I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be
Ordinarily, you feel far away from that boy staring at his feet. Did you consider the pain of losing touch with him entirely?
Glow in the dark stars like the ones plastered on your childhood bedroom ceiling descend from the fly tower above the crowd. Teen girls and boys are holding hands, laying down, staring up at the embroidered machinery—pockets of light from the Barcelona summer night peak through gaps in the closed arena roof. As the clouds pass the sun, the light moves, and a new group is spotlit celestially; they whisper and double over in laughter. Some are taking videos of themselves screaming the words: Another day pretending I’m older than I am / Another perfect moment that doesn’t feel like mine.
Others bawl and howl with anguish so genuine; you think: who here is old enough to be tired of the girl they are? Mascara runs, fringes stick to sweaty foreheads, shiny skirts shed tassels and glitter on the concrete steps between sections. Then you see the dreamers: four girls who gaze serenely at the artificial starry night. Around them is hysteria. Their favorite singer is on stage. Comrades scream and stomp their feet. And yet, these girls are serene. The tenderness. Even from afar, you can feel their bond. It was yours, too, once. The secrets they tell and keep, the promises they make and break. The dreamers do not know they will never feel like this again. Eventually, they will retire into the stands and ache for themselves and each other.
Some days earlier, this beach scene: an overpriced strawberry margarita sweating in the heat, the base of the plastic glass disappearing into the sand, a book with sand in between the pages like microscopic placeholders, the washed-out glare of the sun through dark-tinted aviators. Two girls are playing music from a small speaker, smoking rolled cigarettes, and sheltering their faces from the sun with their backpacks. You get lost in their gossip. Elena: she is not a good friend. Prickly, stand-offish, ‘weird’ with strangers. And can you believe how she treats her boyfriend? Like she’s the man. Like it’s her world. And he’s just living in it.
“Do you remember when we had gossip?” You say to Natalia.
“What do you mean?” She replies, raising her head from the towel on the sand for a beat.
“When we had drama to talk about.”
She lies back down, weary from a whole day of sun.
“We’ve already done that.”
You cannot tell if she means earlier on the trip, in those feverish first hours of a reunion, or if, in general, You Had Gossiped (past tense). It sent a pang: the idea that a certain kind of fun, which revolved around transforming nothing into something by pure force of will, just for the fun of it — was a past thing.
Woozy from the sun, you wade into the Mediterranean, not expecting it to be cold. It’s nothing like the Irish Sea, but the hair on the back of your neck stands up as you wade further in. On the shore are two boys, shifting their weight nervously from one foot to another. Their long, bronzed backs drink up the sun. Two girls stand a couple of feet away. They are not together, but they have noticed each other. The boys fidget, and the girls show off, tossing their golden hair and drawing patterns in the sand with their toes.
Did you ever have that feeling?
These are the games that straight people play with each other: there is always the pursued and the pursuer; it is expected and encouraged, performed often and without comment. You are always the bystander to this certain performance of romance. The ‘courtship’ of it all. Remember when it hurt. When you wanted to look openly, with the hope of someone looking back. How you perfected a studied gaze to your feet to anticipate the tilt of someone’s head away from your general direction, finding the exact moment to steal a glance.
The Didion quote: “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.”
You don’t understand people who are so crippled by nostalgia for one period of time that they can’t find adventure in the present.
Ordinarily, you feel far away from that boy staring at his feet.
Did you consider the pain of losing touch with him entirely?
You find St Antony in Catedral Del Mar. It occurs to you then that you owe him something. For all the prayers he answered — the patron saint of lost keys, wallets, and phones. How often had you enlisted him to locate your essentials in a blind panic? This is the Irish in you. It comes out in fits and spurts. Lately, you have said fewer prayers to St Antony. It is true that your trips now are frictionless. You are less frantic about seeing and doing everything. The impulse to rush down to the beach and stay there all day under the sun with a thin blanket, a speaker, rolled cigarettes, and no umbrella has disappeared. Please, god, where is the sunscreen?
Remember your last trip with Natalia? You rode bikes around Warsaw in Converse that were too small and gave you blisters. You’d never do that now. You’d say no, let’s wait until tomorrow when I’ve got better socks on.
