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shades of grey
2005-05-21 @ 2:48 p.m.
part of the beauty, i always said, about dating people long distance is that there aren't remnants of them lurking around every corner when you break up. they're still there, from moments they spent in your bed, in your home, on your city streets, but they're not everywhere, not completely infused in every moment of your life. so i escaped that, you see, after i broke up with bp. and maybe it's different because i broke up with her, rather than the other way around. the relived moments though were mostly so many distances away, in new york and san francisco. so maybe i'm having, i've had, 3 and 4-year delayed reactions since moving out here. maybe it's because i wrote and read and re-read our story, my version, her version of moments together. but it's also that, for the first time since being with her, i rode the 22 fillmore, for example. here and now, riding it wasn't just the muni route to the mission. it was the unveiling of that long-ago canned swirl of the week i spent with her here, four years ago this month. riding to her lower pac heights apartment on unusually hot may days, wishing so much that i lived here. the corner of 17th and guerrero, too, is more than just an intersection. or, perhaps it's one of the major intersections of my life. it's the corner with the apartment with the stairs atop which i first saw her. the stairs atop which, cheesy and ridiculous as it sounds, that i swear if you could feel what slow motion or time stopping was really like this would be it. the moment we both wrote about. the moment i first noticed her. the moment which, as she wrote, she wished for all the fairytale world she could say the same. the bar on castro and the pizza by the slice place up the block; all these things and more are this landscape that, for me, are dripping and oozing, saturated with this story that never got to finish playing out. for her, this is long over. her pining or tortured remembering is about someone else now. if she's out at night kicking things, it's not because of me. but for me, on moving here, it all came back, remembered in a way i think i hadn't in so long. the tricks or refractions that revisiting a proximity to a memory plays. the strange thing about my sometimes near-obsession with the fact that the story didn't finish being written is that maybe it did, in a way, and maybe it continues. the way a world filled with shades of grey does. when two people are maybe drawn to each other, or at least one person is drawn to the other, or however it works, but they choose after all these years, to keep knowing each other, and to keep loving each other in some capacity.
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