Love and Lemons

“You love love,” my friend said, as if to quell the bourbon-addled tears soaking my cheeks. It felt more like an apology than acknowledgment as we stood on the sidewalk waving goodbye to the man who I desperately wanted to come home with me. 

There’s a folder on my desktop titled Grand Ideas and it’s mostly hasty half-written poetry in catharsis, date plans, dreams I’ve had, some I haven’t, and notes on inconsequential lulls of time that give me pause, that most would remark as routine. 

Almost every song I listen to, I play at least three times, louder with each revolution, a hazy rumble in my body. That impulse to feel compelled me to decorate a man’s bedroom wall with Christmas lights and hang glittery streamers from the ceiling fan to watch the Northern Lights. It’s why I discern infinitesimal moments with acute tenderness, and they flood notebooks.

And in this case, I wrapped a copy of Norwegian Wood and Tropic of Cancer in Japanese cherry blossom gift wrap and timidly handed them to my coworker in the parking garage days before like a soft-soap appeal for closeness. 

“I don’t want you to really like me,” he said as he readjusted in the tousled bed linen draped loosely over his torso. 

A morsel of tungsten light fevered from the window. Softwood kindling for a rudimentary flame tattoo on his back, suddenly ablaze as he turned away from me. 

“What?” I said, dazed. 

We had just fucked. It would have felt like the start to some innocent pillow talk if his voice didn’t sound so pronounced, so decisive.

“I don’t want you to really like me,” punctuating “really” this time like a wound.

I suddenly remembered the familiarity of the phrase. I professed this specific terminology to a bar regular who trades perfume and lotion samples for already discounted glasses of Veuve Rose, almost as if to stifle the workplace gossip, not stopping to think that I might have also stoked it. 

  Her malodourous creamy vanilla and emetic sour stench were suddenly fragrant in his bedroom, and now, I was nauseous. 

In the beginning, with sanguine wide eyes, he asked me if everyone I met fell in love with me. 

“Yes,” I remember saying plainly. 

“But with how they see me. Not who I really am.” 

He nodded then, like he understood. Now, his body estranged with undressed detachment, I understood. 

I drove home listening to his favorite song.

I had just caught my breath on the coast, it seemed. A year had elapsed since I first filtered all my desire into making a home of Los Angeles. 

During that time, a relationship with a long-distance boyfriend dissolved after two years of emotional dependency, and while we toiled arduously to cultivate a life together, I yielded to the melancholy of past lives, mourning the person I could have been. 

Sometimes it seemed like someday didn’t matter, and the grief was palpable. Despite my ache and our glaring incompatibility, I really loved him too. 

He accompanied me while I relocated all my belongings from my ex’s apartment, guiding each haphazardly packed box on an office chair at 2 a.m. to my studio across the street. He’d be thick with forehead kisses when my mind would sever into a daydream, reminding me that daily life wasn’t an extravagant conceit of the imagination, but rather a story I could articulate.

With him, being open to injury was accessible. 

So, I left my bracelet my former lover gifted me as a promise for the somedays we never had in the breadbox on his countertop, a seemingly endmost gesture, and locked the front door for the last time. 

By three in the morning, we had assembled a horizontal dresser in my new living room kitchen together, distracted by the belief that we could build anything.

A year later in déjà vu, he piloted a U-Haul trailer the entire 17-hour trip from Denver for me, starry-eyed with delusions of becoming a television writer. If anything, it was earnest. He had something to prove in that his love was unconditional, even if the cost was letting me go. 

When we got out of my Jeep, we folded the pant legs of our jeans into a double roll and walked toward the water. We watched the Pacific waves gently undulate, then swell and collapse on the shore, unaware the muddied wet sand was crumbling between our toes.

It’s a paltry of breadcrumbs I’m after. Whatever I can feed to the birds I’ll take, so long as there’s something left. 

I’ve never had a favorite color. Then I settled on somewhere between blueberry indigo and ultraviolet grape because it was my college boyfriend’s preference, and he’d render portraits of me in royal purple acrylic paint. I didn’t know if I had an affinity for music or if I was merely inclined to draft lyrics because a man and I spent six years in the basement of our home composing refrains. I’m unequivocally a writer, a congenital grain of my being, but perhaps I assumed the character to spite my father, to show you could tell stories without omitting the people you love.

I ambled after old lovers, digested the smallest parts of them, amassed specks of their existence. All of them, incongruous, fragments consumed only to fill a hunger.

