But I can’t just sit here refreshing the numbers and reading about curing chads because I’m a University instructor who’s slapstick-behind on grading and I’m taking demanding PhD courses and the week is not over yet. Last week was the longest week of my life and this week might be the most unpredictable.

I was going to tell you, speaking of numbers, how many agents have rejected my manuscript since I started querying in May, but I’m not going to go through my spread sheet and count, just understand that it’s dozens plural. There are, technically, presses I’m still waiting to hear back from, but that’s such a drawn out if that it’s only waiting in the sense that I try not to think about it and it’s actually been so damn long now that I mostly succeed.

I read published novels and have to admit with a sigh that I haven’t done this, and that no amount of practice will render me capable of this, and that even more pressingly I’m an essayist. I read memoir, and as much as I’m loathe to admit it, I read autofiction and speculate about which parts actually happened. (I know. You’re not supposed to do that.)

When I write shit I’m proud of, it’s about what happened to me, or what a lot of people are thinking about, and what questions we can ask about being alive based on these events and ideas. When I read, I seek out authors who want to lay bare what happened. Entwined, Alex Alberto’s memoir-in-essays about polyamory, or Sarah Hepola’s The Only Thing There Is to Want, a novelistically structured memoir about the three great loves of her life. Yes, I love reading about other people’s romantic lives, and if you know me at all you’re likely aware that I love making people read about mine.

I’m not saying that a novel can’t get under my skin and invigorate me for days or even weeks — I have many favorites that have been doing so for years. But there’s a different feeling I come away with when I feel like I know someone intimately. There’s a different feeling I come away with, too, when someone likes my fiction writing versus connecting with my personal essays.

All this to say that maybe it’s time to give up on the manuscript I’ve now been drafting and redrafting for 8 years. I grew as a writer, no doubt about that, and I created characters that remain important to me, but my readers’ favorite character was never mine and maybe that says something about what I’m not quite inclined to do, what I can’t reach.

When I read fantastic nonfiction I think, Oh yes, that, not “I can never do this.”

I last revised that manuscript over half a year ago. Before that, I rewrote the first pages in November, not even being able to remember how long it had been. The fact is, maybe, that for me to see this book through to true publication-readiness I might have had to be living a different life, which means I would’ve been drawn to different ways of being than what I’m currently being which means I would have had to not be me.

The thought of walking away hurts. I hate discovering new kinds of grief. But maybe, well, I don’t know.

And I’ll leave that here, uncertain.

The moon is so fucking bright right now it looks almost fake through my blinds, have I forgotten what moonlight can do? Taking walks at night with you was an antidepressant. I miss the SFSU campus, those eucalyptus trees, I’m keeping my head above water but there have been so many moments when I’ve been depressed and thought “I miss being depressed in San Francisco.” Not the severe moments, not the self-loathing and the complete inability to get out of bed, but the quieter depression, the one that kept me at the gym for 3 hours at a stretch and or pushed me to see Puss in Boots at the theater, the one that had me watching all 6 Scream movies back-to-back and was probably a factor in how hard I cried when we lost a character in Scream 6 that we’d met half an hour before. I ran into your former roommate once during that time and every. word. we exchanged. was a stab in my chest or a stab in my ribs even though he’s one of the warmest and sweetest people I’ve ever met, hence my genuine desire to have the conversation even though the moment he turned around the tears I had been barely holding in flowed out.

I’ve had a weird relationship to crying of late, and maybe I miss that too. In San Francisco my relationship to crying was straightforward. After I broke with you I was simply doing it all the time. Walking past Lush and during previews for John Wick 4 and one time on the bus in the Castro when I went past Little Orphan Andy’s where we arguably had our first date. Cried when Ian sat on my bean bag in the living room and said, “This feels like it’s gotten thin, how? Do you even use it that much?”

“For a while there I did,” I said, and turned away to cry in the hallway, because in SF we had a hallway. But this place is lovely, small but large enough, I have my office, which means we’ve got two bedrooms, and birds have made their homes in two separate spaces outside my window which means we’re often hearing bird-stories in bird-language as their bird-dramas play out, and the wings flap so closely it’s like they’re next to my ear, but who can mind?

In addition to all that you actually are and all we actually were or could be, you are the incarnate of everything daily life is currently not and that is out of your control because you were born where you were born (as we are) but when I told you that you would always be synonymous with California for me I could not know the implications, not then.

