Amidst Ruins.

She hit me like this — ooooof. She came looming out of my past and hit me. Not on purpose — it was more like she was dancing, and I stumbled into her space. But still. It hurt.

Her name was Alex. Actually, it wasn’t, but I’m incapable of saying her real name, even all these years later, without feeling my identity begin to collapse in on itself like a balloon having its air sucked out by a capricious child. So we’ll call her Alex, and I’ll say this: I fell in love with her twice.

The first time is not worth talking about except in passing, perhaps because it was so long ago that I hardly remember it. But the second time began when she called me on a snowy afternoon in December and said, “Are you in Portland?” It never snows in Portland. I had been there for years. As had she. Neither of us had known.

I drove to her place on Oak Street, which turned out to be just two blocks from my high school. I parked in the lot and she came down the stairs, black hair and bellbottoms and beautiful, and hit me. Oooof. She touched my elbow when I stepped out of the car, and then we walked in the snow and dim winter, up streets I had known since before the world was born, into the neighborhood called Mount Tabor, and then along the winding, tree-occluded paths of the hilly park that gave that neighborhood its name. We told each other of our lives. She had been serially involved with younger men who had disappointed her. I had been twice a failure in love and was on the verge of giving up on the whole business. This had all happened right here, near each other. Around each other. Maybe between each other.

We sat on a bench at the top of the hill and looked out at the city through the gauzy snow. Everything felt delicate and impossible. The sun tumbled. In Portland, in late December, it is down by ten after four. Portland is a disaster of darkness. She said, “It’s really great we found each other.” That’s when I began to shiver.

I shivered all the way back down Mount Tabor and through the old neighborhoods I knew so well, and into the Lebanese restaurant where we decided to eat. The change in temperatures threw my gross motor functions so far out of whack that by the time the tabouleh salad arrived I was a circus of chattering teeth and quaking limbs. She came around the table to sit beside me and held me around the midsection, and though I felt warm, the shakes did not abate. She touched her face to my shoulder.

I ate through cracking teeth with her warmth pressed up next to me. Years later I would see this scene as a lie about how much she loved me, but then it felt powerful and good. I had shivered because I was cold; I had shivered because I was warm; I shivered now because I believed something I had yearned for would soon come to be. It felt like the first time a dream had come true in my life. It felt like finding shelter after years of wandering.

With full bellies we went back into the snow, and found ourselves at the high school. It was just a few days before Christmas, long after students had been let out for the year, but the day’s cold magic revealed an open door at the back, near the cafeteria. Inside things had been altered in ways unexpected, just subtle enough that I could not notice them without searching. We looked for my locker and couldn’t find it. We looked for the library only to discover that it had been shuttered in favor of a new construction the size of a gymnasium. The new library also explained the absence of my locker: it had been built over the hallway where I had loitered for most of my senior year in a haze of premature nostalgia. She asked me where things went. I could see on her face imagination at play, and I dreamed that she was dreaming herself into my past, and so I participated, too. I could see her among the faces in my memory so vividly that sometimes, even now, I must remind myself that it isn’t true. None of it was true: had we known each other then, we would not have been friends; she had been popular and beautiful and full of laughter — she told me all of these things, in a glancing way, as we walked around — and I had been overweight, self-contained, keeping myself on reserve for an adulthood I was desparate to begin. I did not tell her what I had been like. I allowed her to construct me then, so that she might love me better now.

Eventually a noise startled us — a janitor, I suppose — and we tumbled back out into the night like the tresspassers we were. Soon we returned to her apartment building arm in arm, and she invited me inside for a glass of wine, and … well, you can imagine what happened then.

*

That night turned out to be the high point for us. Over the following months we discovered conflicting truths: I found that yes, indeed, she was everything I had ever wanted, sweet and caring and capable of radical shifts of tone, the kind of girl who could tell a dirty joke tonight and titter over her neighbor’s new girlfriend tomorrow. She found, though she would not say at first, that I was less than all she wished. She was kind enough never to ennumerate for me my flaws, not in so many words, but I believe that what she discovered, and helped me to discover, was that I remained the self-contained unit I had been long before we knew each other, that I held in reserve some part of me which fairly whirred with judgement and fear. I could not be accessed, or wholly convinced that other people were real. I realize now that this is why I am a writer, and she, despite her occasional impulses in that direction, was not: her joy was to give, to live, to be; mine was to take, to move, to change. My whole life I have tried to force the world to be a novel of my own authorship.

Soon enough I could feel that she did not love me, and I tried to make it so. I burned a swath through my money to buy her food she did not need, gifts she did not want. I can only now fathom the guilt that accepting these things must have engendered in a good person, which she was. I wrote poems about her hair, her eyes, our sex, and offered them to her in lieu of access to my soul. That was the irony: the small machine inside me that judged and altered now roared with love for her, and yet somehow it could not come out unfiltered; only in weilding a pen could I get close to it. She did not want love letters. She wanted a man who did not arise at two in the morning to stand at the window staring down into the parking lot, mutely contemplating the horror of our eventual separation. My every effort to make her want me demonstrated to her that she did not.

It ended one day when I arrived at her apartment to find the kitchen table clean, which seemed to me to be a bad sign. In the months we had been together, that table had been a repository for every book she failed to read, every bill she couldn’t quite pay, every paper she didn’t have time to grade, and had collected on it an array of coffee stains and lost pens. She had talked about cleaning it up when she got her shit together, and now, walking into that room and seeing the table cleared, I knew that she was getting her shit together, and that meant somehow sweeping me up and putting me away, as well. She sat me at the table, and I remember the feeling of the shag carpet between my toes; I remember that she seemed sad as she poured us both coffee; I remember that once she sat, her tiny hands writhed and writhed over each other with the knowledge that she was about to do me a great hurt.

“I’ve decided to move back to California,” she said, and that was all she needed to say. The singular I: she was going, and I wasn’t invited. After that I disintegrated. The memories of that conversation float intermingled with vague memories of the following summer, which was the hottest in Portland’s history. Temperatures soared and I lay naked on the floor of my basement. She said she was sorry it hadn’t worked out. I went running at four in the morning with nothing but the sound of frogs and traffic to keep me company. She gently shut down my request to go with her. I got drunk at a bar that had once been a mortuary and went home with a girl who looked like her, but couldn’t complete the act. She told me that a relationship can really only handle one crazy person, and ours had two. I wept in my backyard, smelling tomato vines, spangled with the inadequate shadow of a dogwood tree. I wept with my head on her table, wishing already that I had not answered my phone that on that snowy day so long ago.

It took me years to put myself back together, and in those years we said things to one another that can never be taken back, things we probably meant in the moment but which were not really true. We are no longer friends. She lives five thousand miles away, and does not answer when I send up my flares. My last one went like this:

ALEX. To misspell “love”. To do it repeatedly. Not to learn from this act. To alex is to fail a test with flying colors.