Or how about when you boarded a train to Gdynia for a festival, and it rained so much that your favorite act was stopped short, and your clothes were sopping wet in the cold, windy night, spent at the station waiting for a train at first light?
You thought, trying to sleep in a curled-up ball on the marble floor of the train station beside your best friend: I am living my worst nightmare. You also thought: one day, I will be able to spring for an Uber. That day has passed, and the lack of friction is analgesic. But also, it blunts. Who were you with your ear pressed against the cold, spackled marble, shivering, feeling the wetness of your shoelaces soaking through to your feet, every inch of you drenched?
Were you better, then?
It was over for him on the Waterloo Bridge.
The London Eye winks suggestively; you ruffle your hair toward the wind so it falls nicely on one side. When you pause to admire St. Paul’s, his eyes are fixed on you. Perhaps because he is a local, none of this is beautiful to him.
But still.
From the walk to Soho House, you know he is yours if you want him.
He says this place is full of wannabes.
So why did you bring me here?
On his Hinge profile, he has Cambridge listed as his university. You learn he was only there for a year on a master's. He is starting to make sense.
He takes you to the rooftop. The heat lamps are on. People are huddled in small groups, talking quietly by the pool. There is a signature drink here: a tequila cocktail.
It tastes like a regular margarita.
It occurs to you all of a sudden that you are braver. Remember when a first date was like a root canal? Now, here you are, knowing exactly how this will go. He shows you something on his phone. You stroke his wrist with your index finger, eyes fixed on the screen, as though you have not just secured him for the evening at your hotel. You live for this feeling: the first touch that breaks the sound barrier.
Before you touched him, there was no guarantee.
And now.
Under the table, you stroke his knee with one, two, three fingers.
“Can we go?” You ask.
“How about one more?” He says.
You can tell he likes to be seen. So you dial it up, holding his gaze until he breaks. Taking his hand on the tabletop. Caressing his knuckles. He says you have addicting eyes. You know that, but you make him explain for keepsake. You hold hands on the road, waiting for an Uber. They fit well. His fingers are just long enough.
Remember E, how his fingers were stubby and spaced too close together?
The clasp was never right.
Later, with the lights off and the curtains wide open, you admire the full moon, supine, gazing over the top of his head. He is built differently than you. Slender and long. It just so happens that you fit well here, too. His head between your shoulder and collarbone. Your right leg between his. Your arm across his chest.
The moon is so bright that you are both speechless, spent, and hypnotized for a while.
“I wish you were here for longer.” He says quietly on an exhale.
After the show, you are surrounded by many people who love you. There are flowers, pints bought and overflowing, many hands squeezing your shoulders and saying how great it was. It passes by like all good things do—in a flash. There is a deep gratitude for the people who showed up. The friends from home who left work early, family friends who came to all your school plays, and your father so full of pride and Bulmers that he is mostly speechless. Some ancient hurt is at peaceful rest.
Why, then, did it keep occurring to you who was not there?
You chasten yourself. Smile. Take the flowers. Trade the bracelets. Balance the two pints. But there is smoke wafting out of the crater again. It started the week before. You waited for a text. That pathetic pining you thought you’d given up when things were finally severed. You knew the text wouldn’t come. She doesn’t know you anymore. You said: I release you of any obligation to me, and she bolted.
What could have been done differently?
Had you said this or expressed that, maybe she would be here.
The long summer night draws to a close. Blue descends on Southwark. You do not have a minute to be broken. The air cools down, two and a half pints in, and you are feeling good. Your cousin shows you a video she took of your father writing a text to your mother during the show. His meaty thumb stabs out:
“Its going beautifully he is a natural i am bursting with pride !!!” The camera pans to his face for a moment, lit by the glow of his phone screen, while you are on stage in the background. His eyes crease as the smile takes over.
This is enough; this is everything.
His shoulders, delicate and sharp, spread out like an angel under the steel bar.
You wonder: is someone loving you, and if not, may I have a turn?
The long crook of his nose.