And if someone told me in the summer of 2023, “You will miss California dreadfully. You’ll miss it like you missed New Orleans when you lived in San Francisco, you’ll miss it like you missed Albuquerque when you moved to Santa Fe, you’ll miss it like you miss every formative haunt that’s no longer there, you will miss it so much you’ll contrive ways to go back. You’ll go back twice in two years, and both times you’ll be loathe to leave,” I don’t know what I would’ve said.

Something along the lines of, “But I have to get out of here,” which is true, and what an epic trip across America came after.

There is a villain in You Can See Everything who lives in Austin, Texas, like I used to. Iowa City to Austin, that was epic too, and the moon made such memorable and uniquely lovely appearances that I still remember them all these years later.

Elizabeth Holmes is a terrifying and masterful manipulator but I still can’t help but wonder if she misses California. She must miss the ocean, she must miss a sense of possibility. I learned from the documentary that there are no clocks in prison and visitors can’t bring watches, so she won’t be counting the hours backwards, the way I instinctively do whenever I look at a clock.

Right now, for instance, it’s 9:43 where I’m at and I immediately think, “Wow, 6:43 where you are, Saturday night has barely begun.”

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.

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.

August 1st, said the scholarly editors, back when that seemed like a long time ago. I told myself “Don’t think that’s forever from now, it isn’t,” and I’ve barely read one of their sources, and when they asked how I’m going beyond soft psycholinguistics I thought, “I’m…not…sure?”

Thunderstorms, wildfires, heatwaves. Mental breakdowns, cagey colleagues, a novel starring a predator I’m sure was the reason I leapt out of the MFA Program from Hell and another novel wherein my father makes such a startlingly explicit appearance that I start crying at an unexpected paragraph, that’s my dad. (Yes, the author knew him well, they even dated when they were young.)

A hawk perched on a tree outside our open kitchen window, turned to face us, and squawked so petulantly he ceased to look regal. Not sure what the issue was but at least he was adorable, unlike the haters who stormed my comment section because they thought I had injured Taylor Swift and her fans, a group of people who are in no danger of coming to harm by me.

So don’t you see that I can’t adhere to deadlines? I’ve got hordes coming at me and storms coming at me and wildfire smoke seeking out my lungs and mental health issues on overdrive, and I’ve got novels to read that have dramatic impacts on my actual life and I’ve got…

Two more books in a trilogy to finish writing…and when else…will I have…the time?

I haven’t even gotten my non-utilitarian To-Do list crossed off, I haven’t gotten a necessary haircut or new tattoo or new piercings.

So I wake up every morning and bun my hair because there’s now an absurd amount of it and it’s too thick on my shoulders and my neck for this sweltering humid mock-New-Orleans summer in Ohio.

And a publisher said, Beautiful book, it stayed with me, but we can’t sell it. And an agent said, “You’re a great writer, keep me on your radar, but I’m not one for this.”

And I’m still waiting for the rest of them, the publishers, the agents, the keepers of the gates I feel ready to storm.

And I have to cut myself off here before I get any more indulgent.

Read a novel that had my dad in it and I wasn’t expecting him so I cried — there are my aunts, the five sisters, and that was his father, the one who ran a shipping business for twenty-five years, died early, left it to his son, my dad, who never wanted it, who was never cut out for such things, and I thought I’d been on alert for him because the author grew up with my father but there’s a difference between knowing something could be true and seeing it right there, in the sentences of a reputably published book, and prior to that I’d read a book about a predator in academia and I was sure I knew him, and I’m still sure I knew him, and I won’t say he’s THE reason why I left the MFA program but was he a big one? Hell yes.

Wish I could say the predator was a hack, but he’s not, fucker can write a good book and give solid advice. He’s retired now, I’m told, was “strongly encouraged” to be so. What am I allowed to make public here? No idea, but this isn’t my newsletter, no one reads my Medium, I’ll tell you any part of that story, its frustrations and its despairs and how it led me to move states yet again, but I don’t, I can’t, miss Georgia.

Everyone who said they would never had kids had kids, everyone who said they dreamed of parenting someday did not.

Every friendship that we thought would last forever broke. Every tie we thought bound us to existence cut. But we’re all still here and that’s something. We can live without each other, it turns out.

