It Started In a Pizza Place in 1994

You gain weight eating at different restaurants. This is what you do when you are in love. You eat and gaze and joke and make delighted hmmm and groans. You don’t spend time dissecting philosophical riddles in your head. You don’t tend to shower more.  You get a little filthy. You don’t finger nudie poker cards while hunched over the toilet with a cigar in your mouth.  You don’t get on top of the errands. Responsibilities loosen their grip on your neck. Your shoulders relax and you find yourself forgiving a lot of older yous. You don’t ruminate on what Stephen King had or didn’t have for dinner.

You tidy up the attic that houses your resentments. You finally take a lot of boxed up heartbreaks to the dump, hoisting them over your shoulder, before launching them in with an involuntarily breathy, grunt. You watch the slow movie that has been intimidating you for years, even though you knew you’d love it. You are grateful for what your body can feel. You get turned on from breathing sounds. You remember the face of a kind person who sold you a sandwich three months ago. You don’t need to drugs. You are on one or are one. You don’t pay attention to billboards. You are not clever or hip and you accept it. Your body insists its one with the world. You don’t feel like a pervert. You feel natural.

You decide to look at art and it touches you in a part of you you thought was sawed off.  Your fears throw their hands in the air and watch you play on the playground with their arms crossed like grumpy nuns.  You feel peaceful, allowing the scenery around you to change is enough. Your heart is able to rest with this partner. It yawns and dreams.

Time goes to sleep, the past and future merge. You are running out of underwear. Your legs are unshaven.  You are not playing to the crowd. You feel like an organism with new potential. You surprise yourself with the insight being exchanged. These parcels of wisdom float silently between you and your partner like unspoken gifts that sometimes feel rude because of what they affirm. God is present and laughing and manically tweezing his bikini line as you are revealed to each other.  Eventually, you descend into the madness of one another. Your body adjusts to the temperature of their hottest, most sorrowful insides. Not that bad actually, you shrug.

You expose yourselves. It gets a little gritty after the stories of the past fall away and all thats left is objective evidence, the facts. The tarp over your above ground pool, which you regretted buying in the first place, is removed and inside, is a dead, endangered owl-the last one on the planet, in fact. Drowned by your wasteful neglect. All you can do is hope your partner doesn’t think you are an irresponsible pool owner who is clearly incapable of loving them. Thank god, they shrug.

When did it start?

In 1994, I was at a pizza place watching men throw the dough in the air. I was on a bar stool behind glass. I was four. (It wasn’t a Looking For Mr. Goodbar scenario, my family was close by in a booth.)  It was in Pacific Palisades. A shiny, sunny place that smelled of new concrete and mall fountain water. I sat down next to a boy doing the same thing, watching the dough go up and down.  His name was Bach. I immediately fell in love when he showed me his beaded necklace around his neck that spelled out his name “BACH”. We sat and watched the pizza fly in the air. I was too young for nerves. “Bach, will you be my Valentine?”

Later, my mom was helping me wash my hands in the bathroom when we ran into a friend from my preschool. I forget her name, but she had put her dress over her head and was just standing there with her face pressing against the skirt of it trying to look scary. We were on entirely different planets. Why do I remember this. I was in love.