The Lovers

dispatch from new york city, 4:14 am

The city smells like hot garbage and I’m finally starting to understand that getting older is balancing the things that make you deliriously happy with the inevitable devastation that is the human condition.

One of my oldest and dearest friends texted me on Wednesday afternoon: I have bad news he said. And somehow this is not the first friend who is telling me they are going to die soon. But it’s the first friend who has known me more than half of my life.

He is being light and strong and making jokes and I am going along with all of it. He asks me if he can tattoo something small on me and of course I say yes. I’m tripping over every yes I tell him. I will do anything he asks. We agree upon a tiny version of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover — we have both loved it forever. I ask him if he will tattoo the same thing on himself. I’d be honored, he says. Then he tells me I need to read Pride and Prejudice. It’s my dying wish he says. I hate you lol I say. We both laugh on the other side of our phones.

Now it’s 4:07 am and I can’t sleep because I realize how fast life is moving. I see it in my nephew’s face as he looks more and more like a boy every day and not a baby. I hear it in his laugh which is getting rounder and more grown up. I look at him and think about how my dying friend is still someone’s baby. We all are.

I was getting my nails done yesterday and the manicurist-in-training whipped out a tarot deck in between clients. I’m learning he says as he asks me what I want to know about. Love I say. It is the first time I think about love in a while.

He spreads out the cards in front of me. Pick one. I point my freshly polished finger to a card and he flips it over. The Lovers.

Whoever you are thinking about is The One. It is meant to be, he tells me.

It’s 4:19 am now and I am hoping the sky stays dark a little while longer. Coldplay is humming from my computer speaker and my living room smells like the incense I burned last week. Nobody is texting me and now I know why I always wished I could be a night person. The things that happen inside these quiet and private moments in the middle of the night could never happen anywhere else. Sleepless conversations with a lover in the dark. Sex without saying a word with a lover in the dark. Reaching for a lover in the dark and feeling them reach back for you.

I am thinking about the time I woke up in the middle of the night in your house. I was restless. You were peaceful. I kissed your cheek while you slept and you mumbled I love you and reached for my hand as I got out of bed and went into the living room. I poured red wine and put the pink blanket I bought your daughter on my lap and turned on Sex and the City. It felt like home. You felt like home. You still do.

I feel my hope start to come alive again tonight. In the thought of death. In the face of memories. In the middle of the night.