Shelly Oria - New York 1, Tel Aviv 0

* * *

You don’t know who I’m talking about, but she will be blond. A year from now, you’ll be having an argument in a restaurant uptown. It will be about green olives — you keep forgetting she’s allergic — but it will be about fear. Her fear of losing you, her fear of me.

* * *

It’s possible that her blond hair is making her prone to excessive insecurity. You might want to look into that.

* * *

Except, honey, she’ll be right. It’s a scary thing, dating someone with a past like ours. You still had decades of marriage left in you when I asked you to cook only when you’re hungry.

* * *

I never meant to leave you, you know. I just woke up one morning having left you, and so I left you again, because what’s the sense in arguing with reality?

* * *

So, honey, run after her, would you? I know how you feel about running, I know all about your bad knee. Just listen. Forget about the check, silly. You can always go back the next day. And look around you — would they go out of business over two unpaid filets? So run. You never knew when to grab and when to let go, I’ve always had to tell you. And so I’m telling you now.

* * *

When you catch up to her — she’ll run like a woman who wants your hand to grab her shoulder from behind, which is to say slowly — lie. Express feelings you don’t yet feel, make promises you’re not sure you can keep. You are a truthful man, I know. But darling, in love, a lie makes a clearing for truth to come in.

* * *

I know you must find this confusing. I am confusing you. That was the problem, wasn’t it? I always confused you and you kept trying to follow me. I led us down some spiral roads, and when we reached the bottom we saw reflections of us looking frustrated and old. I would say, Please take responsibility for these people we don’t know; it hurts my eyes to look at them. And you’d say, I take full responsibility and I apologize and can I get you some eyedrops? You always wanted to get me eyedrops.

* * *

It may not appear this way, but what I’m doing is trying to climb back up that spiral road. Some days my muscles hurt but I keep going because I’m reading books that tell me to lean in to the pain. I lean in to my pain until I twitch, until I shake. Unfortunately, twitching and shaking are not things one can lean in to — I’ve tried. The outcome involves falling.

* * *

Your silence is asking me what I truly want — which is to say I am asking myself. That was my earlier point about reflections, but that’s not important now.

* * *

I want you to run after her. When you grab her shoulder from behind, I want you to pretend to be out of breath. It’s not hard, for God’s sake — just fake short, quick breaths and pull her close to your chest. I want you to promise her you’ll never forget about her olive allergy again. I want you to tell her your forgetfulness is not a sign of anything, and certainly has nothing to do with me. I want you to make up some bullshit story that explains your behavior. You know how your parents never remember what foods you dislike? You can work with that. She’ll believe anything, because she’ll want to. And I want you to make her believe. Hold her tight for a few minutes. It’ll be cold and windy, but darling, you really need to man up about winter. When she stops crying, I want you to kiss her. I want you to look into her eyes and say something horribly cliché like The past is in the past. My sense is she will not be the type sensitive to clichés. But say it like you mean it, honey, because what I’m telling you is that eventually you will. And throw my name in there when you say it. She needs to see that you can say my name without pain in your chest. Don’t let her see the pain in your chest.

* * *

But darling, wait. We held each other’s hands in hospital rooms, we laughed for three days once, we spoke complete sentences in unison. We loved through our twenties, and we turned thirty together, four years apart. And one warm September we invited two hundred and seventy people and promised all of them that we would love each other forever, and in return these people gave us money, and gifts.

* * *

So when she cooks that special meal and buys that sexy nightgown — I’ve mentioned she’s not bothered by clichés — and tells you she wants to have your baby, wait. Would you wait? Remember the song you recorded for me. Remember that drive up north on my birthday. Remember our first date, your grandmother’s old Beetle. So many hours we spent in cars, singing. Just wait.

* * *

Tell her now isn’t a good time. Tell her you don’t have enough money saved up yet. And tell her you’ll probably get there eventually — set a date to discuss babies again. Say, Let me get through this next round of fund-raising and then I’ll know more. Compliment her on the steak — because isn’t it nice to be with a meat eater, and isn’t it nice to be with someone who cooks — but stop eating when she shows you the nightgown. Pretend to have lost all interest in the food. I know you never lose interest in food, honey, but what I’m saying is sometimes it’s okay to pretend. So pretend. You’ll have a great night, you’ll see.

* * *

But call me the next day. Would you call me? Tell me she wants to start trying and I’ll say, Trying what. I can be thick when I want to avoid pain. Be gentle with me. Explain. I’ll ask what you want, how you feel. I’ll pretend that this is a conversation we can have. But at the end, right before we hang up, I’ll hold my breath and whisper, Wait. Would you hear me? Would you wait?

Kisses #1–3

I kiss you for the first time, and it starts to rain. You tell me it’s a sign of something, maybe good luck. We don’t have an umbrella, so we just stand there kissing, getting wet, and I think about what you said. The idea that the sky is talking to us makes me uncomfortable, but I don’t say that, and hug you instead. You mistake my hug for agreement, and let your face sink into my shoulder. The air smells clean.

* * *

The second time I kiss you is an attempt to comfort; you’ve just found out your cat died. I don’t like cats, but that would clearly be the wrong thing to say, so I think maybe a kiss could fill in for words. Your sadness makes your lips soft, too soft, and I feel like I’m shaping a kiss out of Play-Doh. You know the difference between passion and empathy, of course; you stop me, your left hand between our mouths. I walk away from you; this is noon and New York and the street is roaring. You are alone now with your distance, with your sorrow, with the memory of your dead cat.

* * *

I kiss you a third time, two weeks later, and it’s a good kiss — just the right balance of wetness and dryness, closeness and a sense of self. You are the reason this kiss is a success, this is your accomplishment. I am impressed, and decide to document every lip encounter between us from now until there is nothing more to document. This will be three years later, in an ice-cream parlor on Sixth Avenue, where you will kiss me with chocolate-chip cookie dough and finality, and I will let my ice cream drip all over my new tank top after you’ve gone, like in a bad movie.

* * *

For now, documenting helps me forget what I don’t yet know.

Kiss #17

I kiss you in a swimming pool. The lightness of my body in the water makes me feel inconsequential. I try to leave my frustration out of our kiss, but that’s the thing about kisses, isn’t it? You can never leave anything out.

* * *

The smell of chlorine stays in my skin for two days. I take multiple showers, because I don’t know how to passively wait for things to get better. You say that I’m crazy, that I’m imagining things, imagining the chlorine. I pretend the smell is gone before it really is.