Joy Known Only from Cheap Sex and Good Wine
Walking the dark streets with her didn’t open up some new interior world, or trigger a crisis about the life I’d been living up to that point. It simply made everything better. Everything. In her presence I entered a state of joy I’d previously associated only with cheap sex and good wine—or the other way around. Her easy looseness, the misanthropic charm in her voice, made me happy in a way that arrived without requiring explanation. I found myself liking certain things again. And that produced an anxiety wildly out of proportion to the sensation, because opening yourself up carries risk. It always does.
When she wasn’t around, my thoughts settled into her photographs. When she was close, I couldn’t get enough of the physical reality of her—her smell, the simple fact of her existence in the same space. Real understanding between two people is genuinely rare. The days and nights turned into races against a deadline nobody had announced. Past Britney Spears and near-fainting spells, we fought a war that could offer us nothing more than the illusion of a victory. We reached for it anyway.
Kissing hungrily, both of us sad enough to know that this world—governed by coincidence and timing—was going to collapse in on itself soon, we pushed into every moment and into each other hard enough that truths started to lie and souls started to masturbate. Happiness is rare. And unlike the empty husks I’d spent years consuming—women whose cheerless appeal I sucked dry like it was sustenance, whose charm I maneuvered my way into through careful indifference—this girl meant something with actual dimensions after a very short time. Clear thoughts. A whole new dimension of them. It was more than great. It was clarifying.
While I followed the call toward a different life, repeating to myself that my plans were right and the direction was correct, she moved with bold, lonely ease past the dusty stereotypes I’d been operating on, and offered me new angles on a nightmare that had been quietly embedding its hopeless ideals deeper inside me than I’d realized. Swallow it, spit it out, fuck your way through it—any form of internal violence is appropriate defense against the slow decay of your own hopes. Any of them.
My future sits in front of me like a gray veil. And I’m grateful that just before stepping into a new life, you held my hand firmly enough to remind me that high-quality mind-fucks can surface anywhere, that some emotions are more alive and more fulfilling than whatever old-fashioned love is supposed to be, and that nothing beats cheese pizza, Weezer, and bloody zombies. To you and your city: I like you so much.