a father and their son, who was maybe 8 years old and wearing a soccer uniform. I’d guess they were on their way to a game. With his son sitting in his lap, the father was being so sweet, so affectionate and physical, kissing the side of his boy’s face every now and then. It made me smile. And of course, I didn’t notice this, not at first. But eventually, looking down at this father holding his child so dearly, right there on his hand, where thumb met pointer finger, I saw his tattoo of a swastika.

We went to see Madonna. It was Austin’s very first time seeing her, and I was so happy to share that with him. This would be my seventh show of hers—but never before at Madison Square Garden. As a kid, I dreamed of seeing her there, understanding it always as some holy pilgrimage. Like seeing Mary in Lourdes. Our seats were second row from the runway, dead center. Before the show began, and before the very front row filled up with exclusively famous VIPs, Austin and I dreamt up our ideal celebrities. Rosie O’Donnell, Parker Posey, Martha Plimpton, to name a few. It wound up being Sam Smith, Evan Mock, Russell Tovey, Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka, The Palm restaurateur Bruce Bozzi and ex-husband to Carrie Fisher/hot-shot agent Bryan Lourd. But the worthiest front row attendee of them all: Jose Xtravaganza. I could’ve wept seeing him there. The show began at 9:45. A matinee, by Madonna’s standards. It was perfect. The setlist, the arrangements, the spectacle. Her. She looked so beautiful, and so alive. I am so thankful that she is alive. It’s crazy to think so much of this show was already planned and rehearsed when she had her health scare last summer, when she almost died. Because so much of this show is eulogy. For Christopher Flynn, Keith Haring, Herb Ritts, and every other bright light lost to AIDs, for Prince and Basquiat and Sinéad, for Michael Jackson, for her mother. All gone. But amidst this loss, or despite all this loss, maybe even because of such loss: Celebration. And how astounding that when she takes the stage each night, in the opening line of her opening number for this career retrospective tour, some forty tireless years in the making, Madonna sings, “When I was very young…”

She sang “Express Yourself” toward the end of the show, all alone on stage, just her and her guitar. When I saw her last month in Brooklyn, at this same point in the concert, she was still performing “I Will Survive.” Another eulogy, almost. It really is a miracle she’s here with us. I was never far from that thought. But also—you never know. I might never see her live again, I have to remember that. And oh, did she give me something to remember. Because it was during “Express Yourself” that Madonna came right to the very end of the runway. Squatting down, she stuck out her microphone toward that front row posse of A-list homosexuals, urging NPH and company to sing along before she stood back up and stepped a couple feet to the side. She was directly in front of us now, as close as we’d get to each other all night long. Spitting distance. And suddenly, I hear Madonna say, “Brian.” My heart stopped. Austin’s heart stopped. My friend Tom was also there that night and, knowing where we were seated, knowing we were seated precisely where she’d just uttered my name, he messaged me, “BRIAN. Did she just address you???” There, in the hallowed hall of Madison Square Garden, I heard her call my name. “Brian.” Of course, it only took us another second to realize Madonna wasn’t urging me to express myself but “Bryan.” That hot-shot agent standing right there in front of me. And yet, from the depths of my heart, I understand this was fate. Brian is a great name because it’s classic but it’s not common, that’s something I point out to people all the time. You meet a million Johns and Michaels in a lifetime but not a fraction as many Brians. And of all the people in this city, of all the people in the world to take that seat right directly in front of mine, of all the people recognizable enough to Madonna to warrant such an address—it was a man with my name.

It was heaven. Like a little prayer.

Still wheezing, I went to see my doctor, someone I specifically chose as my GP because I thought he was hot. Conveniently, he also accepts Medicaid. Seemingly their last appointment of the day, no sooner did I walk into the office than one of the front desk girls asked, “Burns?” Checking me in, the other girl looked at the computer and said, “Alright, your copay’s gonna be $100—just kidding!” It was cute. Under my breath, I said to the girls, “He’s cute…but he’s not that cute.” They screamed laughing.

We went to see Cole Escola’s new play, Oh, Mary! for its first night in previews. It’s at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in the Village. We saw Jacqueline Novak’s Get On Your Knees there too and what do you know, just as we were entering the theater that night, blasting from the stereo of a car driving by—“Like a Prayer.” There are no coincidences. It feels exciting, seeing a show there. So 1960s. So beatnik. Like I should be wearing a little black beret. Two times in one week, we were second row and dead center for a gay extravaganza. And I laughed and laughed and laughed. Cole Escola plays a fumbling, frustrated, nitwitted Mary Todd Lincoln, all cooped up in her gay husband’s White House and yearning for the days when she was a niche cabaret star. It was ridiculous, absurd, over the top—and human. Sweet, even. Never ironic, never mean. Sobbing into the pillows of her drunken-fainting couch, Mary whips around at one point and screams, “Have you ever had a GREAT day?!” I laughed but, just as sincerely, I could’ve cried. At work the next morning, Isaiah said, “Brian! Tell me, how was Oh, Mary!?” Seated on a rolling chair, I scooted closer in his direction, a one man Mrs. Marmelstein. “I don’t want to set you up with too high of expectations,” I said to him. “But it was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”

Austin’s parents were in town for the weekend and they wanted to come to the museum. Austin, his mom, his dad, they’ve all seen me lead a tour by now. This wasn’t anybody’s first time. And yet. Playing the part of the bright good boy for his parents, I’ll always feel that urge, even if I understand that the pressure is all mine. But really, I was just as anxious about Austin getting another opportunity, an even better opportunity to see what I can do. Hoping he’d be witness to just the right question spoken in just the right tone from the warmest-eyed person in the room, and that he’d marvel at how I soar. Watching me really say something, with heart and with knowledge, and all of it coming from a place as deep and profound as song. God laughs. My timing was all wrong and none of the visuals were in the right place and I was nervous. It wasn’t my best. It was bad. But the visitors were great. Granted, they all knew that he was my boyfriend and that they were his parents. I’d told them so. Imploring all these other visitors, after the introduction, “So, you all need to make me look really good, okay? And brilliant. Charming. Adorable, even.” But still. Not just any group of visitors would’ve been so generous.

At the proverbial finish line, holding the door open for everybody on their way out, an old man reached out to shake my hand—and give me a tip. He said, “Here, take this and get your buddy a bagel and some schmear.” My buddy! He might as well have kissed me right on the cheek, I swear. Earlier on in the tour, after I talked about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, this same old man, for all the group to hear, said, “My father—he was there. As a boy. He heard about the fire and went uptown and saw all those bodies. Lying there in the streets. Horrible, horrible.” It’s a story I’ve heard before, of course—you know that. But I promise I listened to him like it was my very first time. If this man’s father was alive in 1911, he’s probably been dead for a long time now. And when would this man have last had the chance to tell a story about him? To a group of perfect strangers? Has he ever had that chance? I’ll take him at his word. Because if he was able to bring back to life the memory of a man, of his father, of this person none of us would otherwise ever know, and if I’m still thinking about him—even now—then God, how couldn’t that be the truth.