The couple on the bus aren’t shouting, but they’re loud, it’s their conversation. She’s telling a story, every couple of lines giving a pause for him to confirm that he’s caught up.
“So Brian is saying all this shit to Amanda about how awful the supervisor role is”
“Uh huh”
“And everyone is saying it and then she actually takes the fucking job as a supervisor even though we ALL said how it was the shittiest job for her”
“Uh, oh man”
I whisper in your ear “I hate them“ you nod at me, yup. We giggle and go back to our respective comics. The bus takes us to Red Hook and we meet your new friend from your relatively new job at a wine tasting tour. We’re just in time for the tour to be over. The bar is massive, a new addition to the ever changing landscape of Brooklyn’s pier. The old wine barrels for tables and dark oak walls almost feel like they’re trying to combat against their acts of gentrification. We see your friends. Everyone’s in couples, and the sexes have disbanded: the guys stand in a circle, quiet and unassuming, and the girls are loud and fun. Here, I want to be with the girls. I smile remembering having the exact same longing fifteen years ago, watching Stacey, Hibaq, and Raphaella chat and laugh from the other side of Ross’ garden at my first ever house party. Sipping on my bitter fosters, jealous of their cherry flavoured WKDs.
My main goal in these moments is to make you proud. To have you look at me from across whatever conversation you’re in, see me, and not worry. Whatever anxiety or problems I have with people, with socialising, are put aside. I do alright. At one point, I feel the whole groups’ eyes on me while telling a story about bombing at a festival in front of a thousand angry Welsh students expecting house music only to see eight poets performing a show called “house party”. Everyone laughs, and I immediately want to thank them for being great and walk towards an exit.
Every now and then our hands touch; squeeze. You okay? Need water? Like ringmen for each other, don’t know if I could put on this performance if you weren’t in my corner.
Today is my last day in New York. We don’t tell this to anyone at the party, pretending to them- and maybe to us- that I’m not going anywhere. My flight is in the evening. You want us to go to the nearby Ikea, buy materials to make an Altar for my newly deceased family members, your grandmother, then go home and set it up.
The rest of the party say they’re going to get crab legs and we should join. You say we’ll see them after ikea. I imagine lugging the ikea supplies to the restaurant, getting back at eight, setting up, then having to pack for the plane, trying to calculate how long the bus rides wil be on top. I say nothing.
We were in this Ikea two years ago, buying a bed for our room. At six foot three, I’ve always been used to my ankles dangling off the bed. You wouldn’t allow it and we got one that could accommodate me. I hadn’t ever felt so considered before, and I realised that there were parts of my life I didn’t have to accept as a constant anymore. Like beds that are too small, and dying in London.
Today I trail, getting more and more silent as we shop. You pick up an object, ask what I think. I think I’m pessimistic about buying anything right now. The trap of thinking about what’s “needed”. This way of thinking started almost ten years ago, when dad was on benefits and I was working part time for a theatre and before going to till at the end of our “big shop” we’d filter out what we need and don’t- getting more strict with the term “need”. Do we really need potatoes? Is the conditioner really needed? Bread will just go off eventually. By the end of these big shops we’d have spent about a tenner between us. The pasta years.
We get to the counter and I’m at half the speed, the question of why we’re going back to get drinks turning into lactic acid. You notice I’m carrying a question, getting annoyed at my inability to vocalise and ask what’s wrong. Nothings’ wrong. Just…
What’s the plan?
We’re now outside Ikea, with nothing bought and we’re arguing. Sometimes it’s like wanting to avoid something so much can build a tension that drives you toward it. It’s the usual: I’m pent up, you’re angry, I’m angry, you’re hurt, I’m hurt, we’re fucked up. I’m sorry for this moment, and sorry for all the moments that have brought us here. Sorry that our arguments are so painful, because we can’t afford them in the small amount of time we have left. We keep walking. We make up. Hug. Big hug. Then laugh, what the fuck.
There have been a lot of arguments on this trip, because we’re breaking up. We broke up a month ago and have spent a month trying to get our heads round it. You brought all my stuff to my Mum’s (which is significantly more than I thought) and we then went for a drink, argued, made out and then argued again. You were so beautiful that night, you were wearing a red satin romper, I remember thinking that no one has the right to look that good in a red satin romper. We’d go back to our apartments, and argue on the phone. We’d meet up after work every day, laugh, kiss, but inevitably break down in front of each other. We’d be so sad while spending so much time together, because the only thing worse than the arguments was being without each other.
For the first time ever, there’s no plan for another trip back to New York. No plan for you to come to London. This sense of distance between us has never felt like such a definitive separation. It’s what makes the fear of these arguments so overwhelming. I don’t want to be arguing with you outside Ikea on my last day. I want to have the luxury to argue without worrying that it’s the last conversation we’ll have.
