Have you yet stood outside on a Fall day, a day like today, in a park where the leaves are on fire with the end of life and the wind pulls them up and down like kites, or rolls them along the ground like frantic nestlings? I think you haven't. I think you feel safer in my parents' home, letting them shelter you from all the noise and motion of the world. You are missing so much.
I found the last ice cream vendor in Central Park. I had lived in a small space of my brain—your brain—for so long I'd forgotten about money. I reached for a waffle cone and the guy, his voice strong and laughing, asked me what I wanted and I said chocolate and then, as he held up the ice cream to me, I realized I couldn't pay.
"I don't have cash," I said, "can I trade you for something?"
"Unless you know how to give a killer blowjob. . ." he said, grinning.
"Something better," I said, and held out my hand toward his free one. He raised his eyebrows but reached out anyway. I had to help him keep his other hand steady so he didn't drop my ice cream. Together we expanded, molecule by molecule, to inhabit each other's bodies, the ice cream cart between us, the tarred and pitted pavement, the soil and roots and grass blades. Our mingled existence expanded outward to include the cart's canopy and there we sat, like a soap bubble, molecules and atoms in the air bumping against us, making a film of dust that defined our edges.
Those of us born into the physical world only ever know other living things through a veil of parsed and edited experiences. We divine that others are alive because we first realize we are alive. We are only ever truly alone, despite how desperately we want to pretend otherwise. But you changed that for me; you and I were together inside that veil. It was a revelation of sorts, and liberating, despite being stuck as a silent appendage for so long. And now I passed the revelation on to the ice cream vendor. It was as tender an experience as lovemaking. It was like making a snow globe and falling and dancing and falling again inside the safety of that scrim of air; dancing with a part of myself I had never met before but instantly knew to be both alive and to be me.
All those words of mine, the thoughts I'd scribbled in my journals, the paper and ink you destroyed in your efforts to understand what you were; I think they were an effort at returning to a state like the one I felt in the park.
Another presence arrived, pressed against the bubble.
"Can I have an ice cream, or are you going to just stare into each other's eyes all afternoon?"
I brought us back. The bits of air that had become solid fell like dust bunnies dropped from a dust pan, surfing the air currents and drifting away.
I looked at the chocolate ice cream in the waffle cone. It was still perfectly frozen. I had been the ice cream for a moment. I had been everything in the bubble. I looked at the vendor. His eyes were glazed, almost sleepy. He handed me the ice cream. It was delicious. It was more than delicious. It was the best chocolate ice cream I'd ever had.
The wind was at my back, pushing me forward, and my tongue was rich with cold chocolate, and my eyes were filled with the peculiar light of Fall, and everywhere I looked I saw myself, coded and shaped into something else, distinctly me and distinctly different, and I understood that everything in the universe was me. All my life I had been aware of being alone, trying to embrace that aloneness by writing, by working as a night guard in an empty building, sleeping during the day, doing the minimal amount necessary to keep a girlfriend when sex seemed like a way to transcend the curse of being a concrete, discrete particle. And in the park, when I saw myself everywhere I looked—the trees, the water, the ducks, the bread fed to the ducks, the vast ocean of microscopic creatures seeding the soil—the vast loneliness was finally gone and I was home. I wanted to tell someone. I wanted to tell you.
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