Intimacies

I once mistook a photo of a plate of prosciutto, fresh off the what could have been a table in the Tuscan countryside, for a plate of meat at hot pot. The ham was laid out in fine folds, glossy pink and fragile, and for a second, I thought it could have been taken at a restaurant in Causeway Bay I’d once visited. Marbled, glistening. Arranged in an obedient circle on the porcelain.

How different are they, really?

Meat sliced with care, to be picked off and shared.

***

This past weekend I visited in New York City. It was a spontaneous decision, and it “aligned” with my work schedule. It was a fun week; I ate, profusely, and saw some friends. On the last day, I took an Uber from where I was staying in Flatiron to Moynihan Train Station, where my train to South Station would depart at 7 p.m. I felt the homesickness I’ve always come to feel as I leave New York after stopping by—since I left college, I’ve visited about four or five times—and perhaps this time around it felt even stronger, with friends going abroad for the summer and the thought that I wouldn’t see them in a while.

When I lived in New York myself, I wasn’t capable of feeling this way.

Through the window, the city blurred past: Spicy Moon, Sergimmo Salumeria, an Indian restaurant with mezzanine seats, floor-to-ceiling windows, the drifting smell of spices. The car stopped in front of a red light, and people passed by through the minor gray tint, the flat quiet of a Saturday evening. Then the light changed and we were off.

***

I don’t remember my time in New York very much, though I lived there three years. In the city, I had always felt like an outsider, even when I came to know certain parts better than the back of my hand—the bike path down the West Side especially, the looming hallway between 50th and 70th Streets. From one end to another, the vanishing point makes the whole underpass feel like part of a Pokémon game.

I’m okay with it. The city is so large and vast that no one, really, can call themselves as from there—not in the way people are typically “from” places. It’s a tapestry, but does that mean it keeps you warm? What do you cozy up against when the saliva hardens on glass rims, when cups of unfinished tea begin to odorize?

In my final semester of college, I was pretty free. I didn’t have much to do, so I began to build an interest in food. On the weekdays where I didn’t have class, I took the subway out to faraway places in search of new restaurants to try. My favorite came to be Park Slope, a neighborhood not so far into Brooklyn on the 2 train—Atlantic Ave, Barclays Center.

I went there several times. I brought work, read on the subway, learned my way around. All the while, I wondered about the people whose lives were lived on those very stops. How unknowable to me they were—what was inaccessible to me was everyday to them, as 116th Street would also be between us, vice versa.

It’s a necessary fixture of life: That a peripheral place to one is another’s everyday, another person’s I-know-this-through-and-through. Anonymity in parallel.

***

Mr. Blue Light, you’re back, aren’t you?

Same spirit, different body. I don’t know if I was ever in love with you, or rather, that it’s possible to be in love with another person at all. What if love wasn’t affection for another but an inward force, a desire for the version of the self one becomes with another? To love another is to love the idea of a life with another, which is to say, the idea of the life into which that self falls. That, and its grittiness. It’s the transformative power of falling into the orbit of another.

Can you love a person without loving the place in which you met them?

And can you love a place without loving the person whom you met in it?

Bushwick to Berlin. All the stories I already know I won’t live. How much does it take to extricate the self from the long-held falsehood that one’s life is the only that exists?

Driving up the coast of California a year or so ago, I looked out at the cliffs, at the water speeding toward their bases in violent crashes. We were headed to Mendocino. There, I felt a sudden desire to escape my life into another. I’d write a book about it. It would be called Minor Love Stories. It would comprise stories written from the margins—not the romances, but the what-if’s, not-quite’s, if-only’s. Glances across the platform; a certain turn of phrase left unexamined; a childhood dispute that didn’t have to take place.

***

As the train pulled out of the city, orange peeking through spokes on the bridge, I saw a glowing red neon sign flash past the window: WELCOME TO THE BRONX. A row of cars stood beneath it, parked neatly, as if willing their diffidence to incite some passerby on the train to take notice, draw out the meaning they’d been screaming to communicate.

We think of intimacy as a spectrum, but what if it was a loop? Maybe, the closer you get to someone isn’t just that. Maybe, as you get closer to someone, you begin to erase their presence from your awareness—erase their gait, their lazy way of knocking at the door when they get home from work. Closeness with another as a form of radical interiority. You know them so well they vanish.

***

I don’t think I’ll live in New York again. I prefer being a visitor. I prefer the feeling of newness.