Overwhelm.
By the time we left San Fransisco, I was terrified of rainstorms. Your cruelest words came back to me when thunder struck, sharp as though I had heard them. I hadn’t, only read: you couldn’t have talked to me like that. But I had nightmares that you did, and when it rained, the nightmares got worse. I truly believed the world would end, that our wall-sized windows would break, every shard slicing my head, cutting my face. I still missed you, still fantasized about us fucking, even in the midst of those dark apocalyptic imaginings, even from the depths of that fear.
In Georgia, life was hard, but the rain was soft. Hearing it outside my window while I worked calmed me down and restored my relationship to storms, my love for them. Now, in El Niño-wrecked Ohio, rain comes in monsoons, sudden, strong, and typically brief, but leaving a flood behind.
Does that sound like us?
Sometimes I feel ambitious and invincible. Sometimes, I want to stretch into a calm emptiness where nothing is asked of me. At work, I have an office with my name on it, and I miss San Fransisco so much I’ve decorated its walls with vintage-style postcards showing brightly painted views of the city. Golden Gate Bridge and the Ferry Building, luminous against the night sky, and the Castro Theatre. The last time I left San Fransisco, I cried because I needed more time.
The first year of my PhD felt like PhD-in-name-only. Second year ignites the real shit. I have two classes that are almost 4 hours long and they’re rooms of intimidating brilliance. In one, I’m the only American, in the other, the only American student. Fuck the bigots who run this country now: the intellect that will transform us comes here from elsewhere.
I’m going to Seattle in November. I haven’t been back in 12 years. I get to be a scholar on a business trip again, I’ve got funding and a presentation based on an accepted proposal and I’m going to talk about being part of the grassroots movement that made sure Neil Gaiman would never have another chance to victimize someone at a reading or convention. I’ll be on the panel called Testimony, Silence, and Authority: Narratives of Sexual Violence. Very different from my presentation last year, in San Fransisco, about the 2020 TV adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity starring Zoë Kravitz.
I’m less than 3 weeks away from my birthday. I try not to think about the one I spent with you and I never succeed. We really got it right that day. Almost nothing to do in the neighborhood that honors San Fransisco with the Full House house and we still got it right that day, the weather and the photographer and the sweet SF local driver and the park. The first time we finally stopped dreaming and acted you said, “It makes sense that it happened right after your birthday.”
We had a way of making sense back then.
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Then came November, which was doom in 2022, though not the doom to come. ChatGPT hadn’t yet been foisted on us and we truly believed America had escaped the disasters of 2016. We didn’t realize it would come raging back in 2024, so much worse.
The first time I went back to San Francisco after we left, in March of 2024 — for another conference, Humanities scholar don’t fuck around — I stomped out of Peet’s at 7 in the morning because our cozy wood-paneled haunt had become a bright yellow nightmare. Didn’t matter how much I needed coffee, I would wait until SFSU’s student center opened and get it there. “Oh, are you a professor or something?” the sweet barista asked me when she saw my conference badge.
The answer is, proto. On my way. Another 3 years. That sounds short.
Three years ago — no, four! — this time last year, I had known you for less than a month. Even though my body lit up for you right away, it would be another couple months before the real struggle, the one that had me asking you what I should do with these feelings, and Ian would tell me, later, that I should’ve asked him. Fair enough, or more fair than I deserved, depending.
I’ve confessed everything except those afternoons we spent just lying in bed together. What made my throat catch on those details? Was it the lies we told ourselves about how we weren’t doing anything there? By that time, desire was urgent enough that we couldn’t keep even a semblance of distance and maybe —
I don’t remember what my thought was, Ian just came in while I was writing this, remarked good-naturedly on my leaping 5 feet into the air from my desk chair and should I? Publish shit like this, I mean? I already do. Who reads my Medium, come on.
It’s not that I keep nothing private. It’s not that I would dynamite the life I’ve worked so hard to build, it’s not that there’s anything I want or I need that I don’t have in spades.
I don’t know how to describe the grief I still carry from the break. But here’s a concrete poem shaped like a rainfall
By an artist who shares your name but in French.