In my last two weeks here, something shifted, we stopped arguing, and let ourselves be in love with each other again. It’s so easy to enjoy your company. My Grandmother said something which really stuck with me, that the longer you know a person, the more you have to talk about and after talking to you everyday for three years there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s true, which is why it’s so hard to imagine a day without you. Without your voice in my head. I don’t know if that can ever be turned off- not consciously. Not proactively,
We try to find your friends eating crab legs. You try ringing but there’s no answer. We’re on the pier, there are a few seafood places we check out, they’re at none of them. Along the way we find a Photo Booth and take pictures of us. Your friend isn’t answering the phone, it’s mid October and while the days are still beautiful, the nights can bring a harsh chill so we decide to just go back home. Along the way we pass an ice cream place and I get you something vegan. Then, opposite the bus stop, we find a record shop. We decide to check it out.
It’s walls are a faded yellow, and I’m not sure if it’s intended to look that way or not. The guy who works there is lovely, looks a little like nineties Larry David, balding but still managing to have hair all over the place. I ask him if it’s alright if we bring the ice cream into his shop (some people are funny about that stuff) and he says it’s fine, and even recommends putting a bit of his coffee in to mix it up. I do, it’s great.
We’ve never passed a record shop without going inside. You dig into the crates with all the enthusiasm of a young DJ Premier. Methodically taking out, assessing, and placing back every record you find. I go straight to the hip hop section and look for a single I loved growing up. Today it’s Fat Joe’s “What’s love” featuring Ashanti. You gasp from the other side of the shop. Show me the record you’ve found, Ella Fue by Fania All Stars. You tell me, with a hushed voice, you’ve looked this record up online and seen it’s going for fifty to sixty dollars, now it’s in your hands with five more for the same price.
At the counter, nineties Larry David tells us he doesn’t have a card machine. Of course. We pile up our money between us and it doesn’t cover all the records. As we’re about to deliberate, Larry David says he’ll let us off, taking what we have, effectively giving us a record for free.
Then, like it was magic, the bus arrives as soon as we get to the stop. It’s funny how things can just work out like that right?
The comic I’m reading is about a future where earth has become almost entirely an ocean. You’re catching up on the collection I had read last, Grant Morrison’s last few issues on X-men. It’s mind boggling, scary, and wonderful. The last chapter centres around an alternate future where Beast has become an evil scientist, unable to digest the grief of losing Jean Grey almost a hundred years ago. As I’m reading mine I check your face to see your reaction to these huge, mind boggling twists. Sometimes you gasp, then look at me as I smile at you and nod.
We make the altar for my cousin, my uncle, your grandmother and your dog when we get in. You make this altar every year, it’s part of your family’s tradition, it helps you keep them alive, in spirit, in your head. So many colours and animals, you even put books that you think my family members would like there.
The picture of my uncle and cousin was printed at mum’s work on A4 paper. Neither have been dead for more than a year and it means a lot to me for you to let me grieve with you like this. My culture is funny with grief, and I’m funny with culture- a lot of it feels very loose. No religion, no significant ties to any rituals of any sort. I carried the weight of mum and dad breaking up for years, not knowing where to put it, hoping it’ll eventually drift away. During one of our big arguments you said “We love each other, but love isn’t enough” and I realised that pain didn’t drift away, it seeped, deep inside of me. I hate that love isn’t enough, but hate that I should’ve learned that lesson to be ready for now many, many years ago.
I say thank you for making the altar, you say it’s okay. Being able to grieve together, in this spirit, makes me so happy. I wish it could’ve been immediately after they died. I wish that this sadness of their passing didn’t hurt me so much, didn’t shut me off from expressing myself and made me stay in London instead of moving to New York like we planned. I break apart thinking about you alone in that big, big bed we bought together. In so many ways I’ve lost you, but right now we’re in front of each other holding hands, together, and I’m so happy, lucky, and grateful.
We look at each other with the candles from the altar in our peripheral and something finally feels dealt with, this weight of grief, sadness of separation, anger for unfulfilled promises. The roughest year we’ve ever had, is finally coming to an end.
I go to put some stuff we bought from the bodega in the fridge and you put on the record you had just bought, the one you got for free. Ella Fue. It’s such a catchy seventies jam, something I can’t believe I’ve never heard before, opening with a guiro being scrapped, then a little bit of bongo, then drums, building higher and higher into a chorus.
I turn around and see you dancing to the record, throwing your scarf into the air, strutting round the living room. The electric guitar kicks in, not trying to show off, just dancing within the music itself. She was the one. I wish I could hold this moment, hope that the afterlife could be this moment, this feeling, on loop.
Imagine how much luckier I am though, to keep living, to go up to you, kiss you, hold you in my arms and dance with you to my new favourite song. Ella Fue. She was the one