My dad should’ve grown old but he didn’t. I thought I was a writer then realized I wanted to get a PhD and once I was out of an MFA program I could write again. I thought I was someone who could never, under any circumstances, be unfaithful to my committed partner, but I’m not. The circumstances came and they swept me away for a year, then a few more months, then another tie cut but not cut. Because I can’t handle one more muscle-fiber shredded and I will not wholly let you go unless you tell me I have to.

I didn’t think I could teach college but I can. I didn’t think I would get passionate about working out but I am. And since I didn’t move to LA after college the way several of my theater-friends did, I thought I wouldn’t have a relationship to California beyond the books I read and the music I love but I do. And I always will.

Someone I thought would always love me decided he couldn’t love me anymore, couldn’t trust me, and I’ll never understand why. When I was one of America’s youth I thought we would always understand love.

It’s both stronger and more fragile than I used to believe.

For months after that November heartbreak I couldn’t look at a sunset without crying. I don’t remember when or where I was when I finally took in those pink orange violet swaths and realized my chest had stayed whole. It cracked apart so many times before I left San Francisco, but even the handful of shards you cut on purpose didn’t keep me from waking up in the middle of the night sobbing I miss you into my pillow. Unfathomable cascades of tears shed in those days, all for you, all for what we weren’t and what we had been and what I’d still hoped we could be. I don’t know what you thought my life was then: there were cocktails with authors in New Orleans, yes, and there were several unforgettable nights out and more than a few small-but-meaningful publishing triumphs, but you didn’t think I could bleed alongside all that?

I cried when I passed my favorite lingerie shop in the French Quarter, cried when I passed Lush, cried the first time I walked into the cafe at the Georgia campus library and saw cookie dough ice cream in the dessert case, cried when Ian sat on my bean bag — which he never does because he has his own — and said, “This feels like it’s gotten thin. How? Do you even sit on it that much?” I said, “For a while there I did,” and turned away so he couldn’t see the tears I quickly learned how to control.

Oh, and once I ran into your former roommate and felt like I was being stabbed in several body parts throughout the conversation but as you know he’s the sweetest guy so it’s not that I didn’t want to talk to him but —

I’ve been back to San Francisco twice. The first time I stayed in the Visiting Scholar lodgings on campus and it was more jet lag than willpower that kept me from letting you know I was there. I talked about you all fucking weekend with literally anyone who would listen and they hung on my every word about us and it all felt startlingly appropriate even though it was a professional conference. Arts and Humanities people, you know!

The second time I went back to SF for a different-and-better-known conference I didn’t say one damn word to a soul about you. Figures, then, doesn’t it, that when I’m reeling from the weekend for a thousand different reasons and I get unexpectedly hit on at the luxurious hotel bar and Wellbutrin has rendered my system such that one whiskey-soaked cherry fed to me off a toothpick has my heart overlight and my vision blurry I tell a drunk couple how I feel about you and I don’t tell them under what circumstances we were ever involved. They encourage me to contact you, they tell me I have nothing to lose. I’m well aware that I’ve left out details but I take their advice anyway because it’s the advice I wanted.

Before you write me back, knowing and even-keeled and generous, I fall asleep, and I wake up to your words at 4:25 in the morning, answer you and fall back asleep. I settle back into the life I have now when I get home from the airport. But now I can’t remember where I am and can barely keep track of where all I’ve lived. I remember my students in Georgia and I remember our sumptuous gym. Everything else I’ve blocked out because fuck that place fuck that program fuck those profs fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I’d have called it all a waste of money but I’d thankfully been paid to be there. (Not enough, of course. The Campus Workers Union won after I left and they raised the stipends for the first time in 15 years.)

When I wrote essays on the road from SF to Georgia I was writing as someone who soon wouldn’t need you and I had no way of knowing that my life in that program would shatter so quickly, so loudly, so hopelessly that I would need you as much as I ever did in the days that I lived for your knock on my door in the morning. Fuck. That. Place. It’s a sexual-harassment-enabling staff-insulting punishment of a program and I’ll try not to end this by saying that the hardest part was not falling into you at the end of any of it, not hearing you say “come here, come here” and calming me down in a way no one else can. I had my first-ever panic attack outside of our former Department Chair’s office. My students got me through that year and they let me know that I also helped them.