And yet, I dreadfully adored them. I relished in their aspirations and passion, charmed by false notions of nearby rosiness, purely for the aftertaste.

I would be so mindful of my feelings inflating, then suddenly they would dispel unannounced, and I caught myself looking ahead to the next-door love like a nosy neighbor. 

I’ve loved just to love when there was nothing left to do with the details. Perhaps, my compulsive lust for connection harried my assumptions about it’s significance. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but appraise present experience with curious sentiment. I transcribed everything in real-time into sweeping cognitive anthologies to clasp any semblance of it.

But it was the moment I forgot to observe that would reengineer the things I thought I could control.

The first November I consumed as a Los Angeles resident felt like balmy fiction. Everything appeared novel and intoxicating, reading like a heady paperback.

At ground level, the city spurred fruitful expression, scattered seeds with differing degrees of fluency, wakened by the season. However, a panoramic fatigue lingering above kept me unwillingly disconnected.

I brooded over this at a downtown high-rise apartment party beguiled by the skyline. Tart aftershocks of cool saltwater air stung my face and coaxed me indoors, but a potluck spread kept a circle of almost strangers huddled on the rooftop patio.

A collection of fragile wanderers was languid in small talk, a density lured by intimacy, and uncertain by the space it occupied.

I had as little acquaintance with each individual as they had with each other, all less familiar than passersby, but on that day, we were appended to the guest list by my high school sweetheart.

He was a recently reconnected friend of my sister’s, and so consequently mine despite my reservations. It had been long since he was resolute in the blissful ignorance that I knew in adolescence, but it seemed he had reestablished himself on the west side fifteen years later with a mindful candor only time or a complete renovation of surroundings can rouse.

Once, he gave me a hand-drawn booklet of vows and we fake married under a tree in Marcy Park after eighth period. It was artless, clumsy, precluded by the innocent act of growing older.

An early glimpse of injury, now the ligature between pending company.

  If anyone at the social gathering asked, I professed myself a writer, leaving out the part where crafting cocktails infused with impossible ideals as a livelihood felt more stunting than pragmatic. My perceived shortcomings didn’t allow me to feel anecdotal or at all in attendance.

Instead, I took notice of the myriad of windows clutched to the building overhead. The glass latticework stretched upward around me like lofty roots clamoring for consideration.

I opened my cell phone camera, focused the viewfinder, and lost myself in the light emanating from each pane with varying fervor: a floor lamp, a stovetop digital clock, computer backlight, colored twinkle lights. Each tint a particular disclosure to the arcane detail of existence.

  And, for a moment, there was no urgency.

I was a patient spectator, a visitor to the experience above, carefully tuned in to the other side of the glassy mosaic telecast.

As I canvassed the expanse, I wondered if any one of the occupants just out of reach was as lonely, swathed in their prismatic hue light flares like I was taking a photo of it.

  And then, suddenly, a voice like soft pulp—

“What’d you make?” he asked fermenting a saccharine smile.

  It was a seemingly ephemeral question if not for the gravity and sincere visage of the nameless person inquiring, somehow an indelible pulse in my body.

  I pointed to the picked-over baking pan of lobster mac and cheese on the table with a stale vegan lemon bar I had been pretending to eat. 

  “You?” 

  “Impossible meatloaf.” 

  Somewhere between sunset and reverie, darkness had snuck in, lusterless. But when he turned to me, the window light stumbled onto him. His face flickered like a first crush; someone you fall full into.

Then, I shook off a tremor from the cold, or something more enchanting I hadn’t yet regarded, and went inside.

“You would like him,” said my first lover turned good friend.

He was submitting a last-minute case for a pair of stray snowboarders to hitch a ride to Mammoth in the vacant backseat of my sister’s car, yet heartily advocating for one specific candidate.

Though he spoke to both of us, he said this directly to me.

“You have the same sense of humor.”

I immediately discerned this as cunning flattery on his part, as he knew how much I indulged in levity, especially at times when it was gravely inappropriate and moreover, how I admired that very same flaw in others.

When they arrived on my street on a Friday evening, I wasn’t home. Frenzied by the dayshift I had crammed in right before our departure and now very late, I rushed to the gate in the alleyway to find them waiting.

I sheepishly rolled down the car window to let out a draft of hurried apologies.

My eyes fumbled over his as he approached. There was something particularly evocative about him. Like we’d met before somewhere, perhaps once, perhaps in countless collisions—

Then, a sharp falsetto ruptured the air. I had steered into the side of the garage, paring a strand of metal in the process.

