It's March 25

I still think about Giuseppe every day. It’s March 25 and I catch myself staring out the window - in a trance - never sure for how long or what I was looking for. Spring has started to reveal himself, provocatively - though my desire seems frozen inside the 25 kisses G used to leave on my sleepy forehead before catching the metro; a morning person to my night owl, compatible only through dialectical juxtaposition, cosmically at odds. I’ve learned to relinquish my daze to Spring, an act of supplication to lead the escape from Winter and all the heartbreak we bore with the cold, infamous for keeping dead organs alive.

I’ve come to realize that I’m an expert at escape, yet I never truly arrive at freedom. I am still so unsure of what that means - freedom - only that I crave it more and more each day, especially when I pass an open window. That’s precisely when I fall into my hamster wheel of pursuit - theory and praxis mimicking one another, jesting reflectively at my expense. There I am, again, so fixated on the process of escape that I have lost sight of the goal to begin with. A means to an end where the means has become the end. G was there to escape loneliness. Syphilis was there to escape G. And Tequila has always been there, rooted under my tongue since the first sip, a magic beanstalk to help me climb away to the terrible giant of myself.

I think about the delayed gratification experiment often. Would I have been the proverbial model child that waited for two cookies instead of an immediate one? A bigger, more noble prize dependent on my ability for patience, my knack for withstanding the visceral effects of longing? I believe so, it’s one of the few things I’m sure of these days. Before I chose gullibility, I was able to decipher an experimental ruse quite easily, armed with militant precocity, perhaps more curse than gift when you must rely on fantasy to survive a scorned adolescence. The longitudinal reading from the looming researcher (nonconsensual by nature, a spy violating my tender becoming - like how my father would watch me from the corner of the school playground to make sure I wasn’t playing with the girls) would have surmised that I will grow up to be successful. And am I? Now I take the first cookie I see and scrape for crumbs. Is part of being successful indulging without remorse? Once your basic needs are met? Would Maslow put me at the top or bottom of his pyramid: self aware and actualized within redemptive pleasure, or a feral infant who finds shelter in gluttony, a necessary reminder that he’s alive.

So I still think about G everyday. I carve out a time in the mornings as I wake to the vacancy of him. Then again midday after work meetings, when I used to text him to complain about my bosses (he would get upset that I don’t stick up for myself more), or to ask about his new promotion (I wonder if they finally gave him the raise). It's already March 25 and I think about how we had spent two birthdays (less than one month apart), Christmas, New Year's, and Valentine's Day together, and even these requisite romantic exchanges were not enough to close the chasm that suddenly appeared on the living room floor after the words “I love you” filled the space like a fog; putrid, suffocating.

If I am guilty of impulsivity (not the first or last time) for saying it, I wonder who bears responsibility for having incited the apparently forbidden feeling, for having struck an insatiable need in me for him to know that whatever this is was my reason for waking, and for sleeping, so that I can wake up next to him again. Could it be that we were both culprits? Slighted by delusions of grandeur, playing house with bits of straw and sticks until the weighty brick of emotional commitment crashed down to remind us that it had only been 3 months. At least then we could say we were partners. Or was this all my own undoing? A dysfunctional inability to delay gratification, indulging in connection like an addict and forcing the hand to gamble away my insecurities. Double or nothing, they say. And the house always wins.

I know my answer, but before G could give me his (or could give me anything to explain his fresh disdain), he was already beginning to mumble sentences that used to boom from his chest with proud reverberation to be near me. His deep voice once massaged by his sleek Italian swagger now a flat baritone, drowned out and withdrawn, almost despairing. His perceptive compliments quickly turned into sour observations, with facetiously hostile remarks leaving stab wounds where caress marks used to be. “Love is not just about you” was one of the last honest things he said to me. At the time I accepted the verbal lashings throughout the fallout as duly recompense for my trained naiveté, for not remaining the militant child skeptical to react around figures of authority - and what is love if not the highest authority, pervasive especially in its absence. But now I would say, “You’ve got it wrong, Giuseppe, Love is about me, also”.

It’s finally March 26 and as I look out the window, a more solipsistic void refracts in new directions worth escaping to. I will still think about G everyday, but not in a lovesick sense. I miss him more like the passing of a distant relative or a family friend. I was molded by him in magnetic tides, from spiritually afar, nostalgic for those pivotal moments filled with belonging, comfort and nurtured self-realization, though ultimately aware that these fleeting interactions were few and far between. In the grand scheme he was mostly Stranger, weekend guest appearances, shrouded in mystery behind the performance of closeness, obligatory by nature and situational circumstance. I mourn him, like one would mourn a journey planned but failed to embark on, the logistics too daunting and unassured; a hypothetical death of what never fully was, leaving a cartoon of grief in its place.