All this I can think about because I love where I’m at right now, not the region per se, but the life. I didn’t know I had arrived so bruised until I started healing. One thing you will never know is what it feels like to lose you. Then there’s everything else, the crazy shit I avoid writing about, what my love for you so often stands in for because fuck it, you’re hot, thinking about you still gets me the way thinking about you always gets me and nothing that you do or don’t do or say or don’t say or fear or insist or deny or declare will change that. Sometimes I wish it could but there is zero logic in operation when it comes to me and you.

And so the summer goes on its summer kind of way and the fireflies flicker outside and the rain pours and we keep the windows open. I miss the SFSU campus, ideal for taking walks at night, but Ian and I listen to music on our living room speakers, discover new artists, talk about where we’re going to live after this, though he’ll be in grad school in a different department and we have at least 2 more years here. I go to therapy, I work out, I think about walking downtown to see a movie but haven’t, I wait to hear back from agents, from publishers, I go back and fourth between writing legitimate drafts and writing indulgently on AO3. Sometimes Ian cooks breakfast and dinner, sometimes we order Chinese, I read for love and I read for research and occasionally I read for an unwitting education. We talk about people Ian used to know and deduce sociologically whatever we can and it’s a somewhat uneven conversation because the only person whose life I don’t know that I burn to find out about is yours. You’re elusive.

We, Ian and I, have rediscovered our night owl habits, the kind our rhythms would naturally slide into if we didn’t have jobs, which as it happens we don’t for the summer. I think about the time you said you were up until 5 in the morning because you didn’t want to stop reading my book. I can make a case for a thousand different moments but surely I fell in love with you then.

And yet love is a bigger and surer and more possible force than I knew. A student of mine wrote, “I truly believe there is one person out there for everyone,” and of course I thought, what if there are several, all vital, and what if it’s possible to live that love as some kind of boundless-but-not-boundary-less multifaceted —

Well.

Still figuring that one out.

Why write something like this for an audience? Do I only dare because I’m convinced I’ve never built an audience here?

The sun sets for you now three hours later than the sun sets for me, and I have no way of knowing what you remember.

But there was a night in November 2022 that, unfettered, unworried, unselfconscious, I wrote details, not anything that could identify you but that could bring other people there. On the dates that weren’t supposed to be dates. Into the kisses we rationalized until they consumed life. I had forgotten about that Notes app freewrite, the one that wasn’t supposed to leave Pamela Des Barres’ informal workshop over Zoom.

A submission call came for “your darlings,” the one every writer tells you to kill, the scraps, the late-night releases, the pieces you wouldn’t add to a novel or place in a memoir. I didn’t know my chances but I sent the editor the words that were supposed to bring everyone to you (without specifying that it was you). She said “Beautiful piece,” and it’ll be in the next issue, and suddenly, I’m terrified.

What would you say if you read it? If you knew other people would read it? Two things that tend to anger me about this mag:

1. I don’t get paid to publish in it
2. The issues are behind a subscription paywall

Now, temporarily, I’m glad both tenets are true. I’m not making money off your pain and the audience is much smaller than it might otherwise be. Apparently there are more than 2,700 subscribers, but details. Do they read every issue? Will they all read my work? You have one friend who’s a fan of the mag’s editor’s books, but you didn’t know that when I first mentioned the author and I have no idea if they’re a subscriber and there’s no way, I made sure of it, that anyone would recognize you.

Whether they would put two and two together — if they cared to — would depend on how much you’ve told them about me, about us. If they knew we lived in San Francisco, if they knew the neighborhood, if you ever called anyone giddy about one of our many perfect nights out — the way I would have called my friends if Ian wasn’t home every second that I was (because every second that he wasn’t home I was with you).

I guess I assumed you and I would write about each other. I never had to face the possibility that I might not like who your pages make me out to be. You’re no memoirist but.

You will likely never see this piece because I don’t think I’ll post it on Substack or here the way I’ve done in the past with my paywalled work. If you did read it and it made you feel anything at all I would want you to tell me. If you read it and it made you feel anything at all I would be terrified if you’d tell me.

Without unfathomable love, there would be no failed quests to find words for us. For you. For the moments that simultaneously feel like they’re happening now and like they had to be decades ago.