He laughed. Alternatively, I wanted to cry.

Maybe we don’t have the same sense of humor, I thought, red-faced.

When he climbed into my sister’s SUV, the dome ambient light trickled onto him. A lost memory reflected in the rearview mirror. Elsewhere, we had shared conversation in a pall of smoky first impression. Yet, even partly unremembered, I felt a familiar protracted dizziness. I averted my glance to the floormat.

Suddenly deluged with scarcity, I craved his attention. If only to be seen. That impulse.

But it was a momentary lapse, as the heavy howling of wind opted to fill the space. I turned the radio volume up to muffle the noise. “Crush” by Cigarettes After Sex mused in the background of Route 395 while the snow pecked the windshield in the dark.

“What would it feel like to have our first kiss on La Cienega Boulevard?” he asked, a dauntless suggestion.

  He looked at me from the passenger seat, my smile ripe as a lovesick promise, and leaned over the center console and kissed me.

  I gingerly tapped the brake pedal and idled at the yellow light, preserving the seconds.

  I had made it to Poppy before last call, but the bar was closed. We were in the same neighborhood by coincidence but going there lured me like a thread tightening. As I turned to leave without him, wilted, he pressed his palm into mine from behind unexpectedly and spun me within his arms.

  That night, I’d forgotten about longing until we mumbled into each other’s skin in midnight self-discovery, then watched as the sun peeked over the rooftop veranda and spilled into me. 

  “What is it?” a somber inquiry I made beside him on a park bench.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said, a glimmer watering in his eyes.

  “First it seems so big, then—”

  “Isn’t that love?” I ruminated aloud.

  I splintered off into a memory not long past. I performed spoken word onstage at a close friend’s variety show affectionately named “I Fucked Up Again This Year, I Mean…Happy Holidays!”

  I had submitted a script to a television executive previously without penning the pivotal performance piece near the end. Decidedly, I finalized it, with hours left until the show, and presented it as meta-commentary on recurring failure that I had purportedly overcome by completing the poem.

  Shortly before the introduction of my time slot, the host looked to the audience with gratitude as the intimate theater space compounded a similar incredible vulnerability that resembled the conditions of our very own meeting at a writer’s retreat in small beach town Nosara.

  Unheralded, she traversed the stairs directly to the second row where he was seated.

  “Are you in love?” she asked, her warmth permeating the room.

  The microphone hovered near his lips.

  “I don’t know,” he answered with a mouthful of brine.

  Then, it was my turn.

  Somewhere embedded in ten minutes, I uttered my response.

  I fell in love, but you put out your elbows, I recited like crushed velvet under the spotlight. I read directly from my phone, but this part I practiced.

  Then, he ran to me eagerly in the parking lot after with a bouquet of red roses like a silk wrinkle throughout everything.

  A compression on my leg brought me back to Stoner Park as he placed his hand on my lap to console me, now sobbing.

  “Did you see that guy with the spray paint?” he asked.

  When I looked up, no one was there, just a newly graffitied signature on a freshly white fence.

  “No, I was crying,” I replied, as a soured dampness hit my tongue.

  I hadn’t noticed. It simply slipped my mind to be anything but here, or there, tucked away in another echo of him. Long had I been wise of my propensity to be swept up and engrossed in a distant romantic utopia, eclipsing both unfeigned happiness and it’s afterglow.

  But presently absentminded, at least to the peripheral, it seemed quite likely I unknowingly acquiesced in the fortuitous accidents concerning this person.

  This. This is what the kind of love that crept up on you looked like.

  I wanted to tell him that. Instead, to satiate the silence I nodded to the three-inch vinyl “Bones” sticker adhered to a rusted camper van parked nearby.

  “It looks like it says boner.”

  “Oh yeah, it does,” he laughed, half-heartedly.

Afterward, we walked alongside the sidewalk swallowed by a halcyon stillness, madly saturated with every drop of presence, and though about to part, still somehow ineffably close.

  I paused before a house on La Grange Avenue.

  Perched on the doorstep, a handwritten sign generously offered free lemons from a ceramic bowl. Charity for the wanting.

  I unfolded my arms and plucked a piece of bright citrus from the cluster. I smoothed over the glossy pores on the rind with my fingertips, a lament on the bitterness of loss.

  I considered the flesh underneath as I weighed it in my palm, also filled with fragmented gores of paradoxical sweetness.

  Seemingly with nothing left to do, I handed it to him—a honeyed overture for abundance.

  Then, I pocketed another to remind myself there was still something left to make.