You can find everything about him (and there isn’t much) online: his LinkedIn, some interviews from years ago in which he speaks in more thickly accented English than you hear now.
That sloping walk, just slightly caved in, with too-long arms.
A return to madness: you are obsessed with the idea of things not being over, even things that have not started. This pause is torturous, self-inflicted, nonsensical. Resolved by a simple question. Or even a casual: hello.
Your quads bulging out of green shorts. What’s it for, if not him?
To yearn is different than to want: there is some element of need, a hunger that cannot be satiated, the unanswered question, a heavy stone with the tiniest glimmer of gold foil sticking out underneath it. Magic you see but cannot feel.
The definition in your bicep.
There is a certain spot in front of the mirror next to the rack where if you sit when class starts, the setting sun casts a dramatic triangle of sunlight: your blue eyes burn in this heavenly yellow.
Was that him looking? The heavenly yellow blinds.
After class one day, you hear the hair dryer going. Somehow, he has showered and changed into his civilian clothes. You have two more classes: stretching and yoga. Usually, he joins, but clearly, he has other plans.
With his face too close to yours, he asks, “Is this too heavy?” His eyes are bluer than yours, even without the heavenly yellow. You look down and change the weights for him.
He tousels his hair, surveys his baggy jeans, tucks his white t-shirt in, and fiddles with the sleeves of a striped blue button-down. The fabric is creased. Is it linen, or is he lazy?
“For you,” he says with his baritone, pressing a pair of dumbbells into your chest.
He leaves to meet whoever it is, and you go to yoga, disturbed and bleeding from a gunshot wound.
The other day you walked in to get a towel, and he was there, with his back to you: shirtless, the sweat gleaming on his back, covered with moles: something you didn’t expect and don’t dislike. You are only able to look for a second before abruptly turning away.
The gall of him to go elsewhere without asking first.
His moles haunt the rest of your class. A small brown dot in the peripheral vision punctuates every press, squat, and deadlift. You want to learn his back like a map and plot the distance between those points.
The betrayal of it all.
One summer day a few years ago, an astrologer told you that your birth chart was particularly covetous. Something about Venus and Beauty.
She said: “Don’t be ashamed of wanting a beautiful life.”
You took that as permission to continue functioning like a magpie, collecting trinkets, being extravagant here and there, but more importantly: savoring the sublime hues of a slipping sunset, rolling it around on your tongue, tasting, locking it away in memory, feeling grateful and divine at each day’s end.
You find beauty everywhere. Most recently in Yonfan’s 1993 film, Bugis Street. The quiet elegance of a top-floor room in a Peranakan shophouse, with creamy shutters and red-tiled floors. Flowerpots overflowing with rainwater, soil just a soggy dream, spilling over flouted ceramic rings. The lush, tropical green walk: was it near Woking Road, where the Green Corridor is now? Look how the Angsana bends over the hill, how those water-logged branches waver and threaten in the monsoon wind.
There is something holy about these transitions.
The way the camera sucks up the old Singapore and spits it right back out. You cannot eject the simple image of a fat, juicy snail gliding across rain-slicked asphalt, the distant glow of a street lamp shining in the left corner.
Here is home.
Commencing the yearly re-reading of Magical Thinking has brought you back to yourself. Didion’s intellect cows you. Makes you sit up straighter in your chair, giving your fingers an itchy, must-write feeling. She is steely, cold almost, matter-of-fact while recounting her grief for her husband, John Dunne. She endeavors to understand it with the cool eye of a journalist: read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. The prose is sometimes clinical, reflecting her futile efforts to itemize her loss. Dunne died of a sudden, massive coronary incident while they sat down to dinner.
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
The social worker at the hospital calls her a ‘cool customer’ on account of her non-reaction to learning of his death, the orderly way she collected his belongings and stepped into a taxi to go home and face the blood on the dining room floor.
At home, surveying the tableau of her entire life’s evaporation, she writes: I wondered what an uncool customer would be allowed to do. Break down? Require sedation? Scream?
She orders the autopsy and pours over its findings; she replays the cardiologist visits her husband had in the years prior. She remembers how, in the back of a car on the way home from a party, he told her that his doctor called his pacemaker the widow maker.
