But from the very start, from the very first day we meet at a party in The Mission, I know she is destined to haunt me, the way everyone, everything, eventually does. She is wearing an olive-colored jumpsuit, cuffed to the ankles, white Chuck Taylors and a high-top afro that she wears like a deity. A mutual acquaintance introduces her as my poet friend Mari, and we talk for nearly an hour about her work. I sell weed at a jazz club in North Beach where I am a bar back—but in this moment, I, too, feel like a poet. I ask her to recommend a book I should read. She uses words like intentionality, and I want to touch her bare arm, to kiss it. I desperately want her. We will orbit each other for some time before our bodies come together. My best friend has just started selling coke, and every other weekend, we drive down to a Chuck-E-Cheese parking lot in Los Angeles to pick up. Whenever I’m not driving, I jot lines in the Notes app on my phone, determined to write something that might one day impress her. She’s more than beautiful. She has mystique, as though she could vanish into thin air at any moment.
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Years later, in New York, at an interview for a teaching position, a white woman with straight blonde hair asks me what I believe my greatest accomplishment is. That’s an interesting question, I say, and I nod. I think back to ten years ago when I left Massachusetts at eighteen, addicted to opiates, my friends crumbling around me, dying, being sent to prison—my mother’s tears, her pleading with me not to leave, her worry that she would never see me alive again. I could only touch her face and tell her honestly, Mom, I’m sorry, but I can never come back. The fact that I am here, in this seat, with only THC in my bloodstream, is an accomplishment. I hit rock bottom and made my way out. I fought for my life and won. But if we’re keeping it real, I know that ole girl ain’t trying to hear that shit.
I tell her about the Black youth-run newspaper I oversaw for two years in San Francisco. I tell her about the challenges of working with children—converting their writing to AP style, giving them age-appropriate feedback, building their independence, earning their trust. I reference the names of specific kids who wrote for the newspaper throughout my tenure, as if they are in the room with us. I’m not slouching in my chair. My right foot is crossed lightly over my left knee. My voice is a rich baritone, my tattoos are covered, and I use my hands while I speak. She asks me my thoughts on behavior management. In the second grade, a nun dragged me down the hall by my ear because I called her ugly to a group of kids during recess, and a first grader snitched on me. I’m sure I have a lot to learn, I say, but I believe in consistency.
When ole girl asks what drew me to the school, I re-word propaganda from their website. I ask her about her experiences there and about what she found challenging during her first year. I know I’m going to get this job because the school recruited me three separate times on LinkedIn. I know I’m going to get this job because I already knew three people who’d taught for this school in the past. I know I’m going to get this job because I know the reputation of the school in terms of holding onto teachers, and I know that, at this moment, they are desperate for literally anyone who would willingly teach there for money.
I’m wearing my only suit, which I bought for a cousin’s wedding five years ago. It’s a gray, sharkskin suit with a dated cut—a little too boxy at the shoulders, the pants a little too long, a little too baggy—but my shirt and tie are new, and I look clean enough that the part of me that still seeks my mother’s validation sends her a selfie while in the bathroom.
When I get back uptown, Mari is gone, and she’s left a mess in her wake. There’s a note on the bed wishing me luck, signed, love, m. We never capitalized when we wrote to each other. In our worlds, grammar and punctuation are policed. Though slight, it was a way in which we loved each other—these subversive little gestures. In my heart, I know I’ve manifested this. Since that very first moment, I’ve been waiting for it—I never once got comfortable. In my youth, I was foolish. I believed I could make someone love me, that I could make someone stay by loving them. When we got together, I savored each moment—the way her skin made all colors feel holy, her laugh, which on her very best days, sounded more like a cackle, more like a shout.
I strip the white sheets from the bed and throw them into the laundry basket, then replace them with fresh sheets—midnight blue. I rearrange the bookshelf, so it is finally alphabetical, and then the dresser, and then I wipe down the surfaces with an organic, pine-scented spray and paper towels. I clean the kitchen and the bathroom and take a shower. I let the water run hot against my back and release large amounts of breath through my nose. When I get back to the bedroom, the sun is beginning to set. I think about the five years I spent in California—the same amount of time I’ve been in New York. What was I looking for in the world? I watch two hours of a Shonen anime in bed, about a half hour of porn, and then I masturbate and fall asleep. The next morning, while drinking coffee and watching anime in bed, I’m offered a teaching position at the school.
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The first time we kiss, outside of the Embarcadero movie theater on a rainy December evening, drunk on red wine, our foreheads touch first, then our noses, then our lips, as if descending toward something together. I blurt out that I have been in love with her since that very first day, that I feel as if I’ve manifested this. She pulls away. We argue. She tells me I idealize her, that it scares her that I might not ever truly see her. That it strips her of her humanity. I tell her I’m sorry, that I knew it was a bad idea, but that I just couldn’t stop myself—it was the addict in me, and that I couldn’t trust myself around her. It is no secret that—at this point in my life—I fall in love too easily—at the very first hint of a connection, I conjure a world in my mind in which we are no longer bodies, but vessels through which we worship one another. It takes months before this feeling goes away.
