He lives in a room within a house, a triple decker, that's floor is littered with used tube socks, no longer white, and the smashed butts of cigarettes and the preliminary ashes from them, and books splayed open and abandoned on tabletops, and a kitchenette with improper lighting and permanent rings of grime orbiting the burners of the stove. He lives on the top floor, alone, and sleeps in a single bed every night in unmatched sheets that smell of foot and when he talks about getting out he does not intend to get out of this, this current living situation, but more so his head, and even more so than that, his life, and the predicament of it.
When we talked about our dreams for our future selves I do not remember yours. Perhaps they were just this, just this cheerful squalor and the independence of having a sock-covered floor of your own and a space all yours to be depressed in. Or maybe it was something more: the published novel, the record contract, the commissioned artwork. I do not recall. I do not recall what we used to talk about, in those car rides with your fingers glued to the steering wheel, our legs fastened to the tan vinyl seats in the heat, furiously cranking down the manual windows and puttering along to some destination. But my memory in youth was photographic: I remember every detail of your physical being; the near-hairless chin, the sad eyes, the acne pimples, the skinny body with its articulated parts as if made of wood or metal.
When I look for you on the street, which is often, search strangers' faces to find yours within them, I am stuck on this old version of yourself, as I have no updated memory to hold onto. What has adulthood done to you? A crow's foot here, a defined worry line there; a squinting, hardy, distinguished quality characterized by a look of gravity and defeat. Maybe you're heavier now. And grayed, and fraying at the edges in that way I've always liked. Or maybe you look like the hope's been pulled right out from you, like a bone from surrounding skin, and you're slackened and listless. Maybe you're beautiful, more beautiful than I even remember, with that gorgeous shimmer of adolescence, as if you'd been pulled right off the vine with no chance to rot like the rest of us.
Are you happy?
This is my biggest question. Happy despite the squalor or because of it, happy because life is more than creature comforts and how many books you've read and comprehended, happier in that case than myself. Happy because dirty sheets are fine as long as there's someone to share in sleeping in them, and the dishes in the sink can't bother you if you're never home to see them, and the unpublished novels and uncommissioned masterpieces no longer matter because, baby, you've got love. And love is what floats you, gets you through, one day and then another, like footsteps light as water. Love becomes a constant instead of a variable, a tether pole to swing from and know you'll always bounce back.
Me? I walk brick-lined streets because this is Cambridge, and I make my way up the creaky staircases of old houses with greige carpeting and banisters painted cream and chipping, and wait in a room with Danish modern furniture and Aztec pillows and spider plants in the windows and wait for my woman to listen to my problems, one after another, heavy like footsteps. Afterwards, after I'm done being silently assessed and diagnosed, I bound down the steps again, back out onto the street, walk through Harvard Yard, watch the sparrows roll their wings in little piles of sand, puffing up clouds of dirt around them, watch the babies gurgling as they're pushed in their strollers with three wheels, watch the frisbees tossed and the coffee gulped from cups and politely tossed in receptacles, and I feel ridiculous. Ridiculous because I live in a world without squalor, one with trees and academic conversations about literature and problems that can be talked out and paid for, a currency all its own. And your problems are allowed to swing out from around you only so far before you're disconnected, pulled away from, tied only to yourself.