Despite her attempts to ‘work up’ the grief: it remains unbearable, her efforts to stave it off work only half the time. While in Los Angeles, taking care of her daughter who, before her father died, had been hospitalized with a serious infection and placed into a medically induced coma, Didion identifies ‘the vortex effect.’ This is a corporeal prompt that sucks her into the underworld of the past. She refers to it as getting sideswiped. She avoids all the familiar routes of her familial history there: the highway that led to their favorite home, neighborhoods where she called on friends of her daughter’s, and eateries they haunted in decades gone by. But she can never account for the element of surprise. Her routes to the hospital from the hotel are meticulously planned. To avoid any sideswiping. And yet, memories that were buried until grief swallowed her whole force their way through the ‘safe zone’: on this route that meant nothing to her, she saw a movie theater that John took her to before they got married. Despite her removal, the emotional callouses she developed over the years, this special disaffection she was known for: the odd line, here or there all these years later since you first read it, still wallops with feeling: I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.
You picture her, frail and bird-like, clutching the steering wheel with blotchy eyes hidden behind her dark glasses. Part of what draws you to this version of Didion, driven to the brink of her own humanity, is what it took for her to get there—to lose her husband and confront meaninglessness. More often than not, you move through the world as a ‘cool customer,’ too, focused on what can be controlled.
Remember this: a cold morning in January by the pier in Dun Laoghaire. It was too cold to run, but you ran anyway, chasing the rare, lazy blue sky. You pause at your halfway mark for a coffee from the truck parked on the mouth of the pier. Double shot espresso, no milk, one ice cube. While you are stretching, on the other side of the road, there is Granddad. He looks naked and gormless: zipping through the foot traffic with his walker, so unsteady and unlike himself that you freeze mid-stretch.
He doesn’t see you.
Granny said he should not go out like this after his fall. But he cannot be stopped. The dementia took everything: his ability to read, write, and remember his name. It won’t take his morning walks or the pub, though. No matter how lost he gets, somehow, he finds his way there.
If you approached him, he would get confused.
Your Granddad, the man who fed you melon and played pizza shop for hours, came to Singapore and swam in the pool, showed you how and why to be gentle, kind, and good for free. Now, an old man hurtling towards nothing.
At dinner a few nights ago, he looked at you fondly. Staring, almost. He was drinking his non-alcoholic Guinness before he copped on and demanded a real one.
He used to print out your writing and keep it in his ‘library,’ the room where he watched television and read the news. I am so proud of you, he always said. When his hearing went, you shouted back in his ear: I love you.
When you cleared the dinner table, he touched your elbow and gestured for you to sit down. You pulled your chair close to his, ready to answer his question.
“Do I know you from somewhere?” He said with a smile. “You look so familiar.”
The rare, lazy blue morning darkens.
You let him pass.
You get on with your run.
Gorgeous writing, Zack. Isn’t it strange as time goes by, that you check in on your memories to reassure yourself that you were there then and that you’re here now? And what must that be like when you can no longer access those memories anymore? Strange how the main players in those memories might not share them anymore, or never did in the first place? I think about this all the time, just never in such an eloquent voice as yours💚💚💚
Immaculate writing, as always! The memory of your grandad at the pier is so affecting. I will see you both there on my mental returns to Dun Laoghaire.
I once sat on a bench by the bandstand, mourning all I had lost following my move to study abroad. I ate takeaway chips (because that was all I could afford), and glared bitterly at the seagulls through fearful tears and drizzle.
I returned after my graduation, wearing a pink sundress and straw wide brimmed hat. I bought a 99 and strolled aimlessly in the rare sunshine. People smiled at me. I sketched the harbour all afternoon.
Life comes full circle. We savour the retracing of steps, wholly changed and aching for all that was.
It meant so much to me to meet both you and Madeline outside the Unicorn Theatre this summer. It made me feel like I was a real person who is part of this world, and not just an anonymous creature, stuck in the past, experiencing life through my phone or vicariously through the lyrics of a billionaire pop star.
It truly was enough.