(By the way, I never meant to assume that you do read my Substack, I lost you as a subscriber years ago. And if you’d seen these messages in a digital amorphous bottle, I doubt you could resist letting me know. I’d tell you I read it, if you shared my audacity, which, as far as I can tell, you don’t.)

(Is that the kind of thing that can change?)

Which leads me to a question for you: if you follow this page, can you tell me why? I’ve always been a passionate reader of confessional writing, but I’ve never been able to determine if my own approach to the form is relatable or indulgent, the triumph of a marginalized voice fearlessly expressing or the vociferousness of just not keeping shit to myself.

The “Should I delete my Medium page?” question came on the heels of a night spent perusing my own archives, wondering if these aspects of my past and present emotional life are a worthy contribution or a demand on an audience.

Any thoughts would be deeply appreciated!

Here’s what happened that night: I’d never been hit on at a luxurious hotel bar and I was, bit a whisky-soaked cherry off a suggestively offered toothpick and had to mention my relationship etc. you know how it goes (except you don’t, because you were the one and the only one I was on the brink of ever throwing over my life for, blasting through it like a tunnel being dynamited into a mountain), and so, in my tipsy sleep-obliterated high-off-a-successful-talk daze, I thought, If I were going to risk regrets tonight (“Here’s to good cocktails and bad decisions!” proclaims an ad for the bar in the elevator) it would be with you. Where are you tonight, what are you doing, who are you with, and do you still wonder if we —

Anyway, I wrote to you, intending to leave it in my Drafts folder with every other email I’ve never intended to send you, dozens total. But I typed your name into the Send box (which I haven’t done with any of the others), and by the time I had been to the Yemeni cafe where you and I used to write, where you took me for my birthday to enjoy the best pastries in the city, what a relief that the place was packed, that there were no seats available, no room for flashbacks about our table, and so I sipped my 9:30pm spiced coffee drank with the 3 Indian engineers who’d offered me a seat at their table and wanted to know about the conference and sounded impressed by my unfolding PhD in Rhetoric and they told me that yes they work in AI and no it cannot do anything the CEO’s want you to believe it can do, I mentioned the narrative that so many are clinging to even in education and one replied, “there is so much money being poured into that narrative,” and then we talked everything, I was a scholar again, relieved that there were too many people in this cafe to remember where I sat with you, wrote with you, where we were when you guided me through writing the scnene I’d been scared to write because I thought my family would appear and come after me and take my life away (“Here’s what will actually happen,” you said, in a way that didn’t make me feel crazy at all). By the time I was walking back in a surprisingly warm night on the way to my hotel I was primed to go after what I wanted. I was starting to feel like I was already dreaming, but I slid into the couchiest chair at the bar anyway. When I told the couple, “If I go up to my room and stay there alone, I’ll send an email I shouldn’t send,” the male counterpart said, with bravado befitting an epic of old, “If it’s from your heart, it can’t be wrong.”

But it can, I wanted to say, but didn’t want to say, and didn’t say, and the woman backed him up, don’t I want to know? Obviously I want to know what would happen, what you’d say if you knew I was here.

So I sent it around midnight, went up to my room, and at 4 in the morning I woke up and looked at my phone and you had shocked me with your response: Are you happy with how things are for you right now?

Do you care that much? I’m not sure if I ever really knew you cared that much.

I answered, and without saying, Sarah, what the fuck are you doing, you asked me, compassionately, what the fuck I was doing.

Absolutely nothing I could justify. I’m lying in a king-sized bed near a reasonably deep bathtub and I leave in the morning, we could have tonight if you wanted it. You didn’t tell me if you did or if you didn’t. You simply asked for the what and the why. You knew I didn’t have either. Hunger for you just surges up like one of those Beach Hazard waves I’ve been warned about all week.

I have no idea when you got so clear-eyed or even-keeled. For a wild split second I wonder if loving me guided you to this kind of heart, if maybe all those things I said that I thought you’d never listen to seeped in after all. I wouldn’t assume my own importance as a matter of course, but no one has paid more attention to my words than you. You said you weren’t sure what being together would do for either of us except complicate things further.

You were right and I told you so and that was that, I suppose, except it wasn’t, not exactly, because there is also this, and maybe, because of what we can’t seal or investigate or ever know for sure, there will always be something.