Addiction never truly leaves you. As you begin to grow, in this way, you eventually learn how to cope and—if you are one of the lucky ones—heal. For me, I must run completely in another direction. I begin to work out, jump rope, meditate, begin to cook things like Chilean sea bass with a roasted red pepper coulis. I begin to leave my phone at home and go for long walks. All of a sudden, when I walk through the park, I hear birds everywhere. I am able to distinguish several distinct calls. From this moment, I want to know everything there is to know about them. I download a bird ID app. I order a small bird caller from the Audubon Society. In just a few weeks, I call back to the sparrows and robins. I hear the song of a mockingbird. And then one day, leaving Buena Vista park early in the evening, I run into Mari.
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I write a poem about loss, which is published by an online journal. I refresh the page over and over, Google my name along with that of the journal, I start a Twitter account, I desperately pray that someone, anyone, asks me how my writing is going. I share my feelings with a writing friend, who, smiling mournfully at me, like a mother, recites something a professor told her: The thing that every writer needs to know is that your first publication is like a firework going off at the bottom of the ocean.
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My first day as a teacher, a student throws a pencil at me while I’m writing on the white board. No one knows who threw it. I try to be their friend, to offer them grace, empathy—and they throw it directly back in my face. On my second day, a girl makes fun of a stutter I thought I’d overcome as a child. The principal has to come into my classroom at least once a day to take control. Nobody listens to me. I walk through the hallways wearing a cloak of shame and embarrassment. A week later, at five in the morning, I wake up, sit at the edge of my bed, and begin to cry. I call Mari during my lunch break and say that I am just checking in to make sure she settled okay. I can sense her annoyance with my calling, and I let her go after about thirty seconds.
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About a month before she moves out of our Harlem apartment, I wake up in the middle of the night, and she is not in bed. I walk out to the living room and see she has gone to sleep on the couch. I ask her what’s wrong, and she says, Nothing. I ask her if she is okay, and she says that she just needs some space. I walk back to bed. This is the moment I know she is going to leave. I suppose it could be true that nothing can be wrong, and yet love could still gently fade. Or maybe it’s something worse. The worst it could be—she wants to be with someone else, someone new, someone without the history of addiction, that when she thinks about me, she feels disgust. Three days before she leaves, she tells me by text that she is moving back to Oakland. I text back, i see. thanks for letting me know, then I go out and get drunk at a bar around the corner, and I take a long walk up the Hudson Greenway. I ask an old roommate if I can crash on his couch. When I get back to our apartment the next morning, most of her belongings are already in boxes, and I am sick at the thought that it could be so easy for her. I resolve myself to be completely neutral toward the situation, no matter what. This is easy because, until the moment she is completely gone, the part of me that is in shock believes that there is no way this can really happen. Or worse yet, that she’ll be back.
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A month into teaching, I curse at my students for the first time. I shout over them, I don’t know where the hell you think you are, but you’re in my classroom, and you will treat me with respect. I emphasize the word hell. I had not planned on saying it—and let’s be real, they say far worse among themselves—but it felt so good, coming all the way from my diaphragm and projecting throughout the classroom, out into the hallway, and inevitably into the principal’s office. A student raises his hand and says, Mr. O, I’m sorry, bro, but you don’t intimidate us like that, and the rest of the class laughs. The principal, later, tells me he understands how I feel, but that I have to be a thermostat and not a thermometer. I become bitter. A student tells me, Mr. O, you know, you look young, but you act like a mean old African grandfather. Another student tells me I look like a Wal-Mart Tupac. Each school day, during every break I have, I walk to Morningside Park to look for dogs to pet. I talk to my mother several times a day. She tells me, When I was a teacher in Louisiana, we were still allowed to paddle students. She laughs, Boy, I used to whoop some ass.
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I go out for coffee with someone I made out with in California, years earlier at a party while on MDMA. Years later and without the buzz of that feeling in our chests, we have nothing to talk about, other than our mutual friend, who threw that party years ago, and has now moved back to Los Angeles with his pregnant fiancée. She tells me that she always thought the two of them would have got together at some point. Later that evening, we meet for drinks, and afterward, we have sex in her Bed-Stuy apartment, which she shares with two other people and costs her $1100 a month. She tells me after that the apartment has a no sleepover policy for hookups, and I fall asleep on the local A train back to Harlem.
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I start playing basketball against my students during recess, and I make a point to dominate them. I give one of the students my phone and have them record. I stare them down after made baskets, and though I know it’s immature, I feel good. As we line up to go back to our homeroom, the class bully throws a bottle of Febreze at my head, which I catch with one hand instinctively. It all happens so quickly that I barely remember it—as the entire gym descends into chaos at that moment, but for the rest of the week, students from each grade approach me in the hallways and ask if I’m the teacher who caught the bottle that the bully threw, to which I sternly answer, Yes.
