TATE

That’s what that phrase in Hebrew directly translates to in English. It’s a pity you don’t have the words for it, because it’s a really important sentiment. It describes the feeling of creating your own reality, and being completely enveloped in it, even though no one else can relate. It defines perfectly the silliness of being self-conscious to the point of being self-centered.

Thus, I went to Temecula and I ate a movie.

I am afraid I am unfit to choose my own life, as I am unsure of what it means to be in love.

I am afraid that is essential to living a normal, adult life.

I am afraid I do not want a normal, adult life.

I am afraid to be an adult.

I am afraid I am an adult.

I am afraid of love.

At once, paradise and hell. Yet, it is home nevertheless. I did not choose New York, as most are led to believe, but she chose me. Almost 9 years ago, I saw the city in person, as it was, for the first time, and promptly fainted on the steps of an unnamed fountain I would come to know very well. As it turns out, falling on the fountain meant falling in love, and thus began the longest and truest affair of my life. I never faltered in those seven, arduous years from home. Those spent, as I saw it, doing time, on the opposite coast, with brief and intermittent conjugal visits twice a year. I knew what I had to do. I had to get home. For good. Arriving the morning after a hurricane late August, I had done just that.

I soon after realized that the hurricane was much more than physical, and it was far from over. Also, I would pass by the moment in time where I fainted on the steps of that fountain at least twice daily. Time, in this sense, is wholly cyclical, and it’s effects are never too old to reach out and grab you. If you could see everything that has occurred in a space in all the time it has existed, Washington Square Park would be high on the list of unbearably overwhelming places to stand. Much less live.

This closing of the gap between my past and my present, in a way made all the years spent between seem like a completed sentence, and also, in the same way, brought all of them under a magnifying glass, examining the cracks in the surface of the story of experiences I had told myself. 

Repeating almost all of my mistakes, one by one, some a few at a time, I had effectively swirled a mixture of insecurities, questions, and fears with the cocktail sword of newfound independence. I fucked up quickly, eager to eat the next lesson New York was to throw my way. I hardly slept, nervous the city would leave me behind if I were to slumber for too many nighttime hours. I hardly left, also nervous the city would forget me lest I took too long a trip. But I was always there, and so was she, staring right back at me.

Confronting the Empire State Building, and deflecting all the questions she asked of me, “How did you get to where you are right this moment? Why are you here? What about me do you love more than yourself?” were often too much to boldly deny. So I ran.

Sitting here, on my opposite coast, some space between her and I does indeed make the heart grow fonder. But also fearful. What if leaving her was the biggest mistake I could ever make? What if she won’t take me back? I honestly feel as though I will die if that is the case. If that is what being in love feels like,  I wouldn’t really know - it’s only my first time. 

that I was holding a snake. It wrapped itself around me and used its body to handcuff me while it was staring me in the face; writing me messages with the curves of its body. Then it crawled over towards you, and tied our arms together, just exploring us. I kept having to remember to be calm, because there was no danger. It was only a dream, I knew the snake couldn’t hurt me. It was just so beautiful if you trusted it.”

“…I know. I was there. I keep waiting for you to get to the dream part of it.”