One of my poet friends, who had taught at the school for a year, said it took five years off his life. But as a first-year teacher, I earn fifty thousand dollars a year, with benefits, which is the most money I’ve ever made in my entire life. Before that, I waited tables at an Upper West Side restaurant. In my heart, I know this job saved me, no matter how many years it may take from me on the back end.
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I run into a friend of Mari’s at a poetry reading. She asks if I’ve spoken to Mari recently and I say no. You should give her a call, she says. She’d be happy to hear your voice. I both want to hear this and don’t, but I smile and say, I’ll do that.
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A week before Thanksgiving, a student throws a bottle of hand sanitizer at the Science teacher, who is also my homeroom co-teacher, and she quits; she is the fifth teacher in our grade to quit during this school year. I go from being the newest teacher to being one of the longest tenured in the school. I feel trapped in this realization, and though I may not feel love for my students, I do have some basic level of empathy for them. It’s really not their fault. This school is like a prison to them. The principal tells me that the mother of the child who threw the bottle of Febreze at me wants to give him up to the state. He says I should try to bond with the kid, that he confided to the principal that I was his favorite teacher. I don’t really believe that—logic could not possibly allow it to be so—but nonetheless, it is an effective lie.
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I talk to my best friend on the phone, and he reminds me of how violently our hands used to shake when we were younger, always withdrawing from one substance or another. There are no longer any traces of that person in me, whose trembling hands drew concern from strangers. These days my hands do not tremble unless I am in extreme emotional distress. My best friend is a surfer now. He has his own lifestyle brand, and he travels all over the world. No trace of the yips whatsoever. Like most of the things in life I’d rather not remember, time has erased it all.
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While sitting in a café the next afternoon, I get a phone call. I walk out, toward the sidewalk, and I say, Hello? On the other end, Mari says, Hi, and after a beat, watching the cars stop at a red light, I say, How are you?
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On my homeroom co-teacher’s last day, just before dismissal, I tell the class it will be her last day. The students are shaken. They know it is their fault. Several of them apologize to her, and she begins to cry. She tells them it is not their fault. As we walk back toward the school after dismissing them, she says, Why the fuck did you do that? I answer that Somebody fucking had to—you were just going to walk out on them and never come back, and with tears in her eyes she says, You fucking asshole. It was not your story to tell.
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Most days are normal, as if we’d never met, fallen in love, lived together for years—although, maybe once a week, or once every other week, I see something or hear something or witness something, maybe a moment we’d shared with each other, and the entire scene materializes, and everything comes flooding back: the ecstasy and the grief, the moments of joy and contempt. We are on the beach in Los Angeles. I am crying in her arms, and she is holding me to her breast. Above us, the seagulls and a moonless night. Approximately a year before our first kiss. I’m a piece of shit, I tell her, between sobs, I’m a fucking piece of shit, and she tells me that I’m not—that I’m a beautiful person, deserving of love, that I’m a poet. And I believe her and weep.
Moments like that come and go pretty quickly. Another thought always takes its place—what to eat, responsibilities for school, Instagram, Twitter, the sky. And the truth is, I don’t mind being haunted. Sometimes I take notes about the moments I remember. I try to write poems, but only fragments come out.
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At the beginning of our love, it really is as if we become one—as much of a cliche as that might sound. We fall asleep with me inside of her. When, at some point during the night, I roll over, she makes a low, pleading sound and asks me to come back. We feed each other everything. Our first time—the very first night—we order gnocchi from Antika. She tells me to lie down on the carpet, and first letting a bit of the buttery sauce drip into my mouth, she feeds me a single gnocco by hand, tracing her finger around my lips. I begin to sit up, but she places a hand on my chest and dips her fingers back into the dish. She places another in her mouth and lowers her face toward mine, sliding it between my lips, into my mouth. We feed each other this way until desire overcomes us, until we are both full.
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Late one night, Mari wakes me up. I do love you, she says. You know that, don’t you? I tell her that I believe her, but that I don’t know if I feel it. I tell her it is not her fault—that I don’t know if I’ve ever allowed myself to be loved, if I’ve ever truly loved. I tell her I am tired and ask if we can get some sleep, to which she says, Yes.
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We smoke a joint together. She says there is a part of her that wants to move back, as if waiting for an invitation. I tell her that there is a part of me that wished she would say that. We’re on the Hudson Greenway, watching the neon sun set over New Jersey. We kiss softly—a single kiss, a kiss that lingers, our lips just a centimeter or two away from each other. Eventually, we open our eyes and begin to pull our heads away. What is my biggest accomplishment? As we walk back, Mari tells me I’ve changed, and I answer, I know. The European Starlings call out to one another, their chirping omnipresent. I’ve read it means that they are